What did Sun Tzu miss? Art of War and SMM

I love the book: The Art of War for Business. But there was something Sun Tzu missed.

While watching a documentary on codes and communication during the modern wars, something leaped out at me that the narrator said. It makes so much sense and is 100% applicable in the modern business world.

When you want to prevent the enemy from scrambling your communications, this is what you do to better your chances that the message gets out the other end:

You spread it over the available bandwidth. You use any and every available channel.

It is that simple!

Now, SMME has started a wildfire. And for the most part of it, it’s great.

But you’ll notice that the big guns are still transmitting the message over the traditional channels too. SMM in an only an addition to what is already working.

At 1^st I thought it is just spread-betting. After taking a closer look I realized that a lot of thought and science goes into what is allocated where.

You only have to know a bit about Edward Bernays to really get what it going on with this business of SMM. Think about how Obama ran his campaign…

Without getting too much into the political side of things, I started my creative mind on how to unite rather to divide. SMM is not always used, but had it’s origins in counter-propaganda.

For SMM to come around it must learn to play according to the rules.

The Dotcoms thought they were going to chance the economical landscape. In a way they did when it all blew up and left a crater on the face of economic history (the 1^st and second time).

Investors are much more cautious now than ever before. See, eventually the intangible have to pay for the tangible.

The “rules”, you ask? Let me use a seemingly unrelated example:

When something gets published, someone normally pays for a magazine or a book. If what it published therein is wrong (factually or slanderlesly), it is a fraud. Because someone paid to have a tangible piece of paper with verified information on it, the involvement of payment makes it a crime to have un-truths published (unless it is fiction).

Is Wikipedia regulated in such a way? Some of the avid supporters among you will fervently argue that it is. But I’ve won and lost enough arguments to know that on Google something can be neither here nor there at the same time. Much like Michael Jackson it can be black and white, boy and grown-up, guilty and innocent (probably dead and alive). For every bit of information on the internet there is an equal measure of disinformation.

To get back from my digression: SMM have to bend the knee to the proven law of advertising. Speaking as a hobby ethnographer, I’m exerting all my creative mind power to establish a single medium through which all the available channels will flow. If it sounds paradoxal, then download this document to find out more… http://www.dclcreative.co.za/doks/CDROM_Cape_feb_2010.pdf

Ps// I am omitting crucial pieces of information from this article for the purpose of using it as magic bullets during the debate it will spark ;o)