6
May
2009
Social media is old news. Now what?
I was about 10 when we got our Commodore 64. I loved it. Everyone else was playing video games, but I had a computer. I programmed in Basic. I made posters in PrintShop. I wanted a modem so bad so I could get on a BBS. I didn’t really know why; I just wanted to. Okay, maybe I was among a minority of 10-year-olds, but everyone shares a fascination with novelty. New movies, books, technology, conveniences, communication — you name it — if it’s new and useful, people are going to be trying it.
There’s something like that going on with social media. People are using it for every conceivable reason: To get as many friends or followers as possible. To sell plans to get more friends and followers. To raise money for charities. To sell product. For PR, promotions and customer service. (I tweeted about being turned down by SquareTrade.com for a refrigerator warranty, and the manufacturer tweeted in reply to me that I could buy a warranty from them.) I think many users are not entirely sure what they are doing with Twitter. Heck, even Twitter doesn’t seem to know how it’s going to make money. (Apple might have some ideas, though.)
But what is left after all of the novelty wears off? What will users ultimately care about? Will users follow, become fans of, or friend corporations? Maybe a few will. But if you think about the number of products that people come in contact with on a daily basis, is social media a good way to keep the brands associated with those products in front of people?
It is, to a degree, but I think that the days of advertisements, be they interruptive or distracting, are mostly numbered. Social media is aptly named. It’s… social. Interactive. And, yes, businesses and spammers are going to continue to gunk up social media with blaring messages and attempts to get attention. But these are misled and easily tuned out. If they offer nothing in the way of social interaction, customer service, or useful information, then they are failing on the social front.
There are any number of ways to utilize social media to expose your brand or message, but I think that the most powerful social media marketing will simply be an expanded form of word of mouth marketing. Promotions, news, offers, opinions, viral ads, etc. will spread throughout the social mediaverse like ripples in a pond, except these ripples will get stronger as they spread.
As with traditional word of mouth marketing, there will be influencers — Twitterers, for example, with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers — who act, independently or sycophantically, as distribution points for corporate messages. A tangent: Social media marketers will need to find a way to track such propegation. Maybe it will be by using links to sites that record the IP addresses of everyone who clicks on them. (Twitter almost always points to something else.) It would be fascinating to watch visualizations of the progress of a particular meme throughout the social mediaverse.
Whatever happens with business in social media, I’m looking forward to it. Good marketing is good communication. Communication is the heart of social media. Of course, by the time the novelty of the current wave of social media begins to tarnish, there will be something else new for us to go crazy over.
Where do you think social media marketing will be, once the novelty is gone? How do you use it, and are you getting out of it what you’d hoped?
Just let me start by saying OMG I was one of the first with a computer, I can’t for the life of me remember the brand, but i remember learning basic and programming it to ask my mother a question (the old if/then & repeat commands!) and responding to her answer! I loved it and thought I was sooooo clever!
But back to the issue at hand, social media…in answer to your question I have got so much more out of participating in twitter than I could have ever hoped or imagined.
I have me some really interesting people, had some fun conversations, gained a freelance job, and been delivered links to so many more interesting bits of information that have interested me or helped me with my work than I would ever have found on my own!
As long as there are business people interacting in this space I don’t think it will die out, there will be a new big thing sometime, and it may cause us all to migrate from twitter, but unlike facebook and myspace this is about quick dissemination of information between professionals who can easily find each other and do not need permission to join the conversation. It’s like networking at a global conference.
I find like minded professionals, I follow them, after a time I interact with them when I feel I have something to say and unless they are uber huge they often interact back with me.
So whatever is next, whatever novelty comes along, it is gonna be fairly hard to beat for simplicity and connecting like minds.
As far as marketing goes, who hasn’t got a story of somebody who has been surprised and delighted that a brand has met with them in this space…so novelty aside, I think it still has plenty of juice left in it yet…
Ah yes, if, then, goto, gosub… fun stuff!
Yes, I’m totally with you — social media is what we make of it. And it is incredibly useful for news, resources, networking & communication and fun. There seem to be a lot of novelty uses for social media right now that are pushing it into the limelight (Get 60,000 followers in 30 days!, look, I’m Fred’s car and I tweet when I’m low on gas!, Become a fan of my business on Facebook!.). As the newness wears off, I think the core values of social media will remain. But the novelties will become as exciting as spam email and telemarketing phone calls. I look forward to the death of such things. Or, if not death, at least zombiehood. How hard do you have to scrutinize a junk email these days before you realize that it’s junk? We can spot ‘em. The same thing will probably happen with Twitter, Facebook, etc. People will start filtering out the undesired content.
So the most important thing, as always, is to not be a zombie; rather, to be relevant, interactive and informative. Keep it real!
Hey Mike… you’re not alone, I had a commodore 64 around the same age too and I wanted to be a programmer way back in elementary school. Ironically I ended up wanting to go to college for Art when I was in High School, majored in Philosophy instead and now (since everyone knows you can’t get a job with that degree anyway) I’m back to art and coding a.k.a. Web Design. HA!
Brian, that’s crazy that you majored in Philosophy. I majored in Philosophy. My degree is still in the box it came in. I took one art class at the U of D and hated it.