The key to social media success – think small!

Posted by Evan Kraus

Sitting at the Conference Board’s meeting on Web 2.0 and listening to the various presentations, I feel like most corporate communicators are still missing the point.  The debates about Twitter versus blogs versus Facebook were predictable, but most here acknowledge at this stage that tools are the wrong place to start.

But even the expert speakers at this conference are still talking about launching or entering communities with the goal of targeting huge market segments like “small businesses,” or “millennials,” or “consumers in Peru,” or “our employees.”  That’s the big miss.

The most successful case studies discussed here are the ones that focused on very small, highly discrete communities online.  Like parents of adoptive children from China.  Or activists focused on improving rates of recycling of bottled water bottles.  Or consumers “in love” with Zappos shoes. 

Social media is fundamentally about these small communities of shared interests.

So let’s all make a commitment to thinking about these communities the way they are, rather than trying to shoehorn them into the comfortable demographic segments on which communicators like to rely.  Everyone agree?