Social Media and Minorities

Social Media and Minorities

Something has been been bothering me for a while about Social Media and the new marketing attention it gets.  It’s seemed to me that we’ve given a very small group of our customers/readers and even the internet at large unprecedented importance.  You’ve got people marketing types from the highest circles of management reaching out to try to solve support problems for customers.  

I think the thing that has been bothering me is that this creates a two tiered experience.  The squeaky internet wheel gets first class service, mandated from the top, whereas the rest of us get something less.

I could go on, and I’d planned to.  However, I think Esteban Glas has covered the issue perfectly in his blog yesterday:

The problem is that there is a lot of noise in the conversation. And that noise is increasing; probably more rapidly than the signal. The real problem then becomes how to tell what in that ocean of conversations is of value and what not. So we end up with “judgment”. Nasty.

All of us in the social media world need to make judgments about where the important conversations reside. And that is an error-prone process. Thus we end up in a conundrum: we can’t possibly pay attention to all conversations, so we make a selection and we end up either listening to the vocal minorities or just to those that agree with us (the infamous Echo Chamber).

You really need to read his full post.  Its by far the best bit I’ve read on Social Media in months.

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