Alan Wolk does it again. First, he comes up with the term NASCAR Blindness to describe how coastal elites fail to understand what motivates average Americans. Now, he has a new term, Scoble Blindness, to describe a similar condition that afflicts those working in the tech sector.
Scoble Blindness is the strongly held belief that everyone using social media is supremely interested in what Robert Scoble* and others like him have to say.
The solution to Scoble Blindness is an easy one: acknowledging that the rules and norms of the Silicon Valley social media scene begin and end with that scene.
For marketers, the proposition is different: we’ve got to stop listening to the chatter coming out of Silicon Valley. To remember that the people we’re marketing to have a very different view of social media, it’s values and uses. And that we’ve got to advise our clients accordingly. We also need to remember that the rules for promoting one’s own personal brand are not the same as the rules for promoting our clients brands. In other words, we need to avoid coming down with Scoble Blindness.
In other words, will it sell in Peoria? When it comes to Twitter, the answer is “not yet.” CNN is all over it and many other media companies see the value in it, but the micro-blogging service hasn’t caught on in the mainstream (not like Facebook and MySpace).
I’ve been doing some casual research on brand name Twitter identities and I can tell you many brands are missing this boat. Of course, this boat is like a ferry, if you miss one, there’s another behind it to take you across the water.
*Robert Scoble is a well-connected man with a video cam and a blahg.
