The end of top-down message control

For the corporate brand, online social media represent the end of top-down message control.

If media have gatekeepers, then messaging is a top-down event. To be heard, I have to make friends with gatekeepers. (In many markets/niches, that's not over. It's just not as powerful a channel as it once was.)

If media are democratically owned and accessed, then messaging is a 2-way conversation. That is the case in social media.

To get close to our customers in this 2-way conversation, we are going to have to assume that they are going to talk. We will not always sell more stuff during this conversation. We cannot control this conversation. It may not go where we want it to go.

But is this really different from the way it's always been? Conversation was always going on among our customers. It was going on in homes and bars and churches and schools and offices, where we couldn't hear it. We had to pay market researchers to extract a cross section of it and filter it into PowerPoint and data charts for us. We had 2-way glass and focus groups trying to hear those animal spirits in a lab setting.

The good news? Now we can hear what they are saying: faster, easier, and less expensively than listening has ever been. We can also respond faster, more relevantly, and more purposefully than ever.

Now, the group conversation influencing a B2B complex sale, especially at big companies, remains mostly invisible to outsiders. The CIO in the throes of an agonizing ERP implementation and the COO with a botched call center outsourcing program are not going to Twitter about it in real time. The risk of a big, tough decision is still spread across multiple stakeholder departments. Many people in the mix can still say "No" to a vendor even if they cannot greenlight the project itself. Social media won't bring me those dynamics. Gatekeepers are still with us.

However, an incredibly valuable stream of conversational chatter is available to an incredibly wide variety of companies. To which you can listen for free, participate openly, and influence more directly than ever. Here's a small but significant B2B example: Look how many professional industry analysts are on Twitter. Smart gatekeepers are mixing with this public conversation stream in order to stay relevant.

Will this new world of connectedness to our customers be more profitable than the old one-way world? Maybe. But this highly visible, faster-than-ever group conversation is here as long as Twitter and the other social media are around to host it.