Weinberg - The new community rules: marketing on the social web

Copyright 2009 Tamar Weinberg

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Hellomy name is Dave, and Im a Facebook-aholic (hi Dave, keep coming back!). The rest of you may not be addicted to social media the same way I am, but I guarantee you its only a matter of time. Now that Oprah and CNN have become run-of-the-mill street-corner pushers for social media crackpipes like Facebook and Twitter, you can bet the rest of the consumer mainstream aint far behind. Mark my words, folks: were all being seduced by a dangerous and sexy online mistress named Social. If you havent fallen for her yet, you will.

If you have ever read a blog, visited a MySpace page, watched a YouTube video, checked out a photo on Flickr, or clicked on a link in Twitter, then five hours later, looked up to check the clock and realized it was 4:00 AM, you know what I mean. Admit it, youve been there: heaven help me, the baby is screaming and needs a diaper change, but gimme a sec, I just need to click on onemorelinkaaah. Now doesnt that feel better?

You might be a teenager on Hi5, profile-hopping all the hot girls in your freshman class at high school, or a grandmother anxiously checking YouTube to see if your daughter has uploaded the latest video of your three-year-old grandson. You might be a punk rocker adding a new song to your bands MySpace page or a Harvard grad surfing LinkedIn to see who you know at Google whos hiring. You might be the Real Shaq Daddy tweeting out nightly box scores and a slam-dunk on Yao Ming, or Barack Obama rallying the faithful to get out to vote via SMS on the eve of the most historic election in American history. From the largest to the smallest, from the youngest to the oldest, the world has become engrossed, enthralled, and addicted to social media.

Unless youve been in a coma for the last five years, your behaviors and interactions with social media have changed dramatically. We now spend more time connectedboth literally and figurativelythan ever before. Our offline-online existence is fused together into an electronically enhanced experience that would have seemed unbelievable just over a decade ago, but now seems almost second nature. One wonders how people ever managed to make plans to meet up for dinner or a night out on the town before everyone had email, eVite, Yelp, or text messaging. Our fascination and fastened-nation with all things digital has been both a blessing and a curse, allowing people to communicate whenever and wherever they please, even if that means listening to the sales guy in the bathroom stall next to you talking to a customer and wondering if you should wait til hes done before you flush.

The first 10 years of the Internet Revolution were all about getting computers connected to the World Wide Web. But the next 10 years are going to be all about getting people connected to one other. There are now over 1 billion people online across the globe, and over 3 billion people with mobile phones who can send a text message. Imagine how much time we can all waste poking one other on Facebook!

More seriously, this sea change in how people spend their lives and leisure hours has created a challenge for those in traditional marketing roles. As with the explosion of cable television channels in the 1990s and subsequent fragmentation of mass market media and advertising, online behavior in the 21st century has been moving away from large portal mass-produced websites like AOL and Yahoo!, and toward a world filled with search engines, social networks, millions of tiny blogs and long-tail websites, user-generated content sites, news feeds, apps, widgets, RSS, email, SMS, IM, chat, Twitter, bookmarks, etc, etc. Finding ways to effectively reach customers in the world of Web 2.0 has become a Sisyphean task, requiring a wide variety of online marketing skills and an endless number of communication channels.

And yet there also exists the everyday miracle of one clever, creative individual who executes a very cheap, viral, word-of-mouth campaign that reaches millions overnight. How can this be? We are both powerless and powerful at the same time. We are fragmented and yet unified. We are solitary shut-ins glued to our computers, but we are powerfully and instantly connected to thousands of others all over the Earth. We are billions of people on the World Wide Web, and we are a billion people blathering on in a billion and one tongues.

This is social media. And like the social beings who create it, social media is messy and confused. It was in the middle of that mess that my personal journey began. Let me explain.

Back in late summer 2001, I had the good fortune of accepting a job offer at PayPal, while the rest of the dot-com world was crashing all around me. Little did I know the towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan would also come crashing down my first day on the job. While still in shock at a changed world offline, I began putting my toe in the waters of a brave new world online as well.

I had always been a geek of some kindmusic geek in grade school, math major in college, computer programmer after graduating, and a small-time Internet entrepreneur in the mid-1990s until my company got acquired in 1998. However, my new job at PayPal was in (developer) marketingpretty unfamiliar territory for a geek. I wasnt even sure how I got the job; a friend who was a PayPal angel investor had referred me, since he knew Id been organizing several Silicon Valley tech and entrepreneur user groups for many years. I guess PayPal figured that was as close as it could get to someone who knew how to market to developers, so it gave me a chance.