Social Does Not Mean Gregarious

There’s an old-saying among marketers: “Good marketing won’t save a bad business.” Entrepreneurs and small business owners are starting to realize that the same is true for the tools and tactics of social media: Social media will not make you a social business.

So marketers are starting to adjust. They have decided to first teach you how to be a social business. Companies have been formed to teach you how to be a social business. Great thought has been put into a roadmap to becoming a social business. This is all fine and good for businesses that are truly social. But what if that’s not your natural inclination? If you’re not ordinarily gregarious, should you spend time trying to teach yourself to be social?

via www.themarketingspotblog.com

I like the message, right up to ‘If you’re not ordinarily gregarious, should you spend time trying to teach yourself to be social?’

Here we see the common confusion about what we mean when we talk about the social web of social business. But this is a wider confusion that just in this context, as shown by the Wikipedia entry

The term Social refers to a characteristic of living
organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term
to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction
of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence,
irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective
of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term “social” is used in many different senses and regarded as a fuzzy concept, referring among other things to:

• Attitudes, orientations, or behaviours which take the interests, intentions, or needs of other people into account (in contrast to anti-social behaviour);has played some role in defining the idea or the principle. For instance terms like social realism, social justice, social constructivism,
  social psychology and social capital imply that there is some social
  process involved or considered, a process that is not there in regular,
  “non-social”, realism, justice, constructivism, psychology, or capital.

The adjective “social” is also used often in political discourse, although its meaning in such a context depends heavily on who is using it. In left-wing circles it is often used to imply a positive characteristic, while in right-wing circles
it is generally used to imply a negative characteristic. It should also
be noted that, overall, this adjective is used much more often by those
on the political left than by those on the political right. For these
reasons, those seeking to avoid association with the left-right
political debates often seek to label their work with phrases that do
not include the word “social”.

When we talk about ‘social business’ or ‘social media’ we are using the primary meaning, more or less the way an anthropologist would use it, not as a politician would, or the way a matchmaker would. We are not talking about holding hands or flirting, here, but the deep workings of people in various cultural settings.

So we need to dispel this confusion, every time it arises.