Authenticity in Social Media: Scalable Intimacy

Authen­tic­ity in Social Media : Scal­able Inti­macy.

Just caught a nice post at Michael Troiano’S Scal­able inti­macy blog. He was observ­ing the effect of authen­tic­ity in social media, tak­ing the suc­cess of pun­dits and lumi­nar­ies as a barom­e­ter. And, appro­pri­ately, won­der­ing how this might scale for brands.

For me, authen­tic­ity is the answer. Authen­tic­ity is the foun­da­tion of con­sis­tent com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and of sus­tain­able enthu­si­asm. It’s what we all crave and respond to. It is the fuel of fol­low­ship, in ways vis­i­ble and not.

He points out that Chris Bro­gan is a nat­ural helper–in real life and in the dig­i­tal world. Laura Fit­ton is strong on rela­tion­ships and empa­thy comes through.

I’m with him on how having some­thing peo­ple can use and shar­ing it pas­sion­ately can be infec­tious. Vale­ria Mal­toni is a nat­ural con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist. She con­verses. Peo­ple are touched.

In terms of where this is going for brands, well it’s not pretty. Loren Feld­man may be able to embrace his inner ass­hole, but P&Gs share­hold­ers don’t want to think about prod­ucts made by tiny hands in far away places, man­u­fac­tured and shipped here at the expense of the envi­ron­ment all so Wal­mart can sell us shit adver­tis­ers have to invent needs for.

And sure AG Lafley gets it, but authen­tic­ity isn’t a brush you pol­ish turds with, so I don’t see a sus­tain­able future for brands whose prod­ucts suck at the core. Not in their cur­rent form any­way. They can co-opt val­ues and serve a com­mu­nity as a cam­paign strat­egy, à la Dove’s Cam­paign for Real Beauty, but if they “got it”, it wouldn’t be a cam­paign, but a commitment.

They’d set up a house in that com­mu­nity, estab­lish them­selves as lead­ers, and lead. Make their mar­ket­ing about mov­ing the nee­dle on an issue that mat­ters. Make their met­rics about sta­tis­tics related to the issue they’re addressing.

But that’s a long tail play and the met­rics they’re respon­si­ble for now are part of a quar­terly returns sys­tems that has them turn a cool, impor­tant and well exe­cuted idea like Real Beauty into some shit about spas. My wife can tell you more–I stopped pay­ing atten­tion the sec­ond they stopped doing shit that matters.

What was the ques­tion? Oh yeah. After mak­ing the point that great art reveals the artists nature:

“That’s why most hip-hop is crap, and Jay-Z is an artist”

he says he’s still peel­ing the onion on what this means for brands.

When he gets to the heart of the onion, I think he’ll find that authen­tic­ity only works long term if it goes to the core. Most bloated brands have no soul at that core. There are a lot of cards you can play at and play out, but authen­tic­ity is a pretty hard one to fold on.

Related posts:

1. Scal­able Intimacy Presentation
2. Debunk­ing Social Media Myths
3. Expres­sive Capital–A clue for social media?
4. Social Media: Noise that matters
5. A live les­son in Social Media