Immediately after the interview with Mark Zuckerberg ended on 60 Minutes last night I got a flurry of text messages, emails and online posts asking me if I had seen the piece. It was not because they wanted my thoughts on the interview, what it meant, what was surprising to me...no.

All of these messages came to me from people outside of my social media circle simply because they had heard me talk about Facebook and then they were able to get some sense of what Facebook truly was from 60 Minutes. Something similar happened to other people I talked with this morning, where parents were all of a sudden awakened to what we mean when we talk about the advent of social networking and it's importance in how we communicate and ultimately how we do business.

Any sort of mention of social media on MSM is certain to bring folks out of the woodwork and I'm interested to see if Facebook gets a bump in new members, but what it taught me, once again, is that when we describe these tools and this strategy we are often too complex. Our focus is too often on broad and ambiguous statements such as "engage with your community" when we mean to say "have a conversation with your customers". We throw around confusing and strange terms like Twitter, Utterz, Ning and Meebo. We talk as if everyone should know what we are talking about and why it is SO, SO, SO important. The moment it actually becomes clear to someone one of two things occur:

• The person actually uses a service and for the first time realize the power of what they are using. This happened over the weekend to our good friend Vic (follow her on Twitter so that she starts experiencing that tool as well!) as she was surfing around Facebook and started being able to virtually participate in events and special occasions of friends who had posted photos to their profiles.
• It is explained on THEIR terms, not yours. This has happened several times to me as I'm talking about social media, getting excited and passionate about the term, what it means, how it works...and the person just blankly stares at me. I then take a step back and say something in the realm of "You know how email allowed you to write to anyone, anywhere, anytime and the web allowed you to shop online from anywhere, anytime? Social media combines the ability to talk, write, visualize and hear anyone, anywhere at anytime...oh, and that person can interact with you using all of these means. Do you think that would be helpful for you business?"

A subset of this topic came up during the last Social Media Breakfast, centered mainly around the fact that we must always be cognizant that we are not always the only ones in the room. There are people, the majority of folks, who are outside of our clique. Understanding how to communicate the importance and impact of social media to these people should be one of our main objectives. If you haven't seen the interview it is below (although this may get pulled from YouTube at any minute). I agree with most folks in the social media realm that this interview was fairly vanilla and that they did not ask any tough questions; but honestly, did we really think that audience was ready to watch a 12 minute piece on Beacon? Also, shout out to Charlene Li for her comments during the interview, well done!

Facebook Interview Part I

Facebook Interview Part II

/kff