I love the critical note – the nail on the head!

Facebook, in my opinion, is primarily about relationships. As a retailer you can NOT go for short term gains, especially low-margin products, and try to force your products on existing social networks without UNDERSTANDING what are the driving forces behind the network. There are platforms designed to bring people together that want to buy a certain product, where retailers offer a product to this group at a discount since more people are buying it at once.

In what business you are, ANY business: you should be in the relationship-building business! If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business! A great example is Rotterdam’s LokalHeroz, @LokalHeroz (Twitter), he has build relationships with most of his clientèle which has earned him a steady customer base. BIG lessons to learn in his story!

Want to make your product available to a certain network, pivot your business model or approach!

Cheers – awesome post!
Stefanos

To answer your question: I’m very curious what you think about how to encourage participation and also if ‘lurkers’ matter, and what their influence on the experience is. But maybe what will interest me most is insights and conversation about designing for converging tech and ‘brick-and-mortar’, because I think we’re in that stage now, where the newness of the techie toys is a bit over, and everything starts to merge and blend.

Remedy? Other than “shut up and don’t bother other people”, I don’t think there is one. NB I’m not talking about business and life-saving stuff, I’m complaining about other people’s private stuff that is none of my business and would be regarded as intrusion if I were to originate it myself.

BTW the medium is irrelevant, apart from making it easy to blabber to more people.

First of all this echoes how web design was treated in the beginning (as in the last millenium) ; It was focussed on whether you could BUILD a website rather than create/design an enjoyable experience for the user; it was focussing on the practical nuts and bolts without asking “why are we doing this and who are we doing it for?”

Bringing the conversation back to now it reminds me of a 6 Pixels of Separation podcast where Mitch Joel raised the curious conundrum that often those that are loudest in the social media sphere are not the ones that have the expertise and experience. In effect they are Super Users, but can’t necessarily do the same in an effective manner for clients with different needs and a different audience.

In Denmark there is a saying ” Tomme tønder buldrer mest” which translates to “Big empty barrels make the most noise” which covers this conundrum.

A competence can be that one is able drive adoption for certain types of platforms

what exactlty is the job of a Social Media expert. (It might be too early to say its a real job)

Can we say that Social Media expert is able to pull the right kind of crowd for his/her employers.