Is Social Media Killing Social Media?
Posted by Al Scillitani on July 24, 2008 – 10:47 amWith everyone trying to “get in” on the social media bandwagon, will the influx of unprepared and mismanaged social media programs and millions of nonsense postings deter people from using them?
Let’s discuss the first issue, unprepared and mismanaged social media programs. Seems like everyday another program pops up. Either a new one with new functionality or a new one trying to make a current program you are using more functional. It is way to confusing. Then you finally sign up to find out it sucks and no one is using it anymore. By the end of the month you are now a member of 15 sites that you no longer visit.
Another problem with these programs are their capabilities and capacities. It frustrating as hell to sign into a program only to find the program is down. It seems like people are creating programs with no vision or plan. They are building the program and then waiting to see if it works and what it evolves into. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (let the people decide what it will be become), however you have to be ready and adapt accordingly. You see an influx of users, immediately expand. You see the users starting to complain for more functionality, immediately create this functionality. The current programs are not scalable nor are they ready for change due to poor planning.
Second issue is the actual content being posted. I will admit, sometimes I post a comment or blog about something that will not interest 99.9999% of people. I am talking about the people the post just to post over and over. There are millions of them. These posts show up in search results or end up getting read because I clicked to follow them on Twitter, but didn’t realize they never have anything to say. I end up unfollowing, but it still wasted my time and I just end up following someone else hoping for some real conversation.
I think time is the key to all of this. When you think about it, how many hours a day do you spend on blogs, twitter, and other sites? Out of those hours, how much time was wasted because you got absolutely no beneficial information at all? This is why social media will end up killing itself. There is still no real definition of what social media is and is not, no definite way to track ROI on the time you are spending on these sites, and it is growing so fast there is no way to filter out useless information and prevent thousands of broken programs from being created.
Britekite, Twitter, and all of these are great, but unless a company gets out there and defines social media and brands itself as the leader, I am not sure the social media hype will be around much longer. Unless this happens, my prediction is in a few years people will revert back to reading trusted forums and blogs and that is about it. It is much easier and much less time consuming for me to go to SearchEngineWatch.com and read posts from Nathania Johnson then to read 20 blog posts and go to 10 social media sites. Let someone else filter out the junk and post the quality information you are looking for. It is kind of the theory behind “The 4-Hour Workweek,” by Timothy Ferriss. People will start to outsource their information gathering.
7 Responses to “Is Social Media Killing Social Media?”
I am SO FAMOUS!
Thanks for the mention.
Great insights, most of which you stole from our coffee conversation yesterday.
By Nathania Johnson on Jul 24, 2008
“Great insights, most of which you stole from our coffee conversation yesterday.”
If that was true, it would have been titled, “Wii’s at Starbucks” or “Why do Starbucks pastries have 4000 calories?” hhaha
By Al Scillitani on Jul 24, 2008
At least some networks have a cute error page, although many people are seeing too much of the Whale…
By Linda Bustos (Roxyyo) on Jul 24, 2008
Hey Al,
I don’t think Social Media per se is going anywhere.
There will always be a need to interactively reach out to customers online. The power of that is to great.
There is a distinct difference in time wasters and “real” social media.
I think we are at an early stage of this so called “transformation”.
Tons of these sites will not be around in 3 years, some will fall, some will rise.
I see your point though that no one body really controls social media like Google has controlled search. There are def. downsides to that.
Remember social media is simply conversation. How do you leverage conversation to obtain a positive end goal. That is the real question here.
By Brian Chappell on Jul 24, 2008
Dearest Al -
I agree with you almost completely. This may come from the fact that by no means am I a social media expert, and might not realize the true capabilities of it.
However, it seems to me that in order to become a reliable source for people to follow, one has to dedicate beacoups of time to sifting the gold from the silt. I’m not willing to do it, but I do rely on others to. Just like the PPC and SEO info sites I visit, I stick among the few that I know traditionally do a great job in summarizing news from a plethora of sources so I don’t have to do it myself.
I don’t think social media is necessarily on its way out, but I do think it must evolve to survive. I’ve recently been thinking how these changes will affect the marketing aspects of social media - while it may not make sense for a company to hire resources to become leaders - specifically because focusing the marketing strategy around 1 product or service isn’t likely to gain an abundance of disciples - it is likely to make sense to go out and find unaffiliated leaders who give their followers recommendations that are related to the site.
Rather than generating interest based around an extremely specific topic from a handful of sources, buying a few hundred leaders who already have followers interested in what your company is selling may make a significant difference to overall awareness, traffic and sales.
Yours,
Rick Ferguson
By Rick Ferguson on Jul 24, 2008
Brain,
I hope social media doesnt go anywhere. Your statement, “There is a distinct difference in time wasters and “real” social media,” is the key.
I am not sure the general public knows about this distinction because no firm, that I know of, has taken ownership of social media and properly defined it and branded it for the public. I still see the opportunity for a few companies to do this. Without this, social media has a bigger chance of falling apart.
By Al Scillitani on Jul 25, 2008
Well if Google continues to roll out the patents and applications they are building currently they could do just that.
RE: FriendRank and FriendConnect
By Brian Chappell on Jul 25, 2008