Re-Socializing the web
Over the past number years we have seen an increase in the use and creation of Social Media Tools that allow us to communicate over the web.
As with everything else, the Marketing and PR teams grab hold of these concepts and tries to participate with the view to generating revenue via sales, affiliations, sponsorships etc.
Craig Hepburn wrote in his predictions for 2009 that social ranking,de-friending and filtering will become more important and I think he is right. The problem many of us have with all this communication is that a lot of it is marketing and sales. Now this also can be broken down into two main areas products/services and Self PR.
Self PR is starting to gain traction in the on-line world like never before, there are so many ways in which to publicise yourself and now it has never been as easy due to companies allowing employees to socialize with the communities. These employees may become figure heads or well known in the specific areas and this may lead to job offers as more and more recruitment is being done via social media tools.
This has a few implications that you need to be aware of and will indeed lead to some disruption.
So why am I talking about this?
Well I think that we are coming to a point that the social web is getting less and less social and more about “Look what I have done” rather than engaging. There is a great blog post about Social Media experts being the cancer of twitter which I find both amusing and pretty much true in many ways, http://www.fanboy.com/2009/01/social-media-experts-rant.html
I do find it very difficult to even justify this becuase I am a) writing this (self PR) and b) plan and create social media campaigns.
So the question is…
How do we re-socialize the web to make it easier to communicate without being sold anything or do we leave it as it is because we are all happy with the way things are?
Or are we addicted???
