Social Media Hysteria

Social media is a buzz. Everyone is talking (screaming!) about it. It´s supposed to be the “next big thing”. I haven´t seen any remarkable results yet.

A while ago I posted about Facebook questioning its effectiveness as an advertising medium.

Nowadays everyone is on about Facebook in particular, not to mention all the other “hot” platforms like twitter.

Yesterday I come across a blog post by Seomoz´s Randfish in which he asks himself pretty much the same question: “What´s the buzz all about?”

“Social media has emerged as a “next big thing,” but in fact, it’s been around since the dawn of the Internet. Forums are social media. EBay is social media…” he goes on, “I worry that businesses and marketers are going crazy over social right now simply because it’s hot.”

There is a fundamental difference between search and social media. With search the audience is on the buying mood, with social media they are not.

When you offer your product or brand to a potential customer (potential enthousiast!), you gotta be carefull not to interrupt her with your unwanted ads, specially if you have not gained permission to do so. With search you have that permission.

I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago in Barcelona and there too everyone was buzzing about how great social media was. But if you looked closer, they were basically consultants and agency people bragging about their social media case studies and how much of experts they were. Well, as  Seth Godin writes in his book “all advertisers are liers”.

Social media is for sure a great tool for building a community around your brand, reaching new potencial customers or to help you spread your ideavirus. But it´s by far not as efficient as Search (both SEO and PPC) in responding to your customer´s most direct needs and therefore generating conversions to your website.

Does Facebook Garantee Success?

In my opinion Google improved advertising ROI because its ads appear when users are in the buying mood.

Most of us know that traditional advertising no longer works. Buying ads to generate awareness, make consumers spend, to  make profit and buy more ads doesn´t work anymore. Consumers are looking for very specific stuff, and it´s up to advertisers to catch them when they´re on the hunt, send them to their page and deliver.

People don´t want to be taken to places they don´t want to go. They don´t want to lose time with non-sense and don´t want to be interrupted.

Until Google (and Yahoo and MSN..) came up with ads showing on search results pages, advertisers in the net were doing just about that. They were executing traditional advertising instruments online. There was direct mail (spam), billboards and posters (banners and pop-ups)…all of which are unwanted, annoying garbage you´re not willing to pay attention to.

I still remember when I used to live in Sao Paulo and the streets were filled with huge billboards, everywhere you looked. It was horrible and it hugely contributed to the city´s visual contamination. Never again.

(Sao Paulo)

Facebook is a buzz.

I am still trying to figure it out why is facebook (or any social network in a broader sense) receiving so much attention and advertisers seem to be seeing a gold mine there. Maybe that´s because facebook is able to segment like no one (unique in the web). Or because it allows you to do “social advertising” (show ads to people and their friends)? or maybe just because everyone uses it (yesterday 13,5% of global users visited facebook, according to alexa.com)? hmmm, because it´s inexpensive? Probably all of them.

But does it mean it works?

I doubt.

Because in the end it´s just traditional advertising in a sense that it´s used to chase and yell at people. Aesthetically wise Facebook might not be like the streets of Sao Paulo, but still it is full of unwanted impressions people might pay little attention to. Besides, who wants to be friends with a brand? What does it add to the user? Will it be worth talking about it and waste your friend´s time?

Mr. Goldstein of SocialMedia Networks on NY Times: “Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”

The real power of internet is that it enables ideas to spread quickly, by themselves and at very low costs. My guess is that marketeers, organizations, people, enterpreneurs need to come up with great ideas that will do just that. Unless communcation strategies are put in place in Facebook in order achieve that goal, sticking to more conventional advertising might be a waste of potencial the social platform has to offer.