Carman Pirie's Blog

What social media guys can learn from the ad agency business

The ad agency business is an interesting one, at the very least, featuring no shortage of folks who would gladly gloss over all manner of actual business considerations or strategic thinking and head straight to creative development. And despite lots of chatter to the contrary, my guess is that at least 80% of the creative directors in the country still see TV as the Holy Grail. They’ve literally never met a marketing challenge that a TV ad can’t fix. They live for TV. They love TV.

Add in the plethora of award shows, with everyone in search of a gold this or that in order to build their book, and you’ve got a recipe that delivers creative for creative’s sake. Not always, of course, but often enough to be an issue in this business.

My point is this: When a social media hack builds something only his basement-dwelling geek friends will like or ‘get’, it is no different than the advertising asshole doing a TV ad simply to gain the praise and admiration of his advertising colleagues at the latest award show gab fest.

Get well Doc

(This Doc-esque photo was taken by my considerably better half on a flight from Nadi to Savusavu during our trip to Fiji a while back.)  

I've never met Doc Searls.  But, of course, it's easy to feel like I have.  Blogging is like that... read someone for a while and, inevitably, you assemble a fairly detailed mental view of who they are.  

Doc has been in hospital now for a number of days, and has been blogging quite openly about all that is happening to him... his condition, the drugs they're putting him on... everything.  There is something remarkably human about it all - something quite intimate and personal. 

I think that it may be a touch too easy for us to get lost in all the babble about the latest new thing or whether Twitter is up or down.  At its core, social media it's really a much more human technology than that.  In many ways, it just amplifies the way we get on with each other as humans anyway.

Beyond tactics

Last Monday I joined with Joe Thornley of Thornley Fallis to deliver a talk at the CPRS annual conference taking place here in Halifax.  A few days later, Joe wrote about how "social media authorship is mandatory for credibility as an advisor".  

While there is no shortage of people claiming expertise without the requisite participation and authorship Joe speaks of, there's also no shortage of supposed experts who seemingly cannot move beyond simply recommending the same social media tactics to clients that they use themselves.

For many PR and marketing folk, the tough part seems to be moving beyond the technology / tactics they're comfortable with themselves towards business-specific strategic applications of social media.  

Clay Shirky's talk at SF's Web 2.0 Expo

This is definitely worth your time and attention: