Social Media Like Colonialism?

Here's an interesting take on using social media to market brands from the excellent ExitCreative blog:

Us trying to market to people with social media seems a LOT like Colonialism

Most efforts to market things socially (whether they be the idea of a nation or the idea of a brand) involve a hegemonic force (the marketer) trying to commandeer the resources of a small society (on- or off-line, these are consumers). This sounds a lot like colonialism to me. We try, from our ivory tower, to figure out what “consumers” will like, or at least tolerate, and then we try to blast our messages out to them in the hopes they will be converted to our belief system. Sounds a lot like the efforts to convert African nations to Christian religions to me. Certainly not as problematic, but it illustrates a point.

In my experience marketers have always been somewhat deluded about how receptive people are to marketing messages. As a creative in ad agencies I was trained in stealth techniques, premised on the idea that people aren't sitting around watching T.V. to see ads- they want to be entertained...and so forth, so naturally most of my scripts began with 'Open on beach in Bahamas...'(a ploy that did actually work once).

In truth I was simply talking to myself, telling jokes and stories, secure in the knowledge that ti didn't matter much either way, so it might as well be fun - especially for me. So, in that sense it's not much different to blogging.

Comments

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Shoulders of giants

"A failure is a man who has blundered but is not able to cash in on the experience." "Life is just one damned thing after another." (Both from Elbert Hubbard - look him up on the wikipedia . If it's wrong - change it)

ThoughtSpurs

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