The Four Semi-Truths of Social Media

Posted on September 13, 2010 by marc meyer

First some quick definitions:

The definition of Nebulous according to Dictionary.com is hazy, vague, indistinct, or confused

Shelf life is the recommendation of time that products can be stored, during which the defined quality of a specified proportion of the goods remains acceptable under expected (or specified) conditions of distribution, storage and display

Depreciation is an expense that reduces the value of an asset as a result of wear and tear, or age. Most assets lose their value over time and must be replaced once the end of their useful life is reached.

Obsolescence is the state of being which occurs when an object, service or practice is no longer wanted even though it may still be in good working order.

Now what if we applied these to the world of social media?

My friend Danny recently sold his Boston Whaler. It was a boat no more than 2 years old and it was in pristine condition. He lost $5,000 on the transaction. His take? The boat depreciated as soon as he bought it. It was cool when he first had it he said, but after awhile, once the “newness” of it had worn off-it then was just an old boat that took up space.

Semi-truth #1: Our infatuation with the next, new, shiny, thing in social media depreciates as soon as we realize that it’s just another engagement, aggregator, application, thingy requiring more time, increased effort, permission to access, another profile creation etc., etc. and yet at the end of the day, delivers not much more than all the others. It’s like Danny’s boat.

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Mike, a friend and a CEO of a cool little boutique ad agency, used to use Twitter, but then claimed that it was too nebulous. (Note I quickly had to run and look up the word nebulous)

His agency has never been doing better, and yet just because he doesn’t use Twitter any longer, doesn’t mean that he doesn’t think it has value for him or his clients. To him, Twitter is what Twitter is- But the basic tenets of good business like customer service and doing the job right, go further for him than “some web app” that takes up too much of his precious client time. fair enough.

Semi-truth #2: The majority of social media applications can indeed be nebulous and though they may have the best of intentions with a cool interface-at the end of the day, they remain nebulous at best with a typical “make money via advertising” as it’s business model, and a primary marketing approach that is dependent on social “coolness” and going viral. Great news! Whether you use social media or not is not going to determine your success in business.

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Remember MySpace? I honestly can’t think of a better definition of social media obsolescence, though there are many to go around. Yes they have had “some UI issues”, but at one point they were THE social network that everyone was talking about. What happened? It still worked and yet people just didn’t or don’t want to use it anymore. The coolness wore off.

Semi-truth #3: What happened to MySpace can happen to any social network. At any point in time, if something better comes along, or if people just get bored with what you are offering, they will leave, and there is really nothing you can do to prevent that, even if it “ain’t broke.”

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Some of your social relationships are platform dependent and might not last as long as you think. What is the useful shelf life of a social media generated relationship? What is the sweet spot for a “social relationship” before it plummets into the trough of disillusionment? How long does it last? 6 months? 1 year? Think Dunbar.

Semi-truth #4: Similar to the the shelf life of social networks, some relationships in social media, though timeless, can be generally shallow and only last as long as both continue to use the application that bridged the engagement in the first place. If one departs, in general the surface like relationship ends. Thus the shelf life of social relationships is inversely proportional to a) Depth of engagement b) Type of platform and c) One got what one needed.

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Isn’t it interesting how shelf life, obsolescence, depreciation and nebulous can be so closely linked and aligned to the world of social media? It’s partly what makes social media great on the one hand, and so maddening on the other. It moves at the speed of sound and yet it’s innate fickleness is determined primarily by it’s makers and it’s users and not much else. Yes new technology may change behavior, but behavior can change or determine the path of technology.

Web 3.0 infograph

Posted on June 3, 2010 by marc meyer

No matter how great a social network might be, bells, whistles and what not- It doesn’t happen without people. It lives and dies by what the users do with it. How many great start-ups and applications die on the vine because no one knew about them? Is it because of a lack of marketing?

Is the social web the answer to our ailing economy?

