To not have a proper understanding of the cultural framework of your audience could be disastrous.

Not having an understanding of cultural context limits your capability to communicate. Effective communication in itself requires that both parties have a frame of reference or a context from which words are being expressed. For example: Let’s say you are from the United States promoting a fresh line of designer jeans to a new market in Britain. You decide one way to break into that specific demographic would be by using a Facebook fan page. A few months pass and you notice that a British girl is wearing your new pants and posts a picture of her on your fan page. So you thank your British friend for wearing your “pants”. But in England “pants” are what we would call “underwear”. The frame of reference for the understanding of the word pants from a British perspective is entirely different from the American perspective.

The British social context requires that in order to complement a British lady that you adapt your language in order to fit. This is just a trivial example of how cultural context plays into social situations. But imagine a place where as a facilitator you have to contextually adapt to multiple cultures across the entire world. As brands enter into social media marketing they must be aware of social context. Ok, maybe your brand isn’t international yet. Maybe it’s not even national. Even so, you can’t escape cultural contextualization.

Even micro cultures require a level of contextual understanding from both parties. The music industry is full of sub-sets of micro cultures with their own unique understandings of words and ideas. Many of these words and ideas become popularized and eventually become buzz words. For example the word “boo” was originally used as an interjection to startle or frighten. “Boo” is now used in the hip hop sub-culture as a word to describe a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Here are a few points to think about:
1. Social media is not limited to one culture.
2. Understanding your audiences’ context will bridge the digital gap.
3. Relating to your audience in this way will foster more authentic relationships.
4. Understanding cultural context should be part of planning your social media marketing initiative.

And thus a great irony should have been exposed in reading this blog post. I don’t know who you are. And I may have not been contextually relevant. Please drop me a line and let me know who you are, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic too.

So, how on earth do I draw the conclusion that Facebook could be the future of web design. A couple of points that I draw my crazy idea from:

1. Facebook’s traffic is rising at an extremely fast rate, check compete.com to see how it compares to Google (I also included an another in there for fun).

2. Optimizing for specific keywords on Google is only getting harder and is even more difficult for smaller businesses.

3. Domain names in particular, the .com tld, are harder and harder to come by. In fact there are over 88 million .com’s compared to a mere 13 million .net domains.

4. Facebook recently launched their “Pay with Facebook” feature, how long until there is a Facebook shopping cart for company pages?

5. People say they love choice, but in reality they choose convenience and value (Walmart vs. downtown America). This point is key. People are being bombarded with different search engines, advertisements and more of everything on the web. Facebook solves that problem.

I am not saying the day is here, Facebook has to make some changes for it to really become an option for small business. For example, Facebook needs to allow more customization of the company pages and the ability to remove ads. If Facebook does take this direction I think it will make sense for a lot of small businesses or new start-ups that would not be able to get the traffic elsewhere.

There is a lot of irony in the fact that our last blog post was on commitment issues and social media and how to test yourself to make sure you are up to the challenge. Well, apparently we were not up to it.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the damage:

1. We had a good amount of traffic coming to the Inovator, and now it’s dropped, significantly.

2. People were talking with us via the blog, emails, tweets and yes even the good old phone. But we left that conversation and it’s cold now.

3. Lastly, I can only imagine how many people must have thought the worst had become us and we closed up shop. Quite the opposite I can assure you, but actions speak louder than words.

So why am I telling you all of this? For one, I am sorry, and secondly and most importantly, I don’t want you to make the same mistake.

Regardless of whether or not you can make money via social networking, the bigger question is, do you have the time to commit to it?

Everything in life takes work. You can expect to get nothing in return if you put nothing into it. So try this, before you take the plunge of signing up your company’s brand on Twitter or creating a Facebook fan page, sign yourself up. Yea, you personally. And instead of tweeting about random things such as what you had for lunch, try to tweet about things related to your industry. How many tweets can you come up with? How many followers can you get? How many useful conversations can you have?

I think you might be amazed at how hard it is to stay on topic in a social network. There are a lot of companies who’s social networking presence is either just a “me too” dialogue or is just used to spam users with promotions. Social networking is about being real, well as real as you can be in the digital space, and people quickly see through fake and feeble attempts of companies just trying to push their brand.