Two's Company; Social Media is a Crowd – Part 2

In a previous post, I opened the discussion of how social media is like a crowd.  In it I referenced an article from Patrick who raised the question.

Patrick’s article was extremely interesting and raised many interesting questions. But being that the blog article was anonymously authored, I think it must be approached cautiously. The article and its position would have carried much more weight, more authority, if the author had supplied some biographical information, including a full name, so I could have vetted him for use as a more reliable source. Because anonymous social media/web sources, and their potential dangers, are something I’ll discuss more fully later in a book I’m currently writing.

I question the authority of his material. But I don’t question his opinion, which is that online groups of people are not communities, but instead are crowds. Now back to the issue of crowds.

Many of my social media marketing consultant colleagues like to call groups of people on social media sites “communities” perhaps because it sounds better than calling them a “crowd.” If the label sounds good, then my colleagues can more easily persuade their clients to undertake social media marketing projects, generating fees. Certainly it’s better to say to your client, “Let’s establish a brand community,” instead of “Let’s establish a brand crowd.” “Community” sounds cuter, more warm and fuzzy, more friendly, more like, “Hey, this is gonna generate us some cash.”

“Crowd” sounds brash, unmanageable, and uncontrollable. Despite all the currently sheik and fashionable exhortations for brand managers to “lose control of their brand” by marketing via social media, what brand manager actually wants to go for uncontrollable as his/her objective? The world is chaotic enough as it is. I’m not against generating fees, if the work traded for the fees solves a problem. But using misnomers is not a good way to start out in problem resolution. To revisit some rhetoric from the 2008 presidential campaign and a standard American culture cliché, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.” So call it a community if you like, but I think it’s a crowd.

I’ll have more on this subject in a future article.