Posted on November 2, 2009 by marc meyer

I’m going to guess that for a majority of the people out there, the answers that they seek are not in social media. Nor is social media the answer for a lot of businesses that have fallen on hard times. But damned if they are not looking.

They lift up the hood and they see this

Yet the number of searches going on for the term “social media” per month hover close to half a million. So for most, when they get those search results, and try to make heads or tails of them, it looks like this:

Yet people are wanting to know what it is and how they can make it work for their business. They’re searching for the answer. And the answers they find come from people who have never done it.

They are social media virgins

What social media has done for a lot of small businesses and large ones as well, is it has provided hope at a time when there is not a whole lot of good news to hang your hat on these days.

Hope is not a bad thing because it’s closely aligned with dreams, and right now for a lot of people, that’s all they can bank on. It’s why they wake up every day. Except hoping social media is going to change your business, it’s culture, and the people using it, and ultimately save it, is crazy. You’re looking for a quick fix and sadly, social media is not a quick fix. That doesn’t mean however, that it doesn’t work, because it does.

But there are people out there claiming that they can make social media work for your company and save your company quickly. Be wary. be very wary.

Social media is not the solution to what is ailing you. In fact, there is a strong likelihood that what is ailing you, is completely out of your control. But you are looking for ways to break out, to try something, anything that will turn the tide in your favor. So you’re looking at social media, looking at it hard.

The ripple effect of a bad economy if you will, causes you to look at everything in a different light. Including social media.

Yes, Social media is transformational, it just doesn’t happen over night. I wish it did, but it doesn’t. Chances are, the more you can wrap your arms around what social media can’t do and what it’s not, the better off you will be.

Are you in for the Long Haul?

Posted on November 6, 2008 by marc meyer

I’m going to start with a sports analogy here so bear with me. It’s not so bad that you won’t be able to understand where I am going. So here goes. Almost a year ago (December 12th 2007, to be exact), the Auburn University football team hired an offensive coordinator-the person or coach who would call the plays from the sidelines. At the time, much was made of this person’s background, pedigree and the potential and the excitement that he was going to bring to the program. High expectations, to say the least, were the only acceptable and assumed result. The football team needed something or someone that was going to generate offense, touchdowns, and wins. There was major Buzz. Sound familiar?

Not 10 months later, on October 8th 2008- Auburn fired the offensive coordinator. Why? Because they were not seeing the expected results quick enough. They were not getting what they thought they should get and what everyone told them they were going to get. Their expectations were not met.

Here’s what might have happened. Maybe they didn’t give it long enough? Maybe they grew impatient. Or perhaps Auburn’s head coach grew weary of hearing others tell him that it just was not working and they need to change it. Or maybe he wanted to try something else, or go with someone else that promised that they could deliver results too? Or maybe he wasn’t fully committed? Maybe, just maybe he wasn’t in it for the long haul?

Now let’s tie this into marketing, and social media marketing in particular. If you don’t give it a chance and you don’t embrace it from the outset then you are doomed. if you don’t coddle it and show it the attention it needs it will fail. If you don’t water it, it will whither away and die. Social Media requires commitment and I think a lot of people become impatient when they do not see the results. You see, we live in an instant gratification world and for some, if they ain’t seein’ it in the first day, they are fricken outta there. WRONG. You can’t treat social media and social media marketing like that. Wake up!

You need to ask yourself right now, are you in this for the long haul? Are you willing to commit to what it takes? Don’t bail before it becomes a success? Don’t be the thousands of companies and people that did not give something a chance. Be the few that were willing to stay the course, believed in their skills and trusted that they were doing it right!

10 social media ideas you can blog about

Posted on October 28, 2008 by marc meyer

In my efforts to provide readers and writers with the tools they need to write better content, here is a topical list of subjects that you could probably write a pretty decent blog post on. If you do, give me some props and some link love. Or better yet, we could discuss them as we go, we can just start with #1 and we can collaborate and work our way down the list together. Your choice.

