Let's get real about social media

Social media is good - but not that good. And we really do need to keep a grip on common sense.

Like when we look at social media's role in the travel disruption beneath the Icelandic ash cloud.

Mashable's quick review - posted by Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying.com who makes a living helping airlines with their branding - tells a good story. You'd expect that for at least two reasons. Neither Mashable nor SimpliFlying have much interest in saying social media was a bit marginal ... though it was.

If you want a flavour of the argument, take a look at this:

How airlines dealt with the ashcloud crisis through social media

View more presentations from Shashank Nigam.

Or, if you're short of time:

"Both airlines and Eurocontrol took charge of the situation(my emphasis) not just by sending out messages, but by leading and participating in conversations.

Airlines like SAS quickly learned how to scale up the efforts when needed, with the help of volunteers from across the company. And the next time a crisis occurs, they will be much better prepared to use social media as a valuable information and customer service tool.

The most important thing right now is to take the lessons learned and develop a coherent strategy for handling future crises."

'Took charge of the situation?' I don't think so.

No-one could sensibly argue that airlines and so on shouldn't have done any or all of this - nor that social media played no part in some stranded travellers getting home ... or at least sitting it out with something approaching peace of mind.

But one of those lessons is that, in the end, it's about numbers. And social media touched relatively small numbers of those trying to get home.

Social media was not a great presence in my life as I - along with something like half a million others - traipsed through Europe over that weekend. Apart from anything else, my mobile and laptop ran out of battery; I was spending hours shuffling forward in SM-unfriendly queues; and public WiFi, it seems, is not quite all it's cracked up to be in Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

Nor did I meet anyone else in any of the queues, stations, parks, streets or taxi ranks who had used any form of social media to get them on their way.

That's not surprising. If you look at the numbers of those who actually used the #ashtag hashtag to get home, they're a tiny, tiny fraction of those stranded. And much of the information the airlines and Eurocontrol gave out by social media was holding information - reassuring, perhaps, but not necessarily what you needed to tackle the next stage of your journey.

Information mattered, not the medium used to disseminate it. And - as I argued in an earlier blog - I (and the hundreds of thousands like me) needed accurate information about the route ahead. And though that information existed, no-one had collated it let alone passed it on to the likes of us. 

But there's a broader lesson here about social media right now. Social media in its many forms is changing the way we communicate. But it is a long, long way from the near-universality, reliability (what if your airline was one of those that didn't set up or use a Facebook page?) and predictability it needs to have to become a true medium of mass communication.

I accept the argument that these are still the early days of social media. And that, unlike traditional media, their success isn't necessarily measured in numbers. It's not necessarily their prime purpose to convene people in large numbers around information.

And perhaps that's the point. 

In time, we'll probably realise that social media does some things well and some things badly. My hunch is that one of the things it will do badly, if at all, is provide reliably and certainly the information millions need simultaneously.

The job that traditional media does, in other words.