The Coming Social Media Train Wreck

Everybody likes a good train wreck.

Hopefully, of course, those where nobody gets hurt.

But when I was a kid, growing up in the sticks of north Texas, I'll never forget the first train wreck I stumbled upon.

Unfortunately, i didn't get to actually see the cars come crashing down off the railroad trestle.

But the aftermath was pretty powerful, in and of its own right.

Twisted steel, splintered and broken railroad ties, spilt cargo...it was awesome.

Of course, I'm sure Southern Pacific didn't agree, and heaven help them, it was a mess to clean up aftewards that took them weeks.

That's what I expect the coming social media train wreck is going to look like.

I've been here in Orlando at the Forrester Marketing Forum for several days now, and it's been fascinating to hear all the talk about social media amongst a largely traditional marketing crowd.

This, of course, ten years after I first read Cluetrain Manifesto and when the first glimmer of insight that this shift was already beginning to occur.

When I would tell colleagues about the book and about what was starting to happen, explaining that this was the future of marketing, they would look at me like I'd dropped in from another planet.

Maybe I had. But I also wonder now what their Twitter IDs are.

If you haven't read Cluetrain, and you want to be a social media practitioner who can help your business enter into the market conversation, run to your nearest bookstore and buy a copy.

Because context is everything.

When I first read the Cluetrain theses online, it made sense to me, particularly at the time, because I was starting to see the power and empowerment that the strength in connected numbers could bring.

The mass in mass media was going to be rendered increasingly impotent by the singularity of social media, the one-to-many equation would soon be equalled by the one-to-one.

Those who historically didn't have a voice soon would be able to, affordably and without prejudice.

The economics of scarcity (spectrum, channels, media outlets, high production costs) had been replaced by the economics of abundance (lower costs of bandwidth, storage, processing power, production tools, etc.)

Watching some of the traditional media and marketing entities, then, over these past couple of weeks jump onto the Twitter bandwagon has been downright amusing to me.

Not because they, like everybody else, shouldn't have the opportunity to tap into the social media.

No, rather, because so many of them seem to be missing the entire point.

Oprah and Ashton and so many others already have a voice.

This was never about a race to the million subscriber finish line.

It was about opening up a new way of communicating, between institution and individual, about evolving the monolithic top-down communication umbrella to a democratic megaphone.

Most importantly, though, it was about listening.

As the cluetrain.com website conveys to this day, where markets are conversations, "Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked."

For those attendees of the Forrester forum, as well as companies around the globe wrestling with their emerging lack of control of the market conversation going on about their business, rather than worrying about whether or not you're using Twitter, you might be better putting your efforts towards determining whether or not you have something to say, and someone intelligent and thoughtful and eager to listen to others to say it for you.

In other words, don't fake it.

Don't pretend.

Don't think just because you got a Twitter account or you put your company on Facebook that you suddenly get it.

No, those steps were only the beginning.

Now it's time to open the kimono a bit and actually tell us something.

Enlighten us.

Show us the smart people way down deep inside your organization and have them tell us something we don't yet know but should.

As Cluetrain went on to explain, "Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in."

This is what Doc Searls and Christopher Locke and Rick Levine and David Weinberger understood and communicated, and it's what the rest of us ought not forget (although evidently which some of us never learned).

I don't know about you, but I'm certainly ready for a new kind of market conversation, especially coming out of the Great Financial Collapse of 2008.

A little brutal honesty and transparency and sunshine and liberation of new and more truthful voices is something we could all stand about now.

But while I wait for it to emerge, I'm going to enjoy watching the great social media crash as so many jump on the bandwagon with little thought to where or why or how they got here.

Because everybody likes a good train wreck.