"Too early for unrequested surplus of plenary" was my description one-third into the smbyyc event. I forewarned associates of being jaded that morning.
In fairness to organizers, I had not read the event description before signing up. It was perhaps a triumph of marketing that I dragged myself to a supposedly sold-out event at an ex-gravel pit on a Friday at 8 a.m., or a marketing failure in that I arrived completely clueless about the organization or the event.
Perhaps 80 of the 100+ RSVPs partly filled a glorified home entertainment theatre to receive, I'll guess, information relating social media to marketing and business things. At least that's what some people in the audience stated. I was there to see if anyone could (dis)confirm my suspicions that "social media" is poorly defined, but I digress.
The event's stated purpose was to allow the organizing committee to gather feedback about smbyyc's direction as an event series and as a community. Though raised hands showed that most attendees were new to both the event and the community, the
focus group discussion charged ahead.
Perhaps the audience of mostly marketing, business development, and PR people were each waiting for another to point out potential pitfalls of asking prospective clients about how to change a service and organization they've not used and about which they know almost nothing. Or perhaps we were all waiting for the next uber slide to explain everything. I don't know. I was never very good at hand-waving.
Not lost on me, however, was a very real question: how did a group whose purpose concerns (that's the strongest word I dare use) asynchronous distributed communications among avatars come to ask what to do with itself as a group of local warm bodies. Several community engagement manager people did not immediately jump in, nor did several spectacularly titled business strategy-sounding people. I was left to wonder if I had been doing it wrong.
Why was no one else pointing out the disconnect among the apparent purpose of the gathering (strategic plenary), the lack of suitable resources (informed stakeholders), and discussions around stranded tactics (implement things!)? What were the terms of reference for this discussion? Why were we having it? Certainly, it was not for change alone. Why did organizers seek largeish external corporate funding while refusing smaller amounts from interested stakeholders? How did this organization in twelve months copy a model from the Internet, build a community around it, apparently lose most of it, and churn through to another cohort? What is the business model, its purpose, and its competitive advantage? How does it obtain its resources? What was the business case to invest time and resources in this? How does partnering with a mostly unknown new group in Edmonton with a similar name help either party? Why are we considering it right now? Is there a genuine community, or just a group of people with common interests?
Did the cattle guy walk out because he was the only one to be sufficiently concerned?
The situation had so many unexplained plot holes, failing to connect familiar elements, but the fans of social media in the audience seemed unaware or uninterested that none of it was making sense. I began to feel like the victim of some elaborate improv by George Lucas. But wait, I may have seen this
before.
But the major difference between smbyyc and the dot-com implosion appears to be that this group is backed by solid people, ideas, experience, and resources. It just needs to identify and build on its strengths:
1. The audience members represented almost every social, economic, and cultural sector in Calgary, all of whom have some set of business development and marketing needs. Absent members of the group would fill in any gaps. It's therefore unlikely that any (social) marketing technique one could think of has already been tried by someone in the community. Further, the highly networked nature of the business community means that almost any knowledge or resource could be easily accessed. But these are also strengths of the Calgary business community in general.
2. Participants inexperienced in social media sought beginner tactical guidance and ideas. The social media veterans sought to share high-level strategies. The strength unique to smbyyc is that all participants are willing to seek out, consider, and try new things. They are innovators, and are comfortable with learning from making mistake after mistake. As both novice and veteran social media people pointed out, the value of the group, or the "networking", is to share and learn from others' experiences.
3. Calgary is great at accepting diversity. SMBYYC should draw on that strength to bring new individuals into the language and culture of social media. Since we would want to engage and retain new and enthusiastic members of the group in order to form a sustainable community, we must keep barriers to entry and frustrations low. Consider mentorship and birds of a feather type activities that work well for other sectors in Calgary unless there are solid reasons to invent something from scratch.
Together, these strengths could underpin some very solid strategy and plans to allow smbyyc members to amplify the value they provide by sharing with each other. Participants and their organizations would easily connect participation with value.
However, the smbyyc group as observed, has a number of weaknesses:
1. The smbyyc group has several thousand years of collective marketing, communication, engagement, media, and PR experience. The 'media' part of social media is probably well understood. Modifying it with 'social' and treating it as a completely new thing, without clearly explaining how just media was not social, is likely causing unnecessary confusion. This may annoy some social media experts, but to draw on its strengths, smbyyc should be guided by business and societal goals, rather than by a collection of related electronic tools. Speaking and thinking about clear concepts would reduce artificial barriers to extending existing competencies and expertise into the adjoining social media space.
2. There are hundreds of social media forums, websites, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, etc. They have in common the requirement that individuals have to consciously go out of their way to participate such venues, rather than making knowledge sharing and discussion about social media part of the routine. If the objective is to make or treat social media as a pervasive communication technology, such as phones and e-mails, the affordances must not be exceptional. Business development and PR professionals are familiar with the challenges of driving even very interested potential customers to websites. As people, our time and attention are no less scarce. For smbyyc to be a community, rather than an ad hoc group, it must be reliably accessible and consistent in reach. The three or four existing forums do not sustainably engage the group are unlikely to be improved by adding yet another forum. Good community managers make big money for the reason that the value they provide cannot simply be found by emergence alone. Majordomo and twitter have worked reliably well to coordinate learning (both strategic and trial by error) in thousands of other communities of interest (even if they do not contain most of the tacit or explicit knowledge learned), and it's difficult not to learn something from being bombarded by problems and discussions.
3. smbyyc participants are united by a common interest in a common communication platform, but are as diverse in needs and practices regarding that platform as users of any other communication platform. Calgary does not have an e-mail blast group, or a business cell phones users group, etc. but people do meet about using particular kinds of tools in particular industries. A multi-disciplinary approach would be required to engage this community in general, and in its various potential fractions, but this approach risks loss of general appeal. Institutionalizing the partition of special interests seems redundant when groups of people naturally cluster on their own, as long as the overall environment provides some positive value or opportunity.
But these are weaknesses that are addressed relatively easily once smbyyc as a community comes to understand why it exists. Sorting out these high-level concepts and strategies would make it much easier for all the low-level tactical and implementation pieces to fall into place.
Random notes:
-Feedback forms are good for collecting input about what works, or not.
-The opera house, the U of C Learning Commons, and the medical school can all do crowds of 100 in flexible formats, with teleconferencing.
-Birds of a feather sessions provide advance notice of interesting content.
-Do the networking activities need to be more focused on socializing newcomers into the community?
/rant
