Today, Mike Wesch connected our fairly insular industry to the larger world we inhabit.
Wesch, an anthropologist, gave an excellent and thought-provoking keynote address entitled “Our Mediated Culture, and What it Means for Marketers” at the Digital Marketing Forum. It would be impossible for me to adequately summarize his presentation, but interestingly, he barely mentioned “marketing.” The connections were that obvious.
Wesch drew the connection between the media and our sense of identity, both as a culture and individually. “We know ourselves through our relationships with others,” Wesch said. How we view ourselves isn’t innate, but reflected to use through our interactions with others. The advent of television and mass media played a massive role in our growing individualistic society. Yet, “the more individualistic we become, the more we crave community,” Wesch said. That concept is proven by how often we refresh our Facebook pages and long for re-tweets. It’s a search for connection with others and the need for validation for others.
Social media provides an unprecedented ability to connect and contribute, according to Wesch. Each of us, in our own small way, can take part in creating beauty or re-think our identity by interacting and collaborating with previously unreachable cultures.
Wesch threw down the gauntlet. Every day, we put content out into this new world, through tweets, Facebook pages, and blog posts (or even comments). How often do we question the overall value of our contributions? Better yet, do we question how we measure the value of our contributions? There’s nothing wrong with desiring Facebook “likes” or Twitter followers or NPS. These metrics have real practical value.
But in all our conversations about page views and unique visitors, we can lose sight of the big picture. Wesch brought that global view to our luncheon. Deep in the weeds of our daily work, we can forget that marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. With every click of the publish button, we should ask how we are contributing to our colleagues, our consumers, our friends, fans, and family.
Tags: Marketing, Social Media
I’ve attended MarketingProfs Forums in Boston, and I always so look forward
to the inspirational keynotes, which connect marketing to much larger business and life principles.
Whether it was Steven Johnson a couple years back, in Boston, likening Twitter to the 17 & 18th
century coffee house, or David Weinberger last spring, describing the properties of networks, on the
Internet, the keynotes often illustrate the connections, which are the best part of the social web.
I so wish I could have made the Houston forum, as I’m a big fan of Michael Wesch’s work, including the “A Vision of Students Today”
and “The Machine is Us/ing Us”. For this reason, I was especially grateful for the steady stream of updates, on Twitter, as well
as the recaps at My Daily Fix…
In particular, this keynote captures what I value so much about my MarketingProfs membership and forums…it’s
the larger, more intangible value, expressed in this post, as well as all the actionable advice MarketingProfs is known for…
In the end, the interaction & collaboration, and the connections highlighted in Mike Wesch’s keynote, are the framework for everything else,
and ultimately how we’ll all be measured, both on and off, the Social Web…
Thanks for sharing…
[...] anthropologist Michael Wesch’s brilliant take on our mediated culture (and the history of the words “whatever” and [...]