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Social TV – Will It Catch On?
With Facebook unveiling changes to their user interface and functionality, much has been written about where Facebook is going. I think a lot of their changes are reactions to Google+, but there are some new things that I think are a natural evolution of the social platform. One of these items is social TV. I read a good article in today’s Globe that talked about changes that Netflix has made to its business model. One part of the article jumped out at me.
Mr. Hastings was in San Francisco on Thursday for Facebook’s f8 conference, where he went on stage with the social networking site’s founder Mark Zuckerberg to announce new co-operation between the two companies.
By connecting their Facebook and Netflix accounts, users will be able to see what their friends are watching, and also watch Netflix content inside through Facebook.
My first reaction was “that’s interesting!” but a few moments later, as I thought about how this would work, the whole thing gave me pause. Do people really want their TV viewing habits being broadcast across their social networks? I’m a heavy user of social media, but there are certain things I’ve never linked to my social networks. For example, I’m a video gamer. It’s something that from time to time I will spend a little time doing in the late evening as opposed to watching a movie. Many games have the ability to link to your Twitter feed and then the game tweets your achievements. I’ve stayed away from that – do I really want to broadcast latest high scores or how many hours I might have played a certain game? Not really. I think the same will be true for social TV. People might want to tweet that they are enjoying game 7 in a Stanley Cup final, but I doubt people are going to want to link their hours of watching reality TV to their Facebook networks. I could be wrong on this, but something tells me that this won’t be as killer a feature as Facebook and Netflix are hoping it will be.
Social Media is About Conversation
It came up in conversation twice in the month of August the discussion of social media and its use in the enterprise. In both instances the people I was having lunch with were telling me about the social media strategy their respective organization had put into place. As 
I listened it dawned on me that the discussion was entirely about the tools being used.
“This is what we’ve done with Facebook” “
This is how many Tweets we are doing each day.”
“This is why we aren’t blogging.”
After a while I asked each of them the same question “What was the overarching objective in your social media strategy?”
The first person I asked replied “Well we didn’t really put together a strategy, because we knew what we wanted.”
The second person I asked two weeks later replied “Our strategy was to start using social media!”
After I’d had these two lunch conversations I sent emails to each of them and thought it would be worthwhile sharing some of the themes in this blog post. Quiet simply, social media is about starting & nurturing a dialogue with your audience (customers / prospects / employees / potential new hires / vendors).
