Thoughts on what the f**k social media is

18Nov08

Marta Kagan’s presentation, “What The F**k Is Social Media?”, made its second pass through our inboxes last week. We had some internal dialog about it the first time, but this time we thought we’d share some of those thoughts here.

It’s true that a lot of people are online and reading / writing blogs, etc. But how many of them are regular creators / authors / readers / collaborators? According to Technorati’s 2008 State of the Blogosphere report, of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati since 2002, only 7.4 million of them have posted something in the last 120 days; 1.5 million in the last seven days; 900,000 in the last 24 hours. That makes for a lot of dead blogs.

Now that social media has lost some of it’s shininess (not in a bad way, it’s just not as new as it used to be), people are really thinking about how social media is practical and not just focusing on all of the potential it has, which is what I think this presentation does.

Social media does have the potential to be revolutionary, but only to a point. Look at all of the other things that were set to “revolutionize” – radio, TV, etc. While these mediums have no doubt reshaped the ways we use technology and to some degree, communicate, they haven’t created the marketing / branding utopia many thought they would. So, I’m guessing social media will follow a pretty similar route.

We’ve already seen plenty of examples where social media has been approached in a less than ideal way – I’m thinking about blogs that are ‘secretly’ sponsored by corporations, poorly done “viral” videos meant to look like consumer created work, co-branded social networking sites that fall apart after their sponsor comes on and redesigns them, and the list goes on …

It seems like advertisers are so excited about a new place to make their mark that they’re not really thinking about why social media is popular to begin with. It’s popular because it belongs to the people. Not the brands. Social media is fundamentally about people having conversations, and when those conversations stop being about people and start being about brands by brands, we begin to have the same problem that we’ve had with every other kind of media.

So, is this to say that marketing and social media don’t belong together? No. Absolutely not. I think that marketing belongs in the blogosphere / on YouTube, etc. but I also think that we always need to be cognizant of the fact that these kinds of new media should predominantly be about the people who use the technology.

The whole transparency / honesty / listening piece is key to successful new media campaigns – the question is, are brands ready to be all of these things? Are they ready to listen and make themselves vulnerable? I’m not sure, but I hope so. I love new media branding / marketing, but I can also see the dangers in using it to death, or using it incorrectly.

* This post originally appeared on the space150.com thinkfree.ly site

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