I’ve spoken before about the social media “bubble”. You know, this warm and cozy place where all us Twitter-loving, high tech super early adopting thirty and forty somethings spend a good chunk of our lives. We have our own gurus, our special buzzwords, and our own geek-a-paloooza assortment of Dungeons and Dragons inside jokes and bad 80′s references written on t-shirts. Even though we pride ourselves on “openness” and “transparency”, you have to admit, it’s kind of a secret club. Oh sure, anyone can join, but they have to know the secret password (it’s “social media d-bag”).

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

You see, the whole POINT of social media is to create online communities of people with common interests. It just so happens that the common interest many of us have happens to be social media.

We sit inside the bubble, but it’s only one of thousands of bubbles. It just so happens that what goes on inside our bubble isn’t dog breeding, or photography, or banjo playing..it’s social media. And ironically, we’re using the very tools and strategies we love, to talk about the tools and strategies we love.

To an outsider, that must look pretty weird, eh?

There are a lot of people outside the bubble looking at us sort of cock-eyed, I think. They wonder why we yammer on all day about ROI, community building, and measuring sentiment. They visit our blogs to try to understand more, but the backstory isn’t there. It’s on 15 other web sites we’ve linked to, and if they haven’t been head-down reading Mashable and Gizmodo for the past three days, then the point is lost on them. Back to dog breeding, then.

The thing is, do the people outside the bubble care? Not as much as we think (and maybe hope) they do.

While we sit around discussing the merits of having a Fan Page on Facebook, they are probably opening up their flower shop for the day. While we have blogchats and webinars, they are building a house. While we debate iPads and Androids, they are creating policies for health care reform. See what I mean?

We live this stuff, because for many of us, it’s part of our job. My clients come to me because I know a lot about video, web design, and online marketing/social media/whatever you call it. They pay me to help them understand this stuff, just like I’d pay a contractor to build me a new fence when I need one.

There is one problem I have with the bubble, though. Some people are treating it like Fort Knox. They are doing this because they think that by keeping the walls high and inaccessible and staying inside of them, they get to have easier access to the money. And they figure, if they can keep their clients in the dark long enough, about “mysterious” things like Search Engine Optimization, RSS and WordPress, then they can milk more cash out of the wallets of the unsuspecting neophytes. It’s shameful behaviour and it needs to stop.

As my friend Kneale would say, social media ain’t rocket surgery. Yes, it’s a new way of communicating. Indeed, there’s a sea of information to wade through. There are myriad tools and new things to learn. But ultimately, the whole point of social media tools is that the tools are supposed to be easy to use. And they are. Just ask my Mom. She teaches me stuff about Facebook.

If you want to really help your clients, don’t try to convince them that this stuff is complicated. It’s not. Your clients shouldn’t be hiring you to teach them how to use LinkedIN. Nobody needs a $1000 weekend retreat to learn how to tweet. Social media consultants are a passing fancy. Your clients need your expertise in how to use all media to more effectively tell their stories. That’s it.

As for us bubble-dwellers, the best way for us to understand more what our clients need is to step out of the bubble once in a while. There are a lot of cool people doing a lot of neat stuff online, and many of them don’t even know that what they are doing is “social media”. They are just doing it. Social Media isn’t an industry. Social media are a way of communicating.

The bubble is a valuable place for us. It’s where we hone our craft, learn from each other, and geek out. That’s a good thing, my friends. But remember, there’s a whole other world out there. We should try to be part of that one once in a while, too.

[photo credit: Jeff Kubina on Flickr]

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Gimmicks get a bad rap. Often they are associated with snake oil, paying too much for cheap goods, and smarmy salesmen who just want to take your money and give you little in return.

It’s true, there’s a lot of gimmicky stuff out there that ain’t worth the package it comes in. But gimmicky doesn’t automatically have to be a negative. In fact, when executed properly, it can be one of the best ways to draw a crowd – and a paying one at that.

