You have to wonder what the nice folks at IBM were thinking when they came up with the latest in their series of "Stop Talking. Start Doing" commercials. You've seen it: middle-aged female manager walks into young guy's office and asks him what he's up to. "Social networking," he says. "Everybody's doing it. I have 826 friends." Great, the manager says, find me a team of 23 international finance people who know arbitrage, have ten plus years of experience, speak Cantonese and can be on the ground by Monday. "I don't have any friends like that," the chagrined young man confesses.
Putting aside for the moment whether it is a good idea to make fun of the values of all the bright young people you're trying to recruit, the message of the commercial is clearly that all this social media stuff is a waste of time and if you whippersnappers would just put your heads down and get busy you, too, could become a dragon lady in about 20 years. Can you spell patronizing, boys and girls?
And, by the way, isn't IBM in the social software business? Doesn't it sell something called Lotus Connections that purports to let you find the people you need. You can't tell me that social networking is worthless and then sell me an expensive system to do exactly that.
I don't mean to beat up on IBM; there are many good people there who are doing really innovative things with social media. In fact, I would consider IBM to be a leader and a social software pioneer. But, there is a growing disconnect (not just at IBM, but at most big enteprises) between communications/PR people, who get the value of social media, and marketing/advertising managers who don't. Since the marketing/advertising departments have the big budgets, their investment in scattershot, incredibly expensive and wasteful TV campaigns drowns out the efforts of those who believe there is a better, cheaper way to do things.
This disconnect--which is as much about protecting turf and budgets as it is about finding more effective ways to reach customers--extends to agencies as well. Olgilvy has some of the best social media bloggers writing today and has worked hard at proving that it "gets it." But, that didn't stop the "creative" side of the house from producing an IBM campaign that reflects--not just in this particular ad, but in general--a distressingly conservative, defensive and backward-looking view of the modern corporation. It's time for some change we can believe in.