I am beginning to feel a little nervous about Social Media. I am beginning to get a little skeptical of all the Social Media initiatives around me.
But then I also read that a little anxiety and nervousness can be a good thing. A little increase in the heartbeat before you meet that someone special or before that important presentation is helpful. It just means that you care about what you are doing and want to be successful.

I read this on David Spinks‘ blog

There’s a problem, and deep down, we’re all aware of it…but to do something about it would make many feel hypocritical and so they push it aside whenever it’s brought up.

The Social Media Growth if allowed unchecked will be the next bubble to burst. There, I said it. The cat is out of the bag.

An important lesson from the dot-com bust (should be a lesson from common sense actually!!) was that companies that don’t make money cannot survive. Advertising, no matter how clever, cannot save you. Consider online pet-supply store Pets.com. Its talking sock puppet mascot became so popular that it appeared in a multimillion-dollar Super Bowl commercial and as a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. But Pets.com was never able to give pet owners a compelling reason to buy supplies online. After they ordered kitty litter, a customer had to wait a few days to actually get it. And let’s face it, when you need kitty litter, you need kitty litter. The company lost money on most of the items it sold. Amazon.com-backed Pets.com raised $82.5 million in an IPO in February 2000 before collapsing nine months later.

Companies chased eyeballs, saying “don’t worry, revenues will follow”. People had business plans that had no mention of revenue. Web agencies popped up all over the place: building websites without a goal. You only needed “Web Programmer” or “Java” written on your resume to charge $200/hr for your services.

Fast forward to 2007. Similar story but same result. They said,

Buy the biggest house you can. Don’t worry about the downpayment. Don’t worry about the principal. Flip the house. Cash out. Live the “American Dream”.

We are still feeling the effects of the last one.

Fast forward again to the “Now” Network and we again see signs of the Social Bubble

• A search for “Social Media Consultant” on LinkedIn yields 46,069 results. “Social Media Expert” gives 12,426 results, “Social Media Evangelist” yields 1749 results and “Social Media Guru” gives 1477 results. For an industry that is 2-3 years old, that is a really large number. [Lesson: better to choose "guru" than "expert" ]
• At most of the digital conferences, the theme is “social”.
• VC money being poured into social networks, microblogs, real time search engines and other cool SM startups that have no clear revenue models. “We will eventually get there”. There is so much free in the industry that advertising alone couldn’t possibly sustain it.
• Each company and their mother is jumping into Social Media, rushing to build a Facebook fan page or Twitter following. According to Bertrand Russell, “Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those that are not regarded as members of the herd.” It is the fear of being “left out” or not being part of the herd that is driving a lot of companies into Social Media. The prime ingredient for a bubble is the desire to do something because everyone else is doing it.

Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, projected that close to 40% of social networking initiatives at Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will will be classified as failures.

I Love Social Media: Don’t get me wrong. I do believe Social Media has gone mainstream. I do believe that the SM tools when used in the right manner can increase both personal and business productivity, improve customer engagement levels, make innovation faster & cheaper and build new relationships.

2010 is supposedly the year when Social Media will be tested. Investors will start demanding some visibility into returns and cash flows.

To keep the Social Media Wave going, it is our responsibility as Social Media Leaders/Experts/Consultants/Evangelists/Gurus/Advocates (whatever fancy term you want to use) to ask the right questions:

• QUESTION 1: HOW IS IT GOING TO BENEFIT THY COMPANY?
• Engagement, loyalty, brand building are all good things. But they are all warm and fuzzy words that others in the firm may not understand. Start thinking and talking in a language that your CFO/CEO understands. Will customer engagement and brand loyalty result in increased sales or lower costs? List down all the potential benefits and see if/how they can translate into $$$. Any marketing initiative can only be sustained if it has the support of the folks who control the dollars.

  And PLEASE, stop chasing followers. Don’t fall into the trap of “How to build 10,000 followers in 10 days”. Success in Social Media is not measured by the number of followers you have. This is not a competition on “My brand has more followers than your brand”. Social Media is for the long haul. It takes time to build the relationships and start seeing ROI. If it hurts to hear that, don’t do it.

• QUESTION 2: HOW IS IT GOING TO BENEFIT THY CUSTOMERS?
  Social Media is not a channel for self promotion. It is frustrating to see so many corporate Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter feeds ONLY talk about the firm. They are in a broadcast mode. They are not engaged with the customer. They are not listening to the customer. They are not solving customer problems. They are not building loyalty.
  You need to think how you can make the customer experience better or simplify their life or add more value.

I am planning to be at the OMMA Global Event in NY next week. The theme for this year is

The New Socialism: welcome to a world where social networks, social media applications and microblogging services become our central means of engaging online. Many industry watchers believe the answer to online advertising’s oldest problem lies inside social media’s walled gardens: that is, how to bring the estimated $500 billion spent annually on offline brand advertising to the Web.

Given that OMMA is giving so much importance to social media, I was surprised that OMMA has not used any of the social media tools on the conference website. The website’s main purpose is to give participants information on the conference agenda, program schedule and speakers bio. And that’s where it stops.

The challenge with most conferences is that you don’t know the other participants, their background, their areas of interest. Won’t networking be easier and you get more value from your investment of time and money if OMMA had done some of the following?

• Create communities of interest: the conference has 11 different themes or track sessions including Mobile, Search, Metrics, Gaming, Video, Behavioral etc. It could have easily created participant communities based for each of these sessions to encourage interaction and networking.
• Ability to interact with speakers: Along with the speaker bios, it would have been helpful if I also knew the link to their blog and/or twitter handle.
• Ability to interact with the sponsors: Sponsors often complain that the breaks during sessions aren’t enough to interact with participants and share with them the value proposition of their tools/products. OMMA could have created more value for the sponsors by allowing participants to interact directly with them. That way, they could have used the breaks for follow-up sessions and shortened the sales cycle.
• Ability to post questions ahead of time: With knowledge of some of participant questions beforehand, the speakers can not only make the session more interactive but also fine tune it to the audience needs.

I do still believe that it will be a great conference to attend given the Who’s Who of Digital Marketing speaking at the event. But I would like the next Social Media Conference to leverage some more social media tools.

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/guptanitinonline

0 people like this post.

Like 

Why do we participate in online social communities? Well, to begin with, we are social animals and the social network provides us with a sense of affiliation, an opportunity to help and seek assistance; and finally boost our self esteem.

0 people like this post.

Like