i find the synchronicity of elements that shape the development of culture as fascinating as its effects. like the random mutations of evolution that become brilliant adaptive advantages, there’s almost a kind of magic to these whimsical convergences of what retrospect makes appear like fate. a butterfly flaps its wings in the concrete jungle, and eventually the world world shifts on its axis.
but it’s not the bith of the hiphop industry that’s the exciting part. hiphop, the music meme of global dominating proportions, was incubated within the confines of a seven mile stretch of the bronx ghetto, and you best believe there wadn’t no tentalce of the recording industry naturally springing up in that desolate radius.
by the time rapper’s delight was recorded it was just a natural progression of the amplification of this butterfly’s roar that had already been underway. what’s really fascinating is what happened JUST before that step, what facilitated that next step, the first moves that hiphop rocked to break out of the gangland dance floor.
the fortunate cultural phenomenon that happened to have ended up at the right place at the right time, hiphop came of age parallel to the casette tape.
before that there was simply no way to record, redistribute, and replay recorded music as easily and cheaply ( waaait a second… that… sounds familiar for some reason?)
the first way that anyone outside of the bronx EVER discovered hiphop was, according to jeff chang, through:
“The live bootleg caseette tapes of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Flash, etc….. [that] were the sound of the OJ Cabs that took folks accross the city. The tapes passed hand-to-hand in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Queens and Long Island’s Black Belt. Kids in the boroughs were building sound systems and holding rap battles with the same fervor the Bronx one possessed all to itself.”
makes you wonder how many other musical and cultural styles must have come and gone, disappearing forever into the dust of disintegrating, discontinued vinyl, the momentum to expand them never able to get fulfilled, held back by the constraints of antiquated music technology, don’t it?
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more reaction to can’t stop won’t stop: HERE
starting this blog seems kinda like merging onto a freeway. one doesn’t just take a sharp left turn and blurt out some sort of doctoral thesis, rather it’s a continuous, gradual process of edging closer and closer to the main flow of traffic, with ideas expanding on ideas, expanding on ideas.
i’ve been tinkering with this draft for a while now, about what i’ve got to say on the way i see the value of social engagement marketing being discussed, which is, like, oh man, just a big monster of a topic that only seems to make the post more and more unwieldy the further i delve into it.
so, i think, rather than waiting until i’ve got the whole thing complete enough to just barrel at a 90-degree angle against oncoming traffic, i’m going to tackle a bit of the onramp–as i see it–at a time.
** curves ahead: **
please be forewarned — i am NOT an online media expert. i do NOT have any kind of technology background, and quite honestly i couldn’t do math to save my life. my perspective comes from almost a decade of producing events and experiences that bring hundreds and now thousdands of people together, and create a platform for interaction on some incredibly visceral levels. large-scale live event creation is sort of like a “control” running parallel to the online experience creation experiment, and there are a myriad ways in which each informs the other.
my perspective also comes from studying PEOPLE and SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, (there’s a reason this blog is called “social creature,” after all). if i was doing what i do in a rural village in africa, it would be called anthropology. in l.a., however, we call it marketing.
so…. with an understanding of THAT basic caveat in mind, here’s an initial attempt at getting on that bull that’s the discussion about “the value of social engagement marketing,” and seeing how long i can stay on and ride it.
myth #1:
THE INTERNET INVENTED SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT MARKETING
nope.
guess again.
before it was about pressing Enter, it was about pressing the flesh. before web 2.0 there were tupperware parties, door to door salesmen, and patent medicine shows. all of these involved the same exact elements as what’s currently referred to in such clinical terms as “social engagement marketing,” and its potency as a selling method was never in question. before advertising, in fact, this was the only method there WAS.
but though the internet didn’t invent it, it DID upgrade it. as the tools for generating and enhancing social interaction got way fancier (and also more removed from immediately physical interaction) they seem to have also made us confused. we now look at this whole process as if it’s some alien anomaly we’ve never encountered before, when the truth is that this process has been in existence for AGES. for, in fact, as long as human beings have known how to communicate.
Strong, E.K. (1925). “Theories of Selling”. Journal of Applied Psychology9: 75-86.
A lot of models are known in order to sell, e.g. the BOSCH-Formula, developed by Peter Hubert for the international sales training for consumer goods.
Offer solutions – talk about the endresult benefits for the customer
Stimulate the senses – let the customer test your product
Cross your sales – think of all the necessary accessories
Hit the closing point – sell when the customer is ready to buy
….ask open questions and offer solutions, stimulate the senses and think of all the necessary accessories. sounds a lot like “social engagement,” wouldn’t you say?
and all of this happening before the invention of media as we know it, let alone the application of social media.
before we go any further in this conversation (and i do hope to make this a conversation) about evaluating the “ROI of social engagement,” we must first take the follwing into account:
the internet does not exist in an easy vaccum.
the online measurement of the effectiveness of social engagement marketing is a PARTIAL measurement of the full social picture.
to measure the remainder of the social picture you will need a shitload of radio transmitters and a good number of soviet psychics. don’t worry, they’re on order, and will probably be a service package offered soon by these guys : http://www.mworks-inc.com/about.html
i believe that because the internet did not spawn either the concept or the application of “social engagement marketing” (only the terminology), nor did it eliminate all its prior forms, but rather ENHANCED them, it’s vital to recognize that any measurement of online social engagement will NOT be a measurement of its TOTAL effectiveness.