Rock and roll music has been around since the 1950s, we all know that. Guitars, drums, bass. Sometimes a keyboard or organ thrown in for good measure. Men and women, grooving, bopping and moving us with their beats and lyrics. There was a point in the late 60s where rock and roll music had become so commonplace that new bands were cropping up every other week, it seemed. Rock and roll, though still extremely popular, started to feel like a pair of old shoes….comfortable and worn, but maybe a bit tired.

Then, in the early 1970s, four young guys from New York City changed all that.

It’s not that their music was so much different. It was still rock and roll, and even though it was the hard stuff – the screaming electric kind of music our parents cringe at – it didn’t have a hugely unique sound compared to the other heavy rock bands of the day.

What was different about these boys? It was how they looked, and how they performed. They were dramatic and scary, with their black and white and silver painted faces, their huge black hair, and their giant platform boots. They towered over the crowd on a stage flooded with lights and smoke and exploding stuff. They broke their guitars and launched rockets. They spit (gasp) blood!

KISS was all about the gimmick.

Think about it. If these guys had come onto the scene as your run of the mill rock band, in a time when the world was inundated with rock machines like The Who, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath, how hard do you think they would have had to climb to reach the top?

Now I’m not saying that KISS couldn’t have done it on their own merits. They are tight as heck, have powerful vocals and great stage energy. All the elements of a great rock band. But perhaps they sensed that rock fans were ready for something more. So they donned wild costumes, and took stage show performance to a whole new level. They found a gimmick, and they took it to the extreme – making it mysterious, a little frightening, and definitely fun.

KISS has sold over 85 million albums in the past 35+ years (source: Wikipedia). They must be doing something right. I think part of their secret is they don’t take themselves too seriously. Just check out this video of Gene Simmons on the Mike Douglas show in 1974 and that is pretty clear.

Gimmickry is an art. And like any art, that means that when it’s executed well, it is brilliant. When executed poorly, it’s laughable.

So how can a gimmick work? Let’s use “KISS” principles:

Be really really good. KISS is not just a gimmick trying to be a really good rock band. They are a really good rock band, with a gimmick. They work hard at being good at what they do as musicians. Then they put the gimmick on top of that, and make it something extraordinary.

Don’t sell the gimmick, sell the product. People aren’t buying the KISS Army. They aren’t buying the makeup, the weird hair, or the platform boots. They are buying the experience that those things create. The gimmick is what gets their attention. The experience is what keeps them around. For 35 years. (Now THAT’S sticky!)

Be over the top, but be practical about it. Ace Freely did an interview once where he said he can’t go on his knees anymore when rockets shoot out of his guitar, because his doctor told him he was wrecking his knees. He said “I’m sorry to my fans for not being able to do this, but I want to be able to walk.” The rocket-guitar-knees thing was a trademark. But practicality (and safety) had to overrule. Make your gimmick something nobody has ever seen before. Be 100% unique, but be 150% practical. Don’t let the gimmick get in the way of health, sanity or profits.

Gimmicks. They aren’t so bad after all. As media makers, marketers and storytellers, sometimes a little gimmick is all we need to get the kind of attention we seek. But over the top doesn’t have to mean giving up value. Provide value first, and use gimmick as a tool. And who knows, before long, you may just be ready to rock and roll all night (and party every day).

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Wow – people are really all a-buzz about mainstream media’s latest foray into the world of social media, eh? I’m seeing lots of different viewpoints and some great conversations. In fact, I’d say that social media is really showing it’s stuff right now – the community is out in full force, in one way or another, trying to figure out what it all means.

I have been a media producer, in some form or another, for going on 20 years. In my time, I’ve produced media (television, radio, print, advertising, marketing campaigns) for everything from high profile, mainstream media outlets to large corporations to mom and pop shops and local community cable. I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to witness first hand what is likely the single largest transformation in the way people communicate since the invention of the telephone.

With that said, I wanted to present my take on recent events within mainstream media and some of the social media community’s reaction to these events. I present here the dispelling of a couple of myths about mainstream media, based on my observations over the past several years. Please keep in mind that this is my opinion only. The purpose here is to state my position on the matter, and open up honest discussion about it. I invite you to dispel what I’m dispelling.

