A good friend of mine and a guy whom I both respect and like recently wrote in his Zeus of Marketing blog (http://jrgrana.com/blog/2012/12/27/its-a-wrap-2012-was-a-blah-year-for-digitalsocial) that 2012 was a blah year for social media.
While I tend to agree in general with some of Jesus' "non-soap-box" advice, there are another two important aspects which hobbled social media and will continue to hobble social media:
(1) It is social, but it ain't media
I've been saying that for ages (or what passes for ages today). Social media's major problem is that it is social, not media.
People go to social media outlets to socialize and network either personally or professionally. They don't go to look at advertising. As a result, social media moved away from the implicit promise of "results" into the muddy waters of "attitudinal" and it is definitely a non-transactional environment.
The end result is that social media zealots have the same discourse now that TV zealots had before... talk about attitude, buzz, engagement and a whole bunch of fuzzy pseudo-metrics.
The lousy part there, too, is that while most clients could easily measure some degree of transactions they don't even have attitudinal benchmarks, so even if social networks could move these metrics, most still would not be able to measure the lift or non-lift.
Bummer
(2) There are too many "anti-Facebook" networks muddying up the waters
Americans love underdogs. And, of course, compared to the 800-pound gorilla, ANY newly-hatched network is an underdog. But, honestly, do we really need yet another pseudo network? I even have a running bet (a bottle of wine) with friends about whether or not the newest, bestest, shiniest pseudo-network (Parranda.org) will even be a player a year from now.
Why?
In contrast to television, where you can have as many networks as you want because the extent of our involvement is laying back, eating Doritos and scratching our bellies, a social network requires work. Real work. And, if Facebook is monopolizing most of your social network time, just how much time and energy do you really have for Parranda? Or Que Pasa? or the zillion others that exist only as minute little pilot-fish networks?
To sum it up... it has been a blah year? Probably. But that's because expectations were misplaced and, face it, plain wrong
