Public Relations, Social Media and Ephemera Since 2005
Maybe for once the Washington Know It All crowd is wrong on this one. At least Chuck Scarborough is willing to admit as much.
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Late Tuesday night, or maybe Wednesday morning, my wife made the following observation – when the history books look back on the last few months of 2008 they will no doubt record the beginning of the end of the era of White Male Control. From the meltdown on Wall Street to the election of Barack Obama, White Men are being pushed out of positions of power.
In an earlier time, white privilege (and let’s not be shy, that’s exactly what it is) meant that the men and women who wrecked the economy through their greed (or incompetence) maintained their positions in the halls of Wall Street. But not this time. Although a new financial marketplace is yet to emerge, one can reasonably hope that it will reward value over greed and merit over the old-boys network.
In the political sphere, millions of Americans ignored the side-show, put aside the fearmongering and voted for a strong break with the past.
Of course it’s not all sunshine and roses, yet. Witness the combination of corporate media and old-boy politics that put an end to Darcy Burner’s run for the House of Representatives. The old monsters can still rear their ugly heads and they still have a lot of power.
But there are a lot of us and there are more of us then there are of them. And we have our laptops, our camera phones and our flip cams. And we have our networks, lots of networks. And we’ll be watching.
Profound Thought Number Two: We Americans don’t always do the right thing (slavery, interment of the Japanese, extermination of the native Americans) but when we do (defeat of Fascism, Nazism and Communism, landing on the Moon, the Internet) we do hit it out of the park.
Those of us in the social media bubble are often accused of viewing our craft as the be-all and cure-all for any problem, marketing or otherwise. If only they had a blog, we say. If only they put more care into their Facebook page.
Similarly, we’re often too quick to credit a smart social media plan for the success of larger programs.
Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Social media is a tactic. And it’s no substitute for a good idea. Social media can help transmit a good idea to audiences that are engaged online. But it can’t replace the power of the original idea.
For either to be true, all we would need is a cleverly designed blog and a pocketful of well thought out keywords and *presto* that Silver Anvil would be ours. Which, by now you’ve no doubt realized, is not the case.
Which brings me to a whole lot of nonsense I’m reading online and off about how good marketing and more to the point, social media, clinched the election for Barack Obama.
An iPhone app, text messaging, targeted emails are all great tools if your audience has iPhones, understands text messaging and is engaged online, as opposed to someone with a computer in the house they use to send chain emails to their grandkids. But that’s all they are… tools. Tools to transmit an idea. It’s the idea that engages the audience and gets them to drive halfway across two states to stuff envelopes and knock on doors and give money. If the idea isn’t there, no amount of social media wizardry can move people.
All the Web and all these social media toys do is lower the barriers to participation. The motivating part, the means to get folks up off the couch and acting, is still about ideas.
PS: I have about six more posts in the works about the Obama election (oh boy how I love saying that) and what it all means for me and for us, so stay tuned.
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Hot damn.
America, you are a truly great and wonderful country.
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