What Is Social Media Really, And Why Should I Care?

(Judy Shapiro is CEO/ founder of engageSimply, a social commerce media company and Chief Brand Strategist at CloudLinux.)

In a recent panel discussion hosted by Ad Age, Judy Shapiro realized that "...there was no consistent understanding of what "social media" was. For some, "social media" meant a new connective layer for the planet (powered by Facebook). For others, social media was the social layer for the planet with a new definition of "privacy" (powered by Facebook). And for others, social media was so broad it meant anything that let people share anything -- which covers a lot of ground beyond Facebook.

To paraphrase a bit, thanks, in large part to this nebulous "social media," marketing is experiencing a fundamental shift that takes every tactical practice of the last 20 years and turns them upside down.

Judy speaks.

I am not sure what I expected to be doing at this point in my career. I have been blessed to have been at the center of the changing, blossoming technology landscape of the last 20+ years.  My earliest days were at an advertising agency called NW Ayer which gave me a broad perspective on Corporate America’s practices, problems and possibilities for triumph. I then gracefully made my way into the tech stars of Corporate America itself with stints at AT&T, Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies and Computer Associates. I also had the great good fortune of working at small innovative technology companies led by visionary innovative leaders. Two prime examples include Melih Abdulhayoglu, CEO of Comodo and Jason Katz, CEO of Paltalk.

This unusual combination of corporate marketing experience coupled with the feet on the streets training born of working at tech startups, gave me a balanced perspective of how the marketing business is evolving in this technology driven world.

So here we are.

The marketing business is going through a fundamental shift that throws into question almost every tactical practice built over the last 20 years. And, amazingly, it seems that just as marketing becomes this new discipline that weaves creativity into an interactive user experience that is tech heavy – it’s a perfect fit for my peculiar type of networking meets technology marketer experience.  

This seems nothing short of extraordinary. Which is why I am all the more stunned at the work I am doing today. I had not planned on any such seismic move in marketing, so I certainly did not plan on launching a marketing tech venture.

But here I am.

My journey has been one of surprising excitement at the possibilities in marketing excellence that was simply not possible before. The vision of this venture, therefore, is to take advantage of these new trends to deliver a sustainable and productive “marketing machine” (a phrase I attribute to Melih) that can turn the tables on how marketing gets done.

In our vision, we don’t approach monetization like Google or Facebook’s who are about pushing more accurate marketing messages to consumers. We are looking to deliver a marketing platform that lets consumers decide what content they see, what ads they see, how their social networks are managed, how they conduct commerce, even how they communicate within the social networks. The organizing principle for this platform is not ad-driven monetization but oriented around Judy Consumer. Our vision is to create the kind of system that we want to live with for the next 10 years . In effect, we want to give Judy Consumer the tech power to create her own personal “Trust Web.”

To the few friends we have shared our vision with – all have come to a similar conclusion – it is an ambitious (maybe too ambitious) vision. They are correct. But as I entered marketing in the 1980s most of marketing at first was human powered with marketing systems emerging later on.  

And here we are – again.

This next generation collection of marketing technologies is rich in creativity but is not organized for sustainable marketing programs for brands. This is work that I, among others, are focused on – creating v1.0 systems to operationalize the business of social marketing.  

We are all at just at the beginning of this journey and it’s a journey I didn’t expect to be taking at this point.

But here I am – and much to my surprise – I am having the time of my life.

Yeah Judy, me too!

So that's it. Ultimately everything hinges on the issue of trust.

From a piece written for Ad Age Digital "Why I Have Begun to Hate the Term 'Social Media' - The Phrase Has Become So Undefined It Has Outlived Its Usefulness" (04/12/11), in response to a comment by Jonathan Kopp, Ms. Shapiro points out, "After all in the real world, there are lots of things to help us establish trust - all we have in the digital world are pixels. Great for conveying information - terrible at helping establish trust."

Trust me, I think she's on to something here.

August 2, 2011   Permalink   Judy Shapiro - Trenchwars Weblog - Ad Age Digital