Making social media’s ’semiotic promiscuity’ work for brands

If you read just one post this week, make it Lingering, Benjamin Kunkel’s brilliantly written and thoughtful essay on the ways in which social media is changing our behaviour. Kunkel grapples with what he calls the semiotic promiscuity fostered by the web, whereby truckloads of ever ’shorter, more frequent, more spontaneous, and more casual’ content seduce us with ‘novelty, variety, excitement’ so that ’shallow and ephemeral relationships supplant deeper and more lasting ones’. It’s a fear shared by Joseph Jaffe, who has been mourning the death of the blog and the hegemony of Twitter on Marketing Profs Daily Fix.

The sentiments will ring true for a lot of people (although Andrew Seal of Conversational Reading has been quick to publish a rebuttal). The question is how we can make this landscape work for us.  At 1000heads, we have found that fostering deeper and lasting relationships with consumers - and taking their experiences, passions and encounters offline - is an essential precursor to the quick-fire amplification of content online. Nailing meaningful engagement with social media users in a personal, experiential way has all the more impact because it is becoming so rare. Get that right, and then plug it back into that semiotically promiscuous online world, and the deeper, individual engagement powers a whole lot of instant, varied, exciting, quickly spread and easily digested content too.

Kunkel’s post is actually a review of three excellent recent books examining the space, and he’s right - it sometimes takes the longer think piece of a full text to drill down into really interesting ideas. So rather than just skimming your Google Reader, I’d advise investing in one or two - and Blog Talk Radio’s weekly Word of Mouth Book Club podcast is a good source for discovering and discussing the latest releases.

Having said that, some online content is definitely better left in the form of ‘op-eds, diary entries, aperçus, allusions, screeds, and scrawls of graffiti.’ Rob Matthews’ physical Wikipedia would definitely collapse my Ikea shelves.

Brought into the world on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 and filed under Uncategorized.