Bob Bly vs. Robert Scoble — Do the New Media Tools Matter?
28 May
There’s a heckuva debate playing out over on Scobleizer between renowned copywriter Bob Bly — a PRstore favorite — and technical evangelist Robert Scoble, founder of the Scobleizer blog.
At issue are two questions:
- Are social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and all the others just time-wasting fads for techno geeks and "me first adopters"?
- Is Bob Bly playing sly, boosting his own buzz by stirring up controversy in advance of his own foray into social media.
To weigh in on the debate, visit Scoble’s blog. This post is geared toward a different question: so what?
Yes, this is the "Why should I care?" portion of the programming. A few weeks ago I explained why I spend so much time learning about social media. But why should any of this matter to you, the business owner?
The answer is because marketing and PR are at a historic juncture. An entire industry has grown up to serve your need to promote your company. The marketing industry makes billions of dollars a year by convincing you that you need our help to entice consumers.
Now here comes social media. Social media isn’t about making the world a smaller place; the Internet did that already. Instead, social media is about democratizing the communication process. It’s about cutting out middle men. It’s about press releases that skip over editors and reporters and go straight to your customers. It’s about kicking focus groups to the curb and refining how you promote yourself based conversations about your brand that happen at 2 a.m.
Twitter, Flickr, iPhones…these are just tools. Some are here to last, others are destined for failure. But like the first square wheels carved from stone, they play a role in showing us what doesn’t work so we can better understand what does work.
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Photo credit: LuMax |
You don’t need to care about Twitter, per se, but about what Twitter, blogging and all the rest stand for. Bright young minds are creating new communication tools on a daily basis. New uses for those tools are invented almost hourly. And for the most part, the tools and the techniques are free or cheap. That’s bad news for me, bad news for PRstore, good news for you.
PRstore is smack in the middle of that historic juncture, along with every other marketing company, large and small. We can help you incorporate new media tools into your marketing mix, or we can sit around until you learn to use them yourself. One way brings me a paycheck, the other leaves me searching for a job.
One things for sure: we can’t go back to the way it was.
It’s funny. I bought one of Bob Bly’s books years ago, then hired him to help us out on a project. Total disaster. May be because we’re in a very nichey, techie market: scientists and engineers who use computer-based instrumentation. Was never able to look at his stuff the same way again.