extreme arts + sciences | digital strategy

Social has grown up quickly and it feels like it’s at an awkward adolescent stage. We know it’s destined for greatness, but it feels gangly. While everyone is doing social, it might just be because everyone’s doing it, it’s the “cool” thing to do. Ask your mom if that’s a good strategy.

Social is exciting. Youthful social is largely driven by exhilaration — that rush you feel from every Like or re-tweet. Now, marketers are demanding more than a just good feeling from their investment.

EAS believes grown-up social is more exciting than an adrenaline rush because it delivers a bigger impact on business. Grown up social is vast and nuanced, it’s ubiquitous and layered, and will ultimately reveal the whole person. The sociologist Erving Goffman once noted that who we are changes every time we change situations. This doesn’t mean we’re faking it – it means that we highlight certain parts of our personalities and our interests with one group or in one venue that we wouldn’t in another. There are things you can say and do at home that you can’t at work, things you can say and do at work you can’t at home, and things you can say and do at the bar that you couldn’t get away with at work or at home. This is how social works. Who we are on Pinterest is just a bit different from who we are on Twitter, or Facebook, or App.net, or in this room, or at the bar afterwards. What we do is different. Who we share with is different. All these layers of social are like layers in an onion, and we as human beings are more than just the sum of those layers – we are the relationships between them. So far, this gets lost digitally. The way we’ve been talking to consumers recently is counterintuitive to the way we treat people in real life, and our lack of attentiveness to this basic reality has resulted in censures like Do Not Track… which is essentially a restraining order. We’ve been going through a very awkward social puberty.

Adobe gets grown up social. They recently launched Adobe Social, which allows marketers to capture increasingly complex social relationships through data, and turn it into simple, effective solutions centered around understanding the new consumer journey. Adobe contacted EAS to create a 20 minute presentation, focused around what a longer view of social looks like to marketers. EAS created “The Awkward Adolescence of Social”, wherein the world of grown-up social is defined, along with how social is moving from a big business to a platform that can make your business big. The presentation was first delivered at Signal in Chicago in September 2012.