Read an interesting (and all too brief) article over on B2CMarketingInsider.com about the lack of social media mentions during Super Bowl ads. The article was penned by Liz Sweezy who, apart from having the most amusing name I’ve ever spoken aloud (go ahead, try it), is also in possession of a very common and very incorrect way of thinking about social media. (That’s not a criticism, I’m just using her article as an example — I hope she forgives me for it.)

Sweezy writes the following:

[The Emerging Media Research Council’s Digital Analysis of Super Bowl XLV] mentioned that a total of eight ads pointed to companies’ Facebook pages. Wait, only eight?  Does this surprise anyone else?  For all the hype that has been building around social media over the last year, wouldn’t you think that every commercial would promote a company’s social media presences on Facebook, or Twitter or YouTube?  At a going rate of $3 million for 30 seconds of ad time, this seems like a missed opportunity for companies who have put serious effort into developing their social presence.
(Emphasis added.)

A couple of key points here:

Hype? What Hype?

First, I wonder what “hype… around social media” Sweezy is referring to. Sure, there might have been increased attention paid to the ways in which we interact with people online this year. There are new tools available to us, and people are innovating constantly with those tools. But the point is that we are achieving a greater understanding of what digital natives expect when they come to the internet – not creating hype. Hype was that thing that happened when Facebook was made available outside of Harvard. What’s happening now is something completely different. All of our social behaviors – from shopping to gaming to knitting – now have online components that are, to some, inextricable from the behaviors themselves. “Offline gaming?” my then-teenaged friend once said to me. “What, you mean like Monopoly and stuff?”

Social is the Default (Usually)

Second, it’s just plain ignorant to think that the mere act of buying a Super Bowl ad wouldn’t drive social media traffic – especially to YouTube channels. Social media are so pervasive that it has become unnecessary for major brands to remind people to go to Facebook for more content. If I paid $3 million for 30 seconds, you could bet your last Whuffie that I wouldn’t spend a second telling people to do something they already knew how to do – and likely would do anyway.

Social Media Augments Marketing

And third, remember that brands develop their social presences as an augmentation to all marketing efforts, irrespective of media type. Social media is not marketing; it’s a behavior. So this couldn’t have possibly been a “missed opportunity” – unless, of course, one of these brands launched a Super Bowl ad without an existing social presence. (See how absurd that sounds? That tells you something, doesn’t it?)

The Takeaway:

We need to stop thinking of social media as a property to which we can drive traffic. It’s not. What social media represents is the ability for a brand to become a part of the always-on digital habitat in which people are increasingly finding themselves. People see their online selves as an extension of their real selves, their online conversations as facilitations of real conversations, their online environments as continuations of their real environments. In short, people didn’t spend lots of time and money on social media because it was the thing to do this year. They did it because, irrespective of their target demographics, they would be guaranteed to miss opportunities to connect if they didn’t.

Sorry if I’m a bit long-winded on this, but I just want to make sure we’re all in agreement that we can’t rest on this kind of stale thinking anymore. We all fall into this mode of thought once in a while – I’m certainly guilty of it at times – but we all need to stop. What are other, healthier ways of thinking about social media? I’d love to hear from you.