Business TV show: Explained - Social Media in terms of the tortured metaphor

so this week I want to talk to you about

my tortured metaphor ready my tortured

metaphor is that the web is a city and I

use this metaphor to describe how

important it is to participate in social

media to participate in blogs forums

chat rooms and to be a part of the

communities that are talking about what

you're doing about your company about

your products about your services and

and the tortured metaphor goes like this

the web is a city and if you think about

the web as a city you can think about

everything that's on the web and assign

it to something that's in a real live

city so for example ebay is the garage

sale the boot sale the city you've got

amazon.com is the bookstore all of the

company websites are the high street the

main street of the city where people ago

to do their shopping you've got the

underworld of the city with porn and

spam and stuff like that so you can

assign every kind of thing that you see

on the web as a virtual City so what are

the blogs and the forums and the chat

rooms of the virtual world of the web

they're the bars and the saloons and the

clubs of the city and so if you think

about it that way and you think about

the ways that people market offline the

ways that people find out about ideas

offline you can you can sort of get a

sense that there's a lot of information

that's shared in the pubs and the

saloons and the bars and the clubs of

the city of the real city and the same

things true of the online world of

forums and chat rooms and blogs so in

order to be successful with social

networking sites you have to be a

participant so imagine that you're a

landscaper and you run a landscape

business in a city and if you frequent

the bars and the club's everyone knows

you oh yeah that's old John that's the

landscaper and guess what's going to

happen the next time they need landscape

services if they already know John

they're going to call him right they're

not going to try to go to the phone book

or the google to try to find a landscape

already know one and the same things

true on the web if you're a participant

in blogs and forums and chat rooms where

people are discussing the sorts of

things that you do and and they get to

know you when they're ready to buy a

product who do you think they're going

to call they're going to call you of

course tortured metaphor I know but I

think it's valuable in terms of

understanding social media