Myth #1. Mainstream Media Doesn’t “Get It”.
I’m seeing a lot of defensive behaviour coming out of the social media crowd in the past few days. They are right on top of celebrities like Oprah and Kutcher, accusing them of ruining Twitter, using it as a broadcast medium only, and the one that really gets me – not understanding the “nuances” of social media.

It’s true that there are things people can learn about effectively using social media as a tool, and there are plenty of good, interesting, smart professionals out there helping people to figure it out. But anyone who thinks that a multimillion dollar corporation like Harpo has not done their homework before diving into social media with both feet is coming at it from the wrong perspective. The beef incident from a few years back, if nothing else, should prove that Oprah’s people most definitely have learned to do their homework. As for Kutcher and the rest of them, they’re all businesspeople too, with images to uphold, and a flurry of agents and publicists who have to damage control their careers if they say or do something stupid on the public stage.

Mainstream media doesn’t get it? I beg to differ in a big way. In fact, they may get it a lot more than many of us. We’ve been stuck for a long time in the same rut with social media, talking about the same stuff over and over. They are in part, starting to move the medium forward.

Myth #2. Mainstream Media is Missing the Boat.
Ooh! I love boat analogies. And my husband came up with a doozy last night. He said “Big media is an aircraft carrier. It takes a long time to turn a ship like that around.”

Let’s look at mainstream media in relation to the average social media superstar. Oprah has hundreds of millions of viewers for her TV show. According to Wikipedia, she gets 70 million page views per month on her web site. Social media superstars, even the really popular ones, are not working anywhere near that scale. Most are in the tens of thousands, and a few elite are in the hundreds of thousands.

What does that mean? Oprah’s driving an aircraft carrier. So is CNN. Your average social media superstar is driving a speedboat. He can turn on a dime. I’m not saying he’s not putting a great deal of thought into strategy and planning and image and all the rest. Of course he is. But big media is strategizing and planning and considering image too. The difference is, they are doing it on a much larger scale. They aren’t missing the boat. They are just driving a way bigger one than the rest of us. And once they get it turned around – and it’s about 3/4 of the way there in some cases – then the game is going to change for good.

So – I guess what this all means is – are you ready for things to start changing? Instead of defending the models that have been created over the past few years, how are you going to adapt your model to the changing tides? Or maybe you don’t think big media changes things at all. They’ve just shown up at the party, and are going to mix with the crowd.

What’s your take?

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I met someone for the first time recently. They asked me “What do you do?”.

The story of what I “do” has changed over the years. I used to just say “I work for [insert company name here].” Then after a while, I started to identify more with the actual work I was doing. “I’m a TV producer.” “I’m a web designer.” “I’m a technical writer.” “I’m a professor.”

When we started the company, my description started to become more complex. “I’m a partner in a production company.” Which always prompted the response, “Oh? What kind of production?”, to which I’d have to go into a long-winded explanation that well, we do tv production, but also web video, corporate video, and oh – yah, we develop web sites too, and do marketing…..

The problem I was having is that I could no longer easily sum up what I actually “do”. I was “doing” too many different things. Then the other day, it hit me. What I do is irrelevant. It’s a task list. It’s what I am that matters.

So what AM I? Simple. I’m a storyteller.

All day, every day, I’m telling stories. I’m telling them here, on my blog. I’m telling them in 140 character increments, on Twitter. I’m telling them when I meet my friends for drinks or coffee or dinner. And I’m helping my clients figure out how to tell their stories too, whether it’s through a new web site, a video, a TV show, a marketing campaign, or all of the above.

It’s all storytelling.

So how does this tie in to the notion that it’s not about the tools? Well, the fact that it’s really all about storytelling rather proves it, I think.

If what we’re all doing out here is telling stories (our own, our clients’, others’ -it doesn’t matter), then really, the tools become irrelevant. Sure, it’s important to know how to use the right tools, and use them the right way to ensure the story is told well. But the tools themselves are secondary. It’s the story that really matters.

When all’s said and done, it’s the story that people will remember – not what you used to tell it. I’m wondering if it’s time to reconsider how much effort we are spending talking about the tools themselves, and if perhaps we should be spending more effort figuring out what our story is and how we’re going to tell it.

Thoughts?

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