Last week in my column, I wrote about how I had resisted the first few (hundred? thousand?) tags from friends on Facebook who were writing their version of 25 Random Things. I wrote that, eventually, I broke down and wrote mine too, because I had been really entertained and even moved by both the things people had written, and the ways they had approached their lists.
Today, I read that Facebook seems to have benefitted from that little meme. I am, by profession, a marketer, and when marketers see people gathering, their first inclination is to figure out how to leverage that community. How can I use Facebook for my clients? How can my clients grow their businesses using Twitter?
Some of my colleagues want to turn social networks into new media versions of old media platforms.
Here is why that won’t work: Old media is where I escaped from real life to watch “Friends.” New media is where I connect with my real life and real friends. For the most part, when marketers try to use inherently social tools (such as the telephone) to conduct interuption-marketing campaigns (such as telemarketing), they’re not so successful in creating big brand enthusiasts.
Silly memes aside, let me share a story about how I’ve used Facebook and Twitter in the past couple weeks.
Not long ago, a bunch of my smart, entrepreneurial-minded friends back in Florida got together for coffee and mutual support. One of those friends is like a sister to me, and we are connected always by phone and email and – now, because it’s so easy, Facebook.
After those smart cookies met, one of our mutual friends connected with me on Facebook. This is just one of countless people whom I adore, but whose friendship would have fallen away if maintaining it were more difficult that entering my email and password into the Facebook log-in page. I am nototiously lazy/busy/a mom that way.
After catching up with her on what we’ve each been doing the past couple years, I realized that she has started working for two other long-lost friends – Kimberly and Denise. I found them on Facebook and Twitter and re-connected in the usual nutshell ways.
These stories are so common. Connecting with people from high school or with colleagues from three jobs ago. They’re cool, but hardly remarkable.
Then, one day last week, Kimberly sent me a direct message on Twitter asking me about what kind of cancer I had almost five years ago, because her 15-year-old daughter was scheduled to undergo a biopsy for a lymph node growth that, according to one doctor, had about a 50/50 chance of being Hodgkin’s disease.
My reply required more than 140 characters, so I sent her a message on Facebook.
For days before her daughter’s biopsy, Kimberly sent out updates and messages via Twitter to her friends. The day of her daughter’s surgery, I used Twitter to convey my encouragemen, prayers and well-wishes. She used Twitter to thank me. She also posted a photo of her daughter, IV in place, modeling her swank hospital gown. I have not seen this child since she was probably 4 or 5, but as soon as I saw that photo, I connected with the feeling that there is little to do in such situations but to find something to laugh about.
Yesterday evening, Kimberly confirmed to her friends on Twitter what they had feared: It’s Hodgkin’s. There will be appointments with oncologists, tests and more tests. She will keep us posted.
This is how I use Twitter. I use it to get updates from the hospital waiting room. I use it to see a photo taken just hours before friends’ lives changed forever. I use it to send a flock of prayers to friends who are terrified of losing their child.
If you’re going to put your brand here, you better bring your A Game and you better deliver something powerful.