Loved this article by iMedia’s Michael Estrin on the “social media bubble.”
The article reinforces many of the things we’ve been saying:
- No single vehicle is the end-all, be-all. Be realistic with your expectations. Accept the limitations of the tool before assigning objectives and goals for it.
- The shine of novelty is wearing off. Restaurants usually do their best business the first weekend they open; the good ones thrive because they provide consistent reasons for customers to return with friends. Golfers curse the game for 17 holes before hitting that pretty shot and scoring well on 18, and tell each other, correctly, “That will bring you back.” We roll our eyes at Facebook but every once in a while a good soul from our past reaches out to remind us that there are people out there who remember us fondly. When those moments become too few and far between, we grill in the backyard, take up tennis, or just step away from the computer sooner.
- The article provides a deeper take on something we’ve been saying: We agree that the expansive “connectivity” the medium provides dilutes the meaningfulness of all connections. Estrin sources an anthropologist–anyone who’s read my stuff on “social capital” knows I’m a geek for anthropological perspectives on social media–who opines that this is a direct reflection of how we are in real life. We have a few close friends and more loose acquaintances than we can count. Social media gives us a visual quantification of that. There’s a whole other blog post in there, maybe even a good argument.
- Marketers must pay heed to the inescapable perception–and perception is reality–that anymore, whenever we hear the word, “privacy,” it is usually preceded by phrases equivalent to, “Facebook is screwing up your,” or, “Social media is incompatible with.” Juxtapose those realities with heightened sensitivity and vulnerability to identity theft, and we have a serious issue to confront.
So, our take on the “bubble” question: Five years from now, we can’t guarantee that Facebook, for example, wasn’t this cute thing that happened. We can guarantee that whatever tools are still around look, feel and function differently than they do now. Quality standards will improve, the industry will take on a more clearly definable structure.
We also promise that the interactive nature of the Internet is here to stay. Perhaps online forums and email were the horse and buggy; Facebook and Twitter, for example, the Model T. Take a look out your office window at the parking lot and you’ll get some idea as to where this leads.
Estrin’s conclusion, and ours, is that your social media success is dependent less on how everyone else uses the tool and more on how you do. Therein begs the question:
Does the way you use social media make sense?
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