Will success ruin social media?
Parties are funny things. If just a few people show up, it’s kind of depressing. The more people the event draws, the more fun it is — up to a point. Eventually, if too many people crash the party, it gets overcrowded and dramatically less fun. Now imagine if all those extra, uninvited guests were shouting at the top of their lungs, constantly trying to sell you something. That’s the problem facing social media right now.
Mike Schaffner argues that the party problem will drive social media churn. We’ll all get fed up with spammers and marketers on Twitter so we’ll all move over to Twitter Clone A. The money men will catch on and the cycle will repeat, he argues, until we’re willing to pay for premium networks that keep marketing out of the equation. I’m not so sure about this last point. I love social media, but I don’t know if I’d be willing to lay down hard-earned cash for it. There are just too many other diversions and communication tools out there to make paying worth my while.
Are you worried about marketing ruining social media? Do you think social networks will be able to recover from a potential ad-pocalypse? Would you pay for a network where no marketing or use of your personal data was permitted?
Image credit, dianne39 via iStock
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Tags: crowds, marketing, twitter
Categories: Editor's Take
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Posted by Mahdi on December 24th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Well said, Jesse. It’s this point that in my opinion validates the predictions that in the coming months, we’ll see a stronger shift towards niche social networks. This will make it easier for the casual or serious user to elude and out-maneuver marketers and spammers. I’m not sure that premium networks will gain too much popularity (for the same reason you mentioned) but I definitely believe that exclusivity and niche is the way things will trend.
Posted by Michele Price on December 24th, 2009 at 11:41 am
I politely disagree. Like anything in life and business there will always be the people who come for the curiosity. There will always be spammers. Our choice here is to see what the opportunities are for those who understand and are willing to be consistent in their engagement and building relationships.
Just like face to face networking there are people who understand how to connect and be “go-Givers” and there are people who only see “what’s in it for them”. It hasn’t killed networking or it’s effectiveness it has screen out the toe dippers and folks who will not offer value to the party.
We will continue to see growing pains, its is just a fact of life and business. I invite local business owners to shore up their strategies and have a strong foundation in place before they wade into social media. Once they have done that, social media does what it does best. Connect you in really big way and give you an ear to your consumer or client.
So how do you see yourself showing up and evolving?
Posted by KarenEman on December 24th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Interesting analogy: Parties and Social Media. Both rely, to some degree, on popularity. Just as few party-goers enjoy spending time with fellow guests who do nothing but brag on themselves and their companies, few on the Internet enjoy spending time reading self-promotion pieces disguised as LinkedIn discussions or blogs.
Social media and Web 2.0 are based on two-way communication. Let’s keep the social media “party” going by sharing what we know without all the thinly veiled, profit-motivated communication. Social media is a marketing tool that should be used to start (and continue) communication, not to close the sale.
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Posted by Brandon Sutton on December 24th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
I’m with Michele – we aren’t going to see people give up on social media over spammers or marketing. If that was the case, email would have been dead a long time ago.
I think it’s interesting that you mention paid networks that don’t have any marketing. I don’t think it’s a problem that marketing exists in social media; it’s marketing done poorly that causes the problem. Providing value to the users needs to be the first order of business in order for the relationship to be win-win-win (user, marketer, website/community). If brands/companies are providing value to the community and not just using social media as just another broadcast medium, then I believe these relationships will continue to thrive.
However, I do agree that niche networks have the potential to be big players in the future. Even still, the value might ultimately be in how they all connect together through the big networks such as Facebook. Either way, I’m not holding my breath on the premium model. It’s possible, but I just see too many examples of people bouncing over to find a free service once price becomes a barrier. I think premium models are viable, but not as a mass substitute for the big networks.
Good food for thought – thanks for the discussion!
@brandon101
Posted by Scott Gould on December 25th, 2009 at 3:59 am
You’ve got to me kidding me.
I thought SmartBrief was about thought-leadership, not meandering, middle-of-the-row nonsense like this.
This is so entry-level and wistful – where’s the framework, where’s the takeaway, where’s the leadership?
Please guys – up your game.
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Posted by Louise McGregor on December 28th, 2009 at 2:32 am
quote “we aren’t going to see people give up on social media over spammers or marketing. If that was the case, email would have been dead a long time ago.”
In the case of email, it got smarter. We can set spam filters, use firewalls etc. There’s a whole industry around the tools to protect us from evil email spam.
I think the same is already happening in social media. Commenting on blogs often requires sign in or some other identity check to stop spam comments, we can filter twitter feeds, we can choose who we sign up as friends or become fans of on facebook etc.
We are at long last getting to “permission marketing” where I will only see ads about products or from companies that I have allowed to reach me. So I see this problem as decreasing – I see less advertising in a social media hour than I would in a TV hour for example.
Posted by Jesse Stanchak on December 28th, 2009 at 6:30 am
Michele– I think it’s a question of volume. It’s easy to blow off that one skeevy guy at the party who wants to talk to you about selling diet pills. It’s much harder to cope with a steady stream of spam tweeters — to say nothing of the folk who aren’t spammers, just really, really bad at marketing. To really get used to it, we’re going to need better tools to help us filter.
Louise — I hope you’re right — and that networks hold up their end of the bargain when comes to asking permission.
Scott — The posts in the “Editor’s Take” section are really meant to be more of a springboard for a discussion, instead of me just telling everyone what to think. We do run a lot of case studies and best practices pieces, but we’re trying something new with these posts. Sorry you weren’t that into this one. I’ll keep trying.