Metafluence

Crossover and trust

Last night I attended a Portland Social Media Club meeting at Weiden+Kennedy. It was lead by Marshall Kirkpartick and he interviewed a few cool folks: Tim Germer, Renny Gleeson, Audrey Eschright, and Benjamin Diggles. Whew, that was a ton of links.

The night was centered around problems and solutions in social media production. I think my biggest take-away from the event was about crossover. Crossover is when an emergent social medium hits the tipping point that takes it beyond geekspace and into the mainstream. Diggles put it harshly in his interview saying that a new technology, like Twitter, can have millions of users, but if they are only used by geeks, then your brand will “sail away to nerd island.” The truth is, he was totally on-point for mass marketing initiatives. Renny too mentioned that W+K researches the markets that a technology spans to determine the viability of advertising in a new medium, which was a diplomatic way of saying, “Are more than geeks using this thing?” Renny did point out that it all comes down to the target market and some spaces will work for one brand and not for another.

When Marshall asked Diggles about how he determines if a space makes sense for his brand, Diggles said he watches folks like myself to determine what is web 2.0 litter and what is gold.

It got me thinking.

I get very excited about a lot of emerging technology and I’m eager to encourage Nemo’s clients to experiment. However, if a new technology is tainted by the stigma that its users are not the ones a brand’s market finds cool, that can hurt a brand. It’s not until a technology rises from the hands of the geeks into the hands of the cool that it can be leveraged for non-geek brands. It poses an interesting problem, as Diggles pointed out, that many of these social tools are created by socially challenged developers. Socializing, whether online or off, is still socializing. So how does a social medium make the transition to mainstream?

It is deemed “cool” by the “in-crowd” influencers and then a larger community forms. Take MySpace, for example. MySpace was not the first in the social network space and technologically is was/is a POS. So why did it emerge as the social network of choice? It was because it started in L.A. fueled by parties in West Hollywood with the hottest socialites on the scene. As a result, all of the wannabes glommed on because the site had legitimacy from the original participants.

The moral of the story is that if you want you social media to make the crossover, it needs to be trusted, which you can only gain from the “in-crowd”. I talked about some of these concepts in my post about 9rules exploring how communities form.

I should also mention that the other interviewees had great things to say too.

I use the quotes around words that are relative. The “in-crowd” to one group, may be nerds to another.