Random thoughts on random days

gapingvoid: the corporate wine blogging manifesto: “…The web is not about techonolgy. The web is not about a new media to market one’s wares in. And the web is certainly not about you.

Remember the following line, first coined by Jeff Jarvis; you will need to rely on it for the rest of your life:

The web is about people.

…The end result of this is, wiith the advent of the internet and various forms of social software, suddenly highly savvy networks of people are springing up in their millions. They’re talking to each other. With or without your permission.

It used to be, you could buy a piece of media, hire some advertising professionals to polish the message till it was nice and shiny, and deliver it to as many people as you wanted, in whatever form you wanted.

But suddenly, you’re now irrelevant.

Now, people can simply ignore you. And they’ve gotten very good at ignoring you. Nobody cares about you or your wine. They’d rather talk to their friends and contacts about wine, they don’t need to hear it from you. They probably think what you have to say is just a lot of advertising-induced lies, anyway. They have better sources of information. And lots of them.

(Via gapingvoid: “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards”.)

This is what I keep trying to teach to my corporate friends and colleagues. It’s not about eyeballs anymore. In fact it never was. It’s about people. In the pre-internet world someone in my circle of friends would come across a product, restaurant, new music, whatever and tell to the rest of the group either good or bad stories and we’d then have the chance to decide for ourselves. The power of these social networks isn’t about the sheer volume of people. It’s still about the circles of friends that talk about you and your product. The difference now is 50 million people could potentially be eavesdropping.

It would be wise to join the conversation before it gets away from you.