exitcreative

I wrote this while in the bath yesterday after reading a passage in Colonialism/Postcolonialism (Loomba, 1998). I think there is more to the following thoughts, but this is what I’ve come up with so far. These are some of the things I thought about that got me to start writing:

1. Why social media is like colonialism
2. Why you should get yourself a goddamn case study
3. Why is all of this based on our lightly researched guesstimations about people
4. Jesus how could one agency make this work several times in a row

When I was going to college, I studied international relations. I studied nation-building, history, psychology, sociology and a host of other -ologies in the course of a multidisciplinary line of learning called “Diplomacy and World Affairs”.

Sounds interesting, right?

And completely unrelated to digital strategy, my current profession.

Well, it’s not that different, really.

I have been re-reading my texts from college over the past few months and a few themes have emerged.

Nation-building is and has always been incredibly F-ing difficult.
It’s just too hard for an outsider to come in and understand the ins-and-outs of a culture or civil society. When I was particularly disenchanted during senior year, I wrote my thesis about why we shouldn’t even try. It was a treatise in isolationism based on the idea that if you keep f*cking something up, you’re probably just bad at whatever it is you’re trying to do, and you should probably stop. (Here I’m referring to nation-building exacted by an outside force, not, for example, Singapore’s successful, independent melding of several different cultures after World War 2.)

Colonialism screwed things up for a whole bunch of people.
If you wanted to, you could attribute almost all the problems we face today–terrorism, etc.–to the colonial enterprise. What’s colonialism? Well, Ania Loomba would say it’s “the conquest and control of other people’s land and goods.” I’ll go with her on this one because she’s smart. I do not want to get into the results of colonialism here, but generally they were not great.

Us trying to market to people with social media seems a LOT like Colonialism
Most efforts to market things socially (whether they be the idea of a nation or the idea of a brand) involve a hegemonic force (the marketer) trying to commandeer the resources of a small society (on- or off-line, these are consumers). This sounds a lot like colonialism to me. We try, from our ivory tower, to figure out what “consumers” will like, or at least tolerate, and then we try to blast our messages out to them in the hopes they will be converted to our belief system. Sounds a lot like the efforts to convert African nations to Christian religions to me. Certainly not as problematic, but it illustrates a point.

Most efforts, no matter how well researched, fail.
Research does not mean understanding. The IMF and World Bank, in their incredibly well-researched efforts to help Lesotho, managed to flood the only useful land in a country of herders to produce a dam that would create electricity that would help industrialize the nation. It didn’t really work, at least the last time I checked. Despite our best efforts to do this right, we manage to fail miserably most of the time. And I don’t even think (as an industry) we have anywhere close to the data/research capabilities of an IMF or a World Bank.

We research, we plan, we create tactics and sometimes we even execute them flawlessly. So why do I think we fail most of the time? For one, it’s damn near impossible to find someone with a really good case study. Sure, there are some: Obama; Nike+; Zappos; Comcast Cares. (The first one is easy, but it’s based on a cause. And that last one is spurious. Ask anyone outside the community of web nerds if Comcast cares. Seriously.) Instead of those, show me a case study where social media worked, where an interactive application resulted in incremental profit, as Richard says. Seems to me it must be either (a) really hard to prove effectiveness or (b) that the people talking about “sharing” really aren’t that keen on the idea.

So we keep rehashing the same cases in every blog post, and keep making the same inane “predictions” about where social media is going in 2009.

Here’s a thought: people are going to keep talking to each other online. Good for you, guru. Here’s my prediction: by and large we’re still going to be bad at figuring out how to to talk to people.

It’s just like nation-building. Because it’s difficult and no-one knows how to do it. Things change drastically once you get troops on the ground, once your strategies start mixing with the realities of the network. It’s far easier to create a campaign with distinct, researched message points and beat people into submission. I feel like at a certain point, we should just admit that we shouldn’t be playing in people’s personal spaces, and we should stick to what we do best.

It worked for England. It worked for Portugal. Heck, it’s even worked pretty well for us.

Let’s keep it up?