Below the Fold

Let's Say Goodbye to Social Media “Gurus”

I’ve never liked the term Guru – it’s a throwaway word, much like Paradigm, Content, or Kanye. Plus, I wonder if calling a marketing person a “guru” is offensive to actual gurus, and whether by using the term I’ll get punished with some karmic payback, like being reincarnated as a Fox News anchor.

But I particularly dislike the word when precedent by two other overused words, “social” and “media.”

Any blowhard with a blog can self-designate as a social media guru, and because any blowhard can, many blowhards do. Same goes for Twitter, the only difference being that Twitter allows people to become assholes much faster and with more grammatical errors.

If you say you are a social media guru, then you are focusing on the wrong thing. It’s important to understand the tools and channels and all that, totally fine – twenty years ago it was important to understand fax machines too, but not a lot of people touted themselves as gurus in “faxable media.”

What really matters is understanding consumer behavior, how people communicate and why, what they are saying and why, and to whom, and where. We use the word “social” as often as a person with a cold reaches for a tissue, yet we forget that “social” is about sociology – you know, people, not platforms.

All media today is social, so in my opinion there is no “social media.” And there are no gurus either, only those who know a little more than some others – and trust me, the others aren’t too far behind.

Leave the Journalism to the Journalists

Being married for 18 years has taught me how to make excuses. Usually these excuses have little effect, other than to serve as a caustic reminder of just how little influence I have in my own house.

Nevertheless, my excuse for not posting in the past couple months is a pretty good one: I’ve been busy compiling a book based on this blog. So you see, I have been writing, just the old-fashioned way – in private.

The book – called The Last Newspaper: Reflections on the Future of News – should be done next month, at which time there might even be a few newspapers left. I hope so – as regular readers of this blog know, I’m still a fan of storytelling, something that Twitter can’t provide and that newspapers don’t deliver often enough. And I’m a fan of reporters, partly because I used to be one, and partly because they aren’t editors.

It’s easy to assume that all social media today is an iceberg, newspapers are the Titanic and that reporters are looking for lifeboats. While certainly true for some, there are others for whom newspapers have simply lost the desire to be different.

I met once such reporter recently in Sacramento. He was interested in looking for a new career, but not for the reasons you may think. He loves newspapers, loves writing for them and loves having worked for them for nearly two decades. He also loves technology and embraces new media as much as the old. And he’s not the least bit worried about becoming an unemployment statistic.

Blogs aren’t killing this mainstream media star – boredom is. The “product” being shaped by management is a bland, watered-down journalism designed not to offend, and in doing so ends up signifying nothing.

This is the opposite of what today’s newspapers need to do to survive. Newspapers have to provoke and inspire. They must be spontaneous and serious, make us laugh and cry. Most importantly, newspapers have to stop reporting the news and start telling good stories again.

The news business can’t drive the product – that must be left to the journalists. Let the good ones do their jobs and the product will improve. Let them get bored, strip their inspiration, and the last newspaper may be here sooner than we think.

What Google Doesn’t Know (and never will)

Inspired by a colleague who proclaimed that “books would be dead” in five years, I posed a tongue-in-cheek question on my Facebook page, asking “what will disappear first, books or the book review section” of newspapers?

Expecting similarly tongue-in-cheek answers, I instead received this:

“I read a story today in the New York Times Magazine about a guy who gave up his Ph.D. and work in intellectual think tanks to become a motorcycle mechanic. This was a fantastic article that no search engine would ever have found for me. I do not do searches on PhD, think tanks or motorcycle maintenance. Thank you, New York Times. That is what newspapers and magazines can do. Bring you the things you didn't know you wanted.”

Now, you can analyze this position in many ways, but for me, it boils down to this: There are search engines that learn from us (Google) and search engines that teach us (Journalists). We need both, and neither should diminish at the expense of the other.

The Next Level of Search

 “Search” may well become the most overused and misunderstood word or phrase in social media since, well, “social media.”

According to a recent white paper issued by my company, there are four kinds of search: Paid, Optimized, Reputational and Social. While correct, the paper overlooks one key fact – for content to be found, people need to know that they want to find it.

Most search strategies and methodologies today are about creating visibility and order – learning what people want, taking them to it, and helping them organize it. As a result, search is moving closer to that Web 1.0 dream of “intelligent agents” roaming the web, fulfilling your every request.

But what if you don’t know what you want until you see it? It’s great to have search that understands me, but I want a search that teaches me. I want serendipity.

Computers learn, people teach -- and this is where journalism and the printed word can still lead.

Journalists as “Search Agents”

Those “intelligent agents” we all wanted? They are called reporter and editors. They are magazines, newspapers and, yes, books.

These are the search agents that advance us and force us to confront what we didn’t think we needed or wanted to know. It doesn’t matter how well a search engine learns to learn if, in the end, it teaches us nothing.

So the next time you are in Barnes & Noble or Borders, look around and remember that you are standing inside a search engine, a vast repository of knowledge that is waiting for discovery. Pick up a newspaper (if there are any left in your town) and see what the “search agents” found for you to read.

Many people today believe that if the news is important enough, it will find them. Perhaps – but I’d rather find it for myself. With any luck, I’ll find exactly what I don’t want.

Before I Wake:

• Finish the proposal

• Prep for conference call

• Review presentation deck

• Schedule brainstorm

• Read WSJ story

• Check RSS feeds

• Update Facebook status

• Respond to client e-mail

• Run a Tweet Scan

• Revise research memo

• Draft quick project update

• Plan business travel

• Get billing codes

• Wonder whether all of this will have been a mistake...if I should die before I wake.

There is No Social Media

Media is social.

Conversation is social.

Conversation is permanent.

Technology is not conversation.

A blog is technology.

A blogger is not.

Bloggers are not impressions.

Bloggers can be influential.

Bloggers are people.

People are media.

People are social.

All media is social.

There is no social media.