What is Your Personal Social Media Strategy? Whether you are an agency, corporation, or an individual you need to have a plan.
SEO depends on social media. As much as some purists might not want to admit it, seo and social media are joined at the hip.
Should bloggers be held to journalistic standards? Bloggers can say and write some pretty outlandish things and get away with it, should they? Should they be held to the same standards as traditional journalists?
Communications Decency Act and Social Networks-Are we doing enough to police what is written and produced and generated on social networks?
Transactional conversations-is there now a value that can be placed on every conversation that takes place via social media?
Social Media is a time suck-how much time do you devote to social media per day and per week?
Whats more important? User experience or Technology? What drives the user? Is it the platform or the the experience?
The criteria for judging social media platforms? What is yours? what do you base your usage on? What should they all be judged on?
Social networking failures, you can’t force the action.-Not all social media/social networks succeed.
How to choose the right social network? Should they be more vertical, will they eventually be?

OK, so there’s your topics, pick one, any one and go to it! Soothe your inner writers block demons and be sure you let us all read it too!

10 Social Media, SEO, and Marketing questions/thoughts I had in Church.

Posted on October 20, 2008 by marc meyer

So I’m sitting in church and they’re passing around the collection plate. At which point I started thinking that clearly the church is hurting too because the little baskets are really flying down the aisles. Given that church is a great place to take stock of all things in ones life, I grabbed my smartphone and jotted down the following thoughts and questions.

Social media measurement and its associated metrics will change with the changing of external markets and it’s influencers.
As the economy changes, so do the rules of engaging the consumer and marketing to that consumer. They have to. They must.
Will or should social media engagement be measured differently in tough economic times? Yes?
Should or will the tone of marketing and social media marketing change?
Do peoples expectations of social media change during economic woes? No. because they haven’t set any precedents yet.
Do we change benchmarking for social media? My thoughts are we would have to, since there is zero empirical data to go off of.
How important does social media optimization and SEO now become? I think it’s huge.
If times were different would some social media startups have a fighting chance? or do they now have an even better chance of surviving? Which is it?
Will social nets thrive now or in the next 24 months given the current state?
Their success will be determined by what? The same metrics? Or can startups afford to be measureed by engagement only?

So I was still feverishly texting these into my notes section of my phone well after the collections had been taken. At which point, I looked up and saw that I was getting some nasty looks from the following: the people in the pew to my right, the people directly to the left of me, my wife, an usher, and my kids, who thought I was playing Bejeweled.

That’s ok though, because If I’m thinking of these things, maybe marketers, social media marketers, start-ups and even GOD might be too! Though divine intervention as a variable into any metric is a given, right?

19 things you should know about your world

Posted on October 16, 2008 by marc meyer

Did you know that China has over 253,000,000 internet users which amounts to about 17% of the world’s users?
Did you know that China will eventually become the #1 English speaking country in the world? Or that
The 25% of the population in China with the highest IQ’s …is greater than the total population of North America. In India, it’s the top 28%. Translation for teachers: they have more honors kids than we have kids.
There are over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google each month. Which speaks to a post I did about tech trends.
The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years. For students starting a four-year technical or college degree, this means that…half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. It is predicted to double every 72 hours by 2010.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10-14 jobs . . By the age of 38
Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the human brain.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor . . .1 out of 4 workers today is working for a company they have been employed by for less than one year
More than 1 out of 2 are working for a company they have worked for for less than five years.
According to former Secretary of Education Richard Riley . . The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.
We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist .
The U.S. is 20th in the world in broadband Internet penetration.(Luxembourg just passed us.)
1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met
The average MySpace page is visited 30 times a day.
The number of text messages sent and received every day exceeds the population of the planet
More than 3,000 new books are published . .
It’s estimated that 40 exabytes (that’s 4.0 x 10¹⁹) of unique new information will be generated worldwide this year
The amount of new technical information is doubling every 2 years
47 million laptops were shipped worldwide last year

Many thanks to Karl Fisch and Scott Mcleod who compiled alot of this data, which in the end, really gives you a sense of how very large this world is and how very small you are.