Starting a Social Media Forum and How Money Talk is an Ice Breaker
A Realization
On November 25th of last year, I was struck by the sudden realization that in Japan social media as a marketing discipline was under represented through an online or offline community forum. There has been an active Web 2.0 event called Tokyo2Point0 started by Andrew Shuttleworth that has been going on for about 2 years now but I had the sense that it was focused on Web 2.0 as a whole and often revolved around showcasing local startups and tech gurus. Marketing, advertising and PR being transformed by new media, while brimming over in the US with the deluge of "social media experts", in Japan looked (and still looks) like unknown frontier. That isn't to say Japan doesn't have an amazingly active social web with all the blogging, SNS, social shopping and passion-based communities. But where were the success stories of corporations reaching out to embrace the so-called "groundswell" as a proper strategy? And where was the dialog about that?
A Community was Born
And so, I headed over to Ning and named my little community Japan Social Media Marketers (http://japansocialmediamarketers.ning.com), an admittedly long and hard to remember name. But I just HAD to keep all the words in the name to make it make clear sense, especially the combo of social media AND marketing was key for attracting a new breed of expert than the usual developers and techheads. I wanted the marketers, the ad guys, the PR gals and the strategists. However, this new breed I imagined had to be searching for a new tool and a new way of connecting to customers. At least that's the sort I was interested in talking to.
A Sad Beginning
So yet another community was born and it bumbled along with mainly myself posting blog entries and the occasional discussion thread that mainly I responded to myself. It was pretty lonely and it was a lot like every blog I started and stopped over the years. Then a really cool Japanese PR man named Kiyoshi Terada, ironically living in Oregon, jumped aboard and became my one and only pen pal for a good month and a half as we parried viewpoints back and forth about the differences of social media in the US and Japan, what makes Japanese Tweets uniquely intimate, etc. It was like having a two person blog that only the two of us read. At the same time, the members of JSMM slowly grew to 30+ (with the help of a link from Tokyo2Point0) and I welcomed each new member with exuberance and goofy photos from Flickr. "Jump in!" I typed at least 40 different times but got very few takers. I then tried some topics that I thought would grab some attention like "Your suckiest client" and "Passion-Based Niches on the Rise in Japan" (a catchy name, I know). But still no go. It was looking like I may have overestimated the need for this sort of thing in Japan.
Monetize Me, Baby
Then during the holidays I began receiving messages from a few guys in the media industry that had found me through the community. It turns out that if you Google "social media Japan" JSMM was close to the top and I had this neat "first-mover advantage", at least it felt like what my MBA teachers are always talking about. The word "monetization" was used several times in our community wall posts and emails and it suddenly dawned on me that that may be the hook I was looking for! I quickly stabbed out the inspired discussion title "So how are we going to monetize social media anyway?", wrote a few sentences of provokation, and waited...within a few hours two then four then seven people who hardly made their presence known before began to respond to the question with thoughtful, multi-paragraph answers! It was sort of like moths being attracted to a flashlight out in the woods where you haven't seen anything living in a long time. It became crystal clear that up until that moment people were simply not interested in expending energy on esoterics about social media marketing. They wanted to talk about how to make money from it, plain and simple. In times like these with the economy in the throws of death, people are more pragmatic than ever before. Sadly it isn't about the coolness of social media anymore. But gladly people are enthusiastic to find out how to make it a business with these cool tools.
But then I'm gripped with a sudden suspicious fear: "Am I giving all this information and community away for free?" Oh boy, when did I get so paranoid schizophrenic?! It must have been when I started mixing my newly acquired MBA learnings with my social media work.
Lesson learned: money talks.
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socialmediawiz: Lance Shields: Starting a Social Media Forum and How Money Talk is an Ice Breaker (via FriendFeed) http://tinyurl.com/9ab87r 01/19/09 10:54pm
papadimitriou: RT @lancesh: Starting a Social Media Forum & How Talk About Money Heats It Up http://tinyurl.com/9ab87r 01/19/09 10:08pm
lancesh: Starting a Social Media Forum & How Talk About Money Heats It Up http://tinyurl.com/9ab87r 01/19/09 10:00pm
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