Category: ideas

Of brochures and bike racks

A long time ago, during my days as a newspaper reporter, one evening I struck up a conversation with a city administrator who was bemoaning one of the challenges of his office.

This conversation followed a city council meeting that had featured a spirited debate about the purchase of a new pickup truck for the public works department. The discussion devolved into a sharing of opinions on the merits of one brand or model of truck over another, or a third or fourth brand or model. The discussion had gotten out of hand, and the business of awarding the bid had taken much longer than it should have.

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Earlier in the meeting, however, a motion to fund an upgrade to the city’s sewer system, at a cost well into the six figures, passed with little discussion and even less debate.

All of which caused the city administration to say something along the lines of: “We can spend a million dollars of taxpayer money on a sewer project without batting an eye. But when it comes to buying a truck, everybody’s an expert.”

I was reminded of this exchange recently while reading Avoiding The Bike Rack Effect in Meetings, by Tomasz Tungus. (Thanks to Beth Cudney for sharing a link to Tungus’ post via Twitter.)

Tungus’ “bike rack effect” operates on the same principle as my former city administrator friend’s “pickup effect.” City council discussions about bike rack purchases (in bicycle-friendly communities, anyway) bear a lot of resemblance to the truck discussion I related above. (The truck discussion occurred in a community that, at the time, was more pickup-friendly than bicycle-friendly. A bike rack debate, in those days and in that community, would never have occurred.)

“The bike rack … is tangible,” Tungus writes. “Each member has used a bike rack, and an opinion on which type is the best. In addition, the money at stake rests within a typical person’s spending. So, everyone involved wants to inject their point of view and derive satisfaction from having added value. The discussion drags on and the majority of the meeting time is spent on a relatively trivial topic.”

After reading the article, I shared Beth Cudney’s link myself and added that in our realm, this could be called “the brochure effect.”

Or it could be called the website effect. Everybody’s received a brochure, and everybody’s used the web, so everybody’s an expert and has an opinion on how to make one. So, whenever marketing of a major event is discussed in a meeting, you’re bound to get a lot of opinions from a lot of people who like to discuss what the brochure or website should look like because those communication vehicles, like the bike rack and the pickup, are tangible and familiar. There is discussion on font size, photography, logo placement, links, QR codes, everything but the communications goals. (I’m sure event planners have their own version. There’s probably the “menu effect,” because everybody knows which vegetable goes best with which main course, or which wines pair best with lamb, etc. And fundraisers probably deal with the “scholarship effect,” because so many potential donors received scholarships or had children who did or didn’t.)

Trying to steer meeting participants toward discussing actual communication, branding or marketing goals and strategies can be a lot like getting the city council to discuss a multi-million dollar power plant or six-figure sewer system. These ideas are too complex or too large in scope to grasp.

It’s hard work trying to define an audience and the objectives of communications to that audience. But, to stretch the sewer system analogy too far, without a communications strategy to channel all of that effort, you could end up with a big mess.

What is the ‘media’ of social media?

Is this what social media looks like?
Is this what social media looks like?

Sometimes we become so immersed in a thing that we can’t distance ourselves from it enough to think critically about it. Like air. It’s all around us, and unless something happens to disrupt its usual quality, we rarely give it much thought.

And then sometimes we can’t think critically about a thing because we bring our own biases and pre-conceived ways of thinking about the thing that we can’t fathom any other perspective.

For those of us who work in social media, we probably don’t understand this thing as well as we could, and for a combination of the two reasons I mention above. First, we’re too immersed in our social media work to view it with much detachment. Second, and we filter our understanding of it through our own biases or the requirements of our job on how we use it. If I’m a marketer, for example, then my marketing background is going to affect how I view social media.

Viewing through a different lens

Lately I’ve been thinking more about our understanding of social media — or our lack of understanding — because of something I read in the early pages of John Naughton’s book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet.

By comparing the communications revolution spawned by the Internet to that which arose from Gutenberg’s printing press some 550-plus years ago, Naughton — a British academic,  blogger and tech columnist — draws some interesting parallels. But first, he provides some context about how to think about the Internet and all its trappings. At one point, he suggests that some of us may be viewing this thing called social media through the wrong lens.

Like many of you, I have a background in communications — in my case, journalism. Whenever journalists, marketers, strategic communicators and others with similar academic and vocational backgrounds think about a “medium,” the singular of media, we tend to think about a conduit of information. Television is one medium of communication. A newspaper is another.

“The conventional — journalistic — interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something,” writes Naughton.

That’s how I typically think of social media: as a carrier of information. That’s how I was trained to think of any sort of media, social or otherwise.

A global Petri dish?

But as Naughton points out, a biologist may offer a different perspective on the word.

In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures — living organisms. … It seems to me that this is a useful metaphor for thinking about human society; it portrays our social system as a living organism that depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop.

Perhaps that’s what this thing we call social media is. Maybe it’s more than just a communications conduit — more than a “series of tubes,” as one out-of-touch politician put it many years ago.

Maybe it’s a type of global, interconnected Petri dish that provides the digital nutrients our interconnected world needs to sustain the increasingly complex, interdependent and internetworked social systems.

And because we’re all immersed in this giant Petri dish, we can’t fully understand its impact — no more than a jellyfish could comprehend how it and seaweed both thrive in the waters of the sea.

This brings me to the question I’m grappling with: If we were to start thinking of social media more as an ecosystem and less as a carrier of information, how would that change our approaches — vocational and personal — to social media?