There's a story about the demise of Facebook in the Washington Post: Worldwide ebb for Facebook. I like the logic--when a company's been around long enough for someone to make a movie out of it, then it's probably on the downhill slide, even if they do get Justin Timberlake. That people are interested in something new shouldn't be surprising to anyone in business, marketing or evolutionary psychology. Same ol', same ol' won't cut it, especially in a world where expectations about the speed of change have reached new highs. But rather than speculate on trends and following the migration across social media tools of whoever's cool, it's time to revisit some words of wisdom from the original management guru, Peter Drucker. Organizations must be organized for innovation. Using economist Joseph Schumpeter's term "creative destruction," Drucker said companies should be: organized for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, family and comfortable, … [Read more...]
Drucker and Facebook–Organizing for Change
Hang in There Jack: A Case Study in Cross-Platform Digital Storytelling
Why would someone use television ads, billboards, and print to drive people to online and social media sites? 1) For the right audience, social media has lots of advantages, speed of dissemination, trust, interaction, expectations, collaboration, and emotional investment in user-generated content, engagement, curiosity, or 2) you are trying to look very hip and don’t care if it motivates action. The ‘Hang in there Jack’ campaign is one very effective example. It successfully crosses from traditional media to the Internet (Hangintherejack.com) and social media applications such as Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter and invites a relationship with the user by encouraging user-generated content via different avenues: comments, videos, text messages, and snail mail get well cards. By doing this, it shifts the focus of the advertising message from the company (Jack in the Box, Inc.) to the user. Jack is now the vehicle for dissemination not the primary message. The hand-off from … [Read more...]
New Communication Rules Bring New Communication Careers
Newsweek's Technology Section has an article called “Twitter, Unmasked: Who is really writing all those Tweets? Professional microbloggers.” This article underscores the importance of looking at new media with an open-mind. Too many people I know, when faced with media that is not indigenous to their technological coming of age, spend way too long explaining why something isn’t important (or worse, is dangerous) without trying to their outside their initial reaction and looking to see how the technology is being used and experienced. As a media psychologist, I’m kind of fixated on that experience thing. Piles of psychological research shows that humans are social animals that need to be connected to others, and, among other things, that interpersonal connections are essential for mental and physical health, and that different people have different connection styles. A lot of people fretted and tried to prove that Web 2.0 technology was going to isolate people and … [Read more...]
The Digital Social “Me”
I sat with a group of educators, marketers, public relations professionals, investor relations professionals, and web developers yesterday talking about how to develop a graduate level program focused on social media. This was especially interesting because as the only psychologist, my vantage point was quite different. Where marketers talk about metrics and stats in media use, I wonder about how people interpret or make meaning out of the experience. To me, the metrics might show if the net result is positive or negative but they don't illuminate much under the hood. I always enjoy it when I get to see a different way of looking at something or thinking about something by talking with smart people. The discussions also reinforce my opinion that effective media applications come from a multi-disciplinary foundation. One topic of discussion was, what does a program focused on social media even mean? What is social media? Is it the same as Web 2.0? Is it part of Web 2.0? Will … [Read more...]
