[Jeff Bullas has a great post on Social Media's Biggest Myth. This post was inspired by his use of the pool party as a metaphor.]

• You can talk insurance with your friends after inviting them to your pool party.
• You can talk insurance with other's friends when being invited to someone else's pool party.
• You might be approached by other insurance sales men at either pool party.
• The host might've set up the pool party to promote a line of pool toys or pool chemicals.
• Everyone at the pool party is a potential customer.

Most people at the pool party are not interested in your life insurance pitch, they are there for the hotdogs.

So engaging in social media for business, small or large, is a bit like being a guest at a pool party. Respect the rules of the host, listen more than you speak, and if you are given an opening, "what do you do for a living?" then by all means share your pitch.

Most commercial social media is more like an ongoing infomercial. Everything is amazing, the deals and coupons are all urgent, and if you LIKE them you will get a prize. But that type of social media is not working for most of us. We are not online, or at the pool party, looking for insurance. We are at the pool party to have fun, maybe meet some new people, and mostly drink beer and eat hot dogs. And swim.

So part of the challenge for business-driven social media is to get out of the broadcaster/advertiser/salesman mode and enjoy the swim. Of course the number of hot dogs sold at the end of the party is important, to the hot dog manufacturer, but it should not alter the basic premise of the pool party.

If your social media is only about ROI and widgets sold, then perhaps you would do well to look at Dell's demand driven deal variety. Very successful, no doubt. But there is not much that the local or small business can learn from Dell's Twitter-as-coupon model.

For the rest of us, we need to learn to love the pool party process. And if we get that opening we can give our pitch. But mostly we need to enjoy the beer, hotdogs and conversation.

Update: A question was asked, "What about when someone pees in the pool?"

I guess that's a pretty good analogy for what's happening in some channels of social media. The coupons and daily deals have flooded the stream of information to the point that people are leaving the party all together. I'm sure that part of Twitter's high drop off rate has something to do with the volume of scammers and spammers trying to peddle their snake oil in 140 characters. So we have life guards. People who blow whistles, give CPR lessons, and pretty much sit around watching the pool to make sure no one is drowning. But they (we) can't prevent the pee. Perhaps better filtration (Klout added to Twitter, for example, or the advanced filtering capabilities in Tweetdeck) will begin to make the accidents and scammers less effective.

(Note: if anyone needs an invite to the Google+ pool party, let me know, I'll hook you up.)

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://uber.la/2011/06/social-media-is-a-pool-party/

Reference: Social Media Marketing’s Biggest Myth, by Jeff Bullas

A few other posts of interest:

• Apple vs Dell: The Summer Promo Deals In Your Inbox
• The 4 Disciplines of Social Media: Google Analytics, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter
• The Liability of Ignorance: How, Where, and When To Join a Social Community
• Does "DESIGN" Matter Any More On the Web? Has Content Finally Become King?
• Tweetdeck: Using Filters to Remove Unwanted Tweets (VIDEO)

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