I attended IPAsocial last week.
As a recent graduate, and someone who doesn't even work in advertising I should probably have known better than to tweet a suggestion for a break-out talk during the second half of the evening.
But listening to the other subjects that came up, I do think there's some space in the debate for a consideration of the aesthetics of what we're all doing at the moment, whether we're working in straight up advertising or in a more productiony / content kind of place like public zone. The title I suggested was "what does social look like?"
I didn't really manage to talk about this much, but elsewhere there was a discussion on how clients could be convinced, and why they might be sceptical about using social media. There was also a lot of discussion on the more anthropological aspects of behaviour and imitation. You can read a lot more on the IPAsocial page
From my experiences so far, I'm not sure there are many sceptical clients. For me, it's been quite the opposite - nearly every project I've seen recently has had social media and engagement as part of the brief. They're all public service and voluntary projects, which might offer some rationale, but my feeling is that it's probably the same in commercial-land too. At least at the beginning of campaign discussions, people seem to be rushing to 'use' social media right now. I do feel it's widely accepted that it is changing the way brands and organisations need to operate, even though Will has raised some concerns that ultimately I do agree with.
My own concern is the speed that the transition to conversational marketing is taking place. The way that it's occurred within the lifespan of one visual trend; the Web 2.0 world of glossy rounded corners, big search bars and clean lines.
There's nothing wrong with these things, but I think it's going to put half-baked social media campaigns in a precarious position over the coming months and years.
What I mean by that is that right now it's kind of ok to have a website screaming "share this!"... "add this!"... "tweet this!"... "facebook!", but this won't last for ever — It's always been the case that it's the ideas being conveyed that need to be social themselves to gain momentum and spread. So I'm worried that as clients come to the end of their transitions to adopting these new techniques, or at least thinking they have, their audiences will be on the way to turning off from the generic iconography and aesthetic that's been shouted at them for so long. People get bored.
Of course this transition won't be a one off thing, it will need to continually re-invent itself as new platforms and trends emerge. But there will be no point if people have got fed up with listening. And I think that for that to happen, we need to be very careful in the short term not to push 'social' into people's eyes. People know they can share, they have the tools to do it. Let's spend our time worrying about giving them things to talk about rather than whether they should or not.
Which kind of ties quite nicely back into Will's notion of brands just being good at what they do. As well as the 'technology changes, people don't' principle that Amelia wrote about a few weeks ago.
Yes.
