I was in Washington DC all last week talking to several agencies about new methods of communication and how to reach niche audiences in ways that perhaps the agency hasn't thought of before. Or... "how can we do something different than the same old Ad Council campaign?" Of course, there are so many things that we can suggest.
More about that in a second.
In a separate plot line, there are issues with "selling" social media (or new tools, period) to companies looking for new ideas. And even if they do want to go forward with a program utilizing these new tools, they often force their opinion on HOW they should be used. Most often, not appropriately. The toolsets are maturing, and just because you put up a Facebook page (fan page or otherwise) doesn't necessarily get to the point of HOW you used that resource. As Ash Patel of Yahoo! said:
"That ship has sailed, between MySpace and Facebook and Hi5 and Bebo and other reasons. Even with that, there are 1.2 billion people on the Internet, and only 150 million are using social networks. That's a lot of greenfield."
Now, let's tie in a third idea stream here so we can then bring this all together and get to the Spy stuff.
A technology reaches a critical milestone and is considered a success when people begin to use the tool for things the developers of the tool never imagined. This is a great marriage of creativity of the users fully understanding the potential of the technology and the developers of the tool creating enough flexibility in the tool to accommodate for these other uses.
So, back to the DC trip. In talking about creative uses and using the toolset beyond simply being in it, we were talking about moving beyond the profile page and looking harder at the event streams and other capabilities of the interactions in the tools. What comes next, I can neither confirm nor deny in case anyone of consequence is reading this :), but it was discussed how US spy networks were using a technology similar to Facebook to communicate and pass information and sensitive intel back and forth.
I found this of special note beyond the cool factor of spy vs. spy in the social networking realm, but how important the tools that allow for seamless communication are to sensitive projects and moving beyond the "poke" and the "send me a star wars figure" functionality that the clients we speak with will tend to gravitate towards in an effort to debunk Social Networking as a legitimate strategy in the overall program. To date, there are few other tools that allow the type of back and forth conversations with a multitude of people that is so important in campaigns.
So if trying to bring a Facebook (or other social networking strategy) to the table as part of an integrated campaign, and when faced with either a) the propensity to be satisfied with just a profile page, or b) the push-back of "it's just for kids," think about the crucial nature of foreign intelligence and the true power of conversation buried at the heart of the program. It may get you a second look at that social media proposal you have in front of your client.
Oh, and if "Curveball" starts following your Tweets...
More later....
