A few weeks ago, I was a panelist at the 10th Annual Symposium on Communication, The Future of Communication, held at Bernard Baruch College, City University of New York, in the Big Apple. The panel’s topic, “More than Friending: Social Media and Communication in Business and Education,” provided for a lively discussion about social media and [...]
|
|||||
|
Richard Telofski is a competitive strategy analyst. Specializing in anti-corporate activism, he examines the actions of "irregular competitors" (i.e., activists and NGOs) and how those organizations impact business from within online and offline media.  |
But had J&J sought to engage the “offended” asking for positive input, such a move would have served J&J greatly not only by saving the explicit cost of trashing an entire campaign, but also by saving the implicit cost of the lost opportunity to develop a relationship with a large segment of consumers. Alvin Toffler in Powershift thought that the “crowd” was the first mass medium, sending messages from the “ruled” to the “ruler.” We can apply that model to the situation of social media’s use in everyday people communicating with the companies that make the goods and services the people buy. What we’ve arrived at here is that online groups really are more “crowd” than they are “community.” From what I’ve just discussed, you can see that online groups are a hybrid between the two, but favoring the crowd side of the “social DNA” rather than the community. 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. The author of the article, who claims to be a neuroscientist and is known only to the world as Patrick, opines that online communities such as those at Digg.com and StumbleUpon.com are not really “communities” at all. He says that they are crowds. |
||||
|
Copyright © 2010 The Kahuna Content Company, Inc. - All Rights Reserved |
|||||