Corporations, Communities and Responsibility

I just sat through most of a Ragan teleseminar about YouTube. It started out strong and then digressed into the friendly guys from Capstrat (the presenters) extending their Warhol-endowed fifteen minutes by talking about their amazing success story of getting an idea from a cool way to decorate their conference room wall all the way to a minute or two on Letterman one Monday evening.

I went in with high hopes, though I’m not sure why. Ragan seminars typically try to be something for everybody and, because of that, end up appealing to a low common denominator. I’m not saying the lowest because I always get a little out of it so obviously they occasionally venture into territory that’s above me, which frankly isn’t much of an altitude to achieve.

Anyway, most of the value of this seminar was restricted to the first half, before the moderator breathlessly asked them to “tell the Letterman story.” It was a good primer of YouTube and how businesses might use it. Perhaps my high hopes were most sustained by the presenters’ early emphasis on the idea that we can’t exploit the communities or the idea of viral campaigns.
Coming from the corporation that I do, I’m always afraid of being party to the next big Web 2.0 faux pas, where we try to force some viral campaign or respond in a real nasty way to some social media and it ends up on Boing Boing and Digg a million off-topic forums and blogs. “Look at these evil bastards,” they’ll say, and there goes me ever putting this job on a resumé.

I digress. Gotta stop doing that. Anyway, our presenters took the idea that marketers can’t exploit the viral a step further by actually stating that we have a responsibility to protect communities like YouTube. Perhaps it’s selfish, that we just need to protect them so they are still viable when we want to use them again, but whatever you have to say to get the point across, because social communities are important and only becoming more important, and that they can exist in a somewhat mainstream way while still exercising a great deal of sovereignty is a fragile phenomena.

And why are they a viable medium for communicators? Because it gives voice to people who are just like the people watching. And it’s been said many a time that people don’t trust advertising, they trust people that are like them.

I think Capstrat was right today when they said that these communities will not adapt to the marketers, it must be the other way around. But what if the marketers don’t adapt but keep hammering at the communities? They’ll flee. The Web is transient, and that topic didn’t come up today but it’s certainly something to consider when looking at the Google/YouTube deal. What’s to say all those people are going to stay there? I think they probably will for the most part, but YouTube won’t enjoy its disproportionate following for long, mark my words.

Then Capstrat departed into the “Letterman story” and I lost interest. I kept waiting for the punchline, the metric, the result, and they kept saying they achieved that result but it was merely more hits to their site (which I suppose is a good thing and not a bad result of a pretty cheap campaign) and awareness, which is not really not much of an objective at all. In any case, I couldn’t help watching the video of their Post-it project and wondering about how many potentially-billable hours all those people spent in time-elapse.

As Ragan hosts these seminars and as trade magazines have more cover stories about public relations and marketing in the Web 2.0 world, the unscrupulous or the merely confused will come out of the woodwork and there will be more horror stories about cease and desist letters and companies trying too hard to be funny and irreverent and only making themselves come off as pathetic, and ultimately, of companies trying to play the game while still controlling the message in all their old ways.