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thanks to the following folks for their insight, info, and sounding boards for this in one fashion or another:
there’s more to come on this, for sure, but if you’ve got any thoughts on this particular part of the onramp, feel free to use your turn signal in the comments.
my favorite part is where she goes, “you don’t know anything about me.”
and he says, “i know everything about you sweetheart!” and starts spouting off all sorts of demographic statistics. perfect case in point about the difference between knowing your demo (defined by the market), and understanding your user’s identity (defined by the user).
and speaking of identity…. i found it particularly curious that the creator of this video is european. if you know anything about the european stereotype of the “american male” (insensitive, egomaniacal, daft) it’s kind of hilarious to consider the role of the “advertiser” being based on that stereotype.
just saw a great bit by sarah dopp about the trend of an established company’s new community site campaign that involves an outdoor advertising strategy to drive traffic–case in point: reebok’s goruneasy.com that i already wrote about glowingly HERE.
what i find particularly interesting about this approach that’s being adopted not just by reebok, but starbucks as well (letsmeetatstarbucks.com), among what’s sure to be a coming slew of others, are the kind of pre-web 2.0 strategies–and their benefits–that are getting incorporated in this technique.
Billboard-to-web community-oriented marketing is being adapted with high visibility.
By sending people to a campaign-specific website, they can monitor their campaign’s site traffic ROI without any confusion.
we’ve been employing this tactic in concert promotion for ages. the simplest way to determine the effectiveness of any ad is to isolate an offer, for example, letting radio station X promote a particular kind of discount offer that no other outlet is pushing.
it’s incredibly interesting also to consider the significance of using outdoor media to promote a web 2.0 site of a consumer goods brand. this is the multi-platform kind of “meta-strategy” that i think is going to become the standard for a new kind of campaign. one that fuses the best of the old (it don’t get much older than billboards, yo) with the new, and in the processfuses engagement WITH awareness instead of relegating the two to their own separate ghettos.
you ever have that feeling that you’re living in the future? like you’re driving on these strange elevated chutes, and whether or not to have kids is now a choice, and you have no need to think about WHERE food comes from, it just generally appears at the beckoning of a shopping cart.
it’s pretty strange, all this is.
all this that you take for granted because you’ve just never known any different, but every so often something will jolt you out of this haze of taking-for-grantability. it happened to me the other day in the checkout line at bed bath and beyond. there were a couple of people in front of me, so i had time to actually notice what was going on as i waited. standing on the checkout counter, just to the left of the cashier was was a 12-inch flat plasma-screen TV, and it was playing a scene from one of those “relaxing” dvd compilations that were on sale in the impulse-buy section of the store right below the counter. it was a scene of tropical fish swimming around a reef. it was uncanny how much the 2-d fish looked like they could be real life, non-pixel based lifeforms just swimming around inside the frame of this plasma fishtank as cashiers made change, and customers sighed in line.
the thought ocurred to me: this is what the future looks like. or rather… this is what the future was going to look like. it was as if i’d experienced a vision of this moment in the past, before it happened, and was now living through its fulfillment. like…future de ja vu.
i think about that as i watch these crazy videos my friends keep shoving at me:
looking backwards, from the future where every surface has become a computer, and every photo anyone has ever taken is part of wiki-map of the universe, on today’s present, it already feels like we’re living through the dark ages right now.
which, of course, raises that inevitable question as old as the concept of time itself: when the future arrives, are you going to be glad you made it through, or not so much?
i mean, for the people born then it won’t matter. they won’t know any different. like how my generation doesn’t know a concept of sex without aids being attached to it somehow. i bet the older generations pity how much worse it is for us, but since we don’t really have anything else to compare it to, it’s just all we know.
i feel like i’m already starting to pity younger generations.
like…. how for kids that were too young to be in high school when tupac was shot, they don’t really have the same understanding when you say “hip hop” to them that older generations do. and that already includes mine!
explaining to them what hiphop used to be like is like explaining how michael jackson used to be black. which is, of course, another big one all unto itself.
i think porn is probably the biggest point of lament. like what’s happened in the course of porn going from hidden and inaccessible to mainstream and expected. i remember reading a statistic somewhere that it’s like 7 out of 10 elementary school kids have already seen graphic porn on the internet when they weren’t even looking for it. whatever that must mean in terms of the kind of inescapable message that’s being passed along to kids about the expected standard for sexual behavior is kinda disheartening.
food is a huge one too. from obesity to anorexia we have more disorders around food now than ever before. either we don’t think about what we’re eating enough, or we obsessively overthink it–is this the consequence of not having to think about getting it in the first place?
and while we’re on the topic of overthinking things, there’s of course that little narcissism epidemic thing. the rise of the creative class is, of course, not doing any of us any favors here, since narcissism is a side effect of self expression, unfortunately.
there’s openmindedness, i guess. we’re definitely getting exposed to a greater assortment of lifestyles than an average person would have been able to encounter before, and it’s making us more tolerant as we come to realize that our default, may not be the universal default we thought it was. a none too shabby outcome of the world getting all smaller and way too crowded like.
but it’s interesting, you know… we’re openminded…. yet no more empathic than ever before.
i wonder how that happened…
maybe openmindedness is a “nurture” thing…. but empathy is a nature one? requiring actual genetic change vs. cultural? we “know” we shouldn’t do bad stuff to people over there, but it’s not like we are more prone to feel bad if we do. (in fact, all these horrifyingly gruesome movies about torture and mutilation oozing out of hollywood these days only seem to indicate we may be getting a greater kick out of it than ever). the real issue is that the proximity of “over there” is getting increasingly closer and closer to us, so in effect, our restraint is still just us thinking about OUR own asses.
jeez… this is making me depressed…
the only good change i can even think of is in terms of sustainability. here’s a concept that was barely even in the common dialogue just a few years ago, and now it’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue. finally, environmental consciousness has been emancipated from the hippie ball-and-chain, so now it can actually be hip for EVERYONE to care about sustainability instead of just the counterculturals.
but this one good bit of future de ja vu, isn’t enough. i’m still pretty heartbroken about the whole michael jackson becoming white thing.
