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
Hi Marcelo -- I'd like to take part in that bet about Parranda. :) As one of the founders, though, I should clarify that we don't see ourselves as a *social network*, and in no way do we even hope to compete with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Rather, we see ourselves as the nucleus of an offline/online community focused on a number of very specific actions that ultimately may benefit Puerto Ricans by leveraging the diaspora. And we're a non-profit. That may not be sexy enough to excite people who are solely focused on tech innovation (I make a living in that world, so I know the biases). But we believe we are focused on a very real set of needs, and we are devoting a lot of time and energy to addressing those needs. If you are interested, I'd be happy to talk more offline. Lots of stuff coming up in the first six months.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Send me your email. The bet is simple: Pachanga will not be a "major" player. There is this perverse thing in one of the Facebook groups where they are always trying to find "the one that will destroy Facebook"... which is, by the way, always posted in Facebook. For the reasons described above, I don't see something as limited as a social network aimed at the Puerto Rican diaspora as being anywhere near major. Moreover, when it comes, specifically to Puerto Rico, I just don't see that much of an urgency. I lived in Puerto Rico for many years, recently attended my 40th High School reunion there (I'm from Perpetuo Socorro) and quite frankly, see that even the highly specialized groups in Facebook just don't have that much traction. This is not either ill-willed or polyannish... it could be, for all I know, selective blindness on my part, but the numbers just don't add up. Having said that, I wish you the best of luck
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