Social Media: Do you need to reinvent the wheel?
It’s claimed that in Mesopotamia (part of modern day Iraq) 3500BC one of the most important tools ever was invented. That tool was the wheel, however the original use of the wheel is unlikely to be the use that most people would automatically associate it with in the current day. In 3500BC the wheel was used in pottery as what we would now call the ‘potters wheel’, and it was not until 3200BC that the wheel was used for transportation (contrary to evidence from the Flintstones…). This is a clear demonstration of how the use of a tool is not necessarily defined by its intended or original use, all that really matters is if the tool can be used to achieve specific goals.
Jump forward 5000 or so years and we can see how the same principles of a tool can be applied to modern day Social Media. The first thing to make clear is that Social Media is a tool, it is something that can (and in the case of many brands should) be used to help you achieve specific goals.
Twitter was positioned (and still is on the homepage) as a tool for people to let friends, family, and co-workers know what they’re doing. Of course people do use the service for this use, but many others have found many other ways to make use of twitter. For example many people are using the service to exchange information with people they’ve never met, and using the information provided by the service as a real time search of almost any subject. It’s not important that these uses were not the intended use of the tool, all that matters is that the tool is helping people achieve their desired objectives (what ever these might be).
Youtube was originally set up with the goal to allow ordinary computer users the chance to post their video content online. There is no disputing it has been successful in this aim, however, if you look to the most watched on youtube you’ll see that this is not the only way people are using the tool. In fact the majority of most watched videos on youtube are actually music videos, many of these have not been posted by ‘ordinary computer users’ but by large corporations, furthermore, many users are not actually watching these videos but simply using youtube as a music player. Once again the original use of the tool remains (as with the wheel and twitter) but the tool has really shown it’s true potential when it has been used in ways that were not necessarily intended.
So as with the wheel there is no correct way to use Social Media tools, the key is to find how the tool can work best for you or your brand, and in some instances this might even require discovering another way in which the tool can be used. Potters used the wheel in a very different way to cart vendors, just as groups of friends use twitter differently to brands, and how budding film makers use youtube differently to record companies. But even though there is such variation in the use of the individual tools no one group can claim to be using the tool in a manner better than the other, success is completely context relevant.
The most successful tools will have many uses and appeal to many different people, but even the most successful tools can’t be used by everyone. If there is no way the tool can be used to achieve your objectives then it’s not the right tool for you, you’ll need to find a different tool or tools to achieve your objectives. So therefore just because brand A is using a social media tool with great success does not mean brand B can use the same tool in the same manner to achieve similar success. Brand B needs to find a way to make the tool work for their specific goals or maybe even look to different tools altogether to which their goals are better suited.
Image: Cartype
