Social Media for Everyday Life

Lately it seems there’s been an upsurge in nay-sayers against social media and the peo­ple who are hea­vily invol­ved in the social media space. The gene­ral con­sen­sus is that peo­ple are sick of hea­ring the term “social media guru”, or other rela­ted terms.

Let’s Not Get Butthurt

Now, first of all “guru” isn’t much of an offi­cial title any­way, so lets not get butthurt about someone who calls them­sel­ves such a thing any­way. And secondly, it seems to me seve­ral of the posts that I have read whi­ning about this phe­no­me­non are writ­ten by peo­ple who would likely be clas­si­fied in the same cate­go­ries as such “guru’s”.  Of course, there are many peo­ple whom I highly res­pect that are highly talen­ted when it comes to the whole social media game, you can find them in my blo­groll. But this isn’t why I’m writing.

3 Types of Peo­ple — Con­nec­tors, Mavens & Salesmen

I think we all need to remem­ber a few things about social groups and mar­ke­ting. In The Tip­ping Point, Mal­colm Glad­well talks about the con­cept that there are 3 types of peo­ple: Con­nec­tors, Mavens & Sales­men. I’m going to assume that you’re fami­liar with the con­cept with these types of peo­ple. But in a brief desc­rip­tion, Con­nec­tors are the types of peo­ple who know lots of other peo­ple, Mavens are the peo­ple who have lots of infor­ma­tion, and Sales­men are the types of peo­ple who are persuasive.

We Rely on All of These People

In social media, we have and rely on all of these types of peo­ple and/or con­cepts. The con­nec­tors are the peo­ple that have 30,000 follo­wers on twit­ter who can broad­cast a mes­sage that ever­yone will end up seeing. The mavens are the 5 million visi­tors on red­dit that keep the con­tent fresh and honest. And the sales­men are some­ti­mes the stars of our belo­ved you­tube videos, or some­ti­mes the mag­ne­tic head­li­nes that we can’t deny a click.

It’s One Big Community

The thing is, these con­cepts apply to mar­ke­ting, epi­de­mics, social media, social groups, and pro­bably a lot of other things. We all fell in love with social media a few years ago because it was new and dif­fe­rent, and you didn’t have to be a “some­body” to play. And I would ven­ture to say that many of us called our­sel­ves a “guru” or an “expert” at one time or another. It may not be the case today, but such wis­dom comes with matu­rity as we have all weathe­red a few storms in this ever evol­ving world of social mar­ke­ting. The fact is, even though it is “social” media that we’re dis­cus­sing, we still rely on a few key com­po­nents. If we didn’t have the con­nec­tors that could spread the word, no one’s mes­sage would get out. If we didn’t have the mavens to vote us up, check the facts and leave com­ments, we’d have no audience. And if we didn’t have the sales­men to sell the mes­sage, entice the clicks, and drive the vie­wers, well no one would be inte­res­ted at all. So really, in a sense, we’re all guru’s with our own parts to play in this gigan­tic social com­mu­nity on the web. And that’s how it’s going to con­ti­nue to be, and that’s how it has to be. We all rely on each other whether directly or indi­rectly. Let’s not sweat the small stuff.

So I guess the only ques­tion is, what’s your part?

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