I had a long conversation with Hugh McLeod to help figure out what the heck I’m doing on the ‘social’ bit I introduced yesterday. I wanted to figure how the conversation in the last post could be taken forward and with that in mind I’m sharing my thoughts about how this works in the professional context. Hugh was gracious enough to help me keep it simple.
If social accounting is going to mean anything then it needs to have a social object around which the community can gather, share ideas and handle their issues. This sounds nuts until you read what this means. Seth Godin who has been preaching edge marketing for more years than most quotes Hugh:
You make what my friend Hugh MacLeod calls “social objects”—things that people want to talk about. That’s what the iPhone is. People say the iPhone was superhyped, but Apple didn’t hype it. People hyped it to each other. The challenge is not “How do I spend $50 million on advertising?” The challenge is “How do I spend $50 million on product development, so I can make a product people will talk about?”
In the past, this would have been a closed forum to which only paying customers gain access. We don’t think that makes sense. Taking a leaf out of Seesmic‘s open community playbook, we’re starting to develop a set of social objects around which customers can meet.
GetSatisfaction is one, DailyMotion is another, where we’ll post videos about what’s happening. Anyone can join these groups, ask questions, raise queries, give their points of view. They are the (current) objects around which people are talking about FreeAgent. And we don’t want any barriers to their being able to do that. It’s way beyond blogs. As we get ready to go international, this gets to be really important because we’re going to find ourselves facing all sorts of issues we can’t imagine right now.
The video at the top? It talks about trust and how you have to build it. It’s by Loic LeMeur and was made on a recent visit to Stanford University campus. Loic’s another friend who is super smart.
So here’s the interesting bit from the professional perspective. Check out Stuart’s comment. Interesting?
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