Using Social Media to Build Meaningful Relationships
Based on Authenticity, Character and Integrity<

I worked at Heavy.com years ago.  We still have Heavy reunions.  They had beer Fridays, a young corporate culture, sponsored events like private concerts with MiniKiss, the miniature Kiss cover band, and it was a fun place to work.

There was no such thing as social media, we did what intuitively made sense and went with our instincts.  I miss that.  I miss having fun with technology, stuff like:

• Chat rooms and posting widgets, choosing songs for my player and custom profiles, and all the fun stuff on MySpace before they lost a handle on SPAM.
• Facebook applications, most of which never did anything, but they were fun to play with for longer than the average person’s attention span.
• Watching videos that made me laugh, and not thinking twice if they were created by some advertiser, because videos were fun and most brands didn’t have the guts to make content that might go “viral.”

I miss social sharing before it became SOCIAL MEDIA, before companies had to throw money around because of the sheer volume of people who are “social” online.  Before there were 10 million experts writing about it.  Before there were 20 million people who want YOU to promote their content because they want to be a star.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SOCIAL PART OF SOCIAL MEDIA – SOCIAL, AS IN, FUN?

I’ve worked in social media for years.  Before it was a discipline.  I know how to develop content strategies, to engage and build communities.  I can talk the talk – engagement, metrics, Return on Investment (ROI), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – it’s my job, and I’m damn good at driving real results for clients.  I also use social media daily – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, I read blogs and write one, etc.

But I miss the fun.  I miss content that just made me laugh.  I miss self-indulgent entertainment value.  I miss social sharing before it had to have a purpose.  When it was enough to be creative, without having to be quantifiable. Social sharing helped forge communities that fostered self-expression because the goal was to do something interesting and fun.

Best analogy might be in my friend Rodney’s recent comment on Facebook, I’ll explain below:

IT’S ABOUT BEING SOCIAL, NOT ABOUT QUANTIFYING THE END RESULT

The rise of SOCIAL MEDIA has led to a deluge of experts on the subject and billions of dollars from corporate interests, resulting in a booming industry focused on how to connect brands with consumers in meaningful but ultimately quantifiable ways.  Meanwhile, the masses of people using social media have led technology developers to transform them from platforms of self-expression into conduits of information publishing.

People are quick to dismiss SOCIAL MEDIA users as narcissistic in the same way as they dismiss young kids as hipsters.  Doing so misses the point that we are increasingly narrowing the range of possibilities to be creative – or simply, to have fun – and overall the focus on engagement and end results stunts the growth of things like talent or innovation.

AUTO-TUNE OR AUTO PILOT?  WILL SOCIAL MEDIA KILL OUR SOCIAL SKILLS?

I was a punk rock kid growing up.  I had mixed feelings when Nirvana became huge because I was worried that mass adoption would kill punk rock.  I was and still am a huge electronic music fan, but the high fees of touring artists make some of them only accessible at large venues that lack intimacy and impact the overall experience of the performance.

I can live with that.  What concerns me, however, is that the change in the content quality across social media is having a similar impact upon how we communicate.  That we’re becoming more information obsessed, and somehow less social, and by less social I mean genuinely less interested in the fun times had when people come together.

I saw for the first time last night the remake of “We Are The World.”  What struck me about the song was the use of the auto-tune device on vocals, first championed by Cher’s song Believe.  There have been so many remakes of things from my childhood, such as Transformers, GI Joe, Nightmare on Elm Street, Where the Wild Things Are, but one question came to mind – are there enough celebrities who can actually sing to do vocals for a short song?

There might not be.  We’ve auto-tuned our vocals to reduce talent into screaming through a machine.  What might happen to our social skills through using social media?

We are the world, and we can also change it.  We can make it fun again. Like the Japanese did when they recorded their own tribute:

Cartoon above care of:
toothpastefordinner.com