SocialMediaBust

Q: Now that we're into 2011, have your perspective on social media changed? Do you still see investing in it for business purposes as a low yield thing?

Robert: Yes. I haven't seen any data to suggest otherwise. In the time we've cut back on our social media involvement, we've been able to allocate more time to business critical functions and to customer related activities that we've proven to work for us. Also, for me personally, I'm channeling my time and energy into writing off of social media. In 2010, I completed 3 revised editions for McGraw-Hill plus two books were published that were new or in a new format. There is a limit to what one can do with limited resources, and social media, at least the way the "pundits" tell us to use it, isn't worth it. It simply doesn't scale.

Q: What do you mean by "doesn't scale" in business terms.

Robert: Ok. If I write a book, or even articles for my websites (not blogs), those become permanently useful to me as a business. Eacy day, for as long as things don't change radically, people read them, or in the case of books, buy them. My initial efforts work, or scale no matter how many people are involved. If it's one person, or one million people, there is no additional work involved.

Social media doesn't work that way, because the platforms, including blogs, "treat" content within a chronological context. For example, your tweets, in effect, become invisible after a few hours or days. Blog posts, it turns out, seem to have a similar shelf life, although it's a bit different -- kind of halfway between a tweet or update and a web article.

If you want to use media, for whatever purpose, you want your investment of time and thought to keep working for you. Social media doesn't provide that. In essence, you need to be "there" every day. And for minimal results.

Q: So where are you going from here?

Robert: My PERSONAL interactive involvement on social media has come to an end AS A BUSINESS TACTIC. I may occasionally tweet something or involve myself in a LinkedIn conversation but that's for fun and interest and NOT for business promotion.

I'll continue to post on my blogs, because I enjoy it, and I can repurpose content easily.

However, that's not to say you won't "see" me anymore. We have moved to a "push" mentality, something all the supposed experts tells us we shouldn't do. Everything is automated. New blog posts are sent automatically to social media platforms. Article links and summaries from our huge online libraries are sent automatically. Our involvement on a human level is very limited.

Q: Do you still have an interest in the phenomenon of social media?

Robert: Yes. But not so much as a business tool. I'm interested in it as a mode of communication, and how it will affect society, a little like the stuff that Jaron Lanier has written about in You Are Not A Gadget, but a little more practically oriented. Less philisophical.

I dearly want to finish my book on social media which has kept me more involved in social media far longer than I would have liked. But, after all, if you are going to write a book about a "place", you kind of have to visit the place.

Q: Thank you. Perhaps next time we can talk about the challenges of writing a book on social media.

Q: You've commented that you've seen significant shifts in how people use various social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Could you address that a bit?

A: I'm certainly not a long term early adopter of these platforms, but I can share what I am seeing over the last year. The fact that it's such a relatively short period makes it potentially more profound.

I've spent most of my time on Twitter and when I started, it was a lot of fun. People were tweeting about the music they were listening to, and people were having things like trivia games -- it was really like a real life party in many ways except in wee bits. Within just about a year, I don't see ANY of that anymore. Zip. Zilch. Also, conversation has diminished a lot. Where before people were really trying to have conversations, sometimes succeeding within the 140 character limits. Now, that's less frequent.

What I'm seeing more of is promotional links, and a whole lot of spam has taken the place of interaction. Now it's also true that one's impression of Twitter largely depends on which particular segment of it you frequent and who you follow, so while I suspect this is a general trend, it may not be.

On LinkedIN, the groups concept should work, but it doesn't. It's still the best place for conversations, but each month the good stuff gets drowned out by the bad or promotional.

Q: So you see this as a decay, then?

A: Yes. Social media that isn't social, but just a platform for ads and junk is just another venue where you have to search and filter and search to find the good stuff. Unfortunately, in completely unmoderated settings as we find in a  lot of social media, what you get is decay, and losing what made the thing useful and fun in the first place.

Q: if it is decaying, how come growth is so explosive?

A: I don't think it's a coincidence that the decay parallels the explosive growth. I can't account for the growth except to say that I believe it will "ungrow", and that this has already started. Among young people the rate of account abandonment on Facebook is about 20%. The account abandonment on Twitter is about 80% although it's hard to tell if people just aren't tweeting but prefer to read, or not.

Q: Can it turn around again, do you think? What would it take?

A: The current social media sites were based on socialness and having fun, but the explosion of ecommerce, and not coincidentally, spam and junk artists is going to continue, unless there is some means of eliminating that. Whether there is or not is hard to tell, but the solution would look somewhat different than what we have, which is the worst of both worlds. The decay results in social media that isn't very effective for business, and neither is it much fun (or at least it's not as much fun).

Q: So, no solutions?

A: Yes. Control. Our social media platforms are out of control in the sense that almost anything goes. If people were held accountable, and could lose their access if they abused the priveleges of being part of it, that might work. Amazon.com took a step in that direction when it required that comments would only be accepted from people who had made purchases from amazon, thus removing some of the perception of anonymity. I think the only way to stop the decay (and this very thing happened on usenet/newsgroups) is to verify identities somehow, and enforce rules. That, unfortunately, is not something easy to do, or palatable in a society where people feel they have the right to do what they want. Maybe we can talk about that another time.

We have a guest interviewer: Sam from Ireland who asked the following questions in email.

Q (Sam): I read somewhere that you have predicted the bursting of the social media `bubble´ in the future. What exactly might that entail?

A: I'm betting on 2012, and it will be like 1999-2000. Outright failures and closures of marginal social media companies and those that support social media (eg. client software, plugins, etc). The field will contract to include less than ten players, with the smaller ones dying off. And when I say ten players, I include the blog hosts like Wordpress and Blogger.

Some companies will be bought and absorbed. My guess is that of the major players today, Twitter will be bought, or it will end up gone in some way, simply because it's got very weak fundamental numbers and very limited features. When 80% of people who try you leave, and only about 7% participate much, you have some serious financial issues.

If YouTube was not owned by google I'd suggest something big happening with them since they lose massive money every year. I would suggest they might try something to generate revenue. I can't see them accepting losses forever.

Lots of consultants will be out in the cold if their only skills relate to social media. Marketers will be faced with some harsh realities.

A lot of this will be driven by the realization (something pros actually know and talk about) that ad revenue on social media platforms is miserable, as are conversions. Ad costs are too high, and sales are too low.

Webmasters and others in the general wider industry have know all this for a good 8-9 years -- that monetizing forums, blogs, etc, is very very tough. This is so similar to the situation in the last bust.

When the social media buzz wears off (when the hope fades), the bottom line kicks in and realizing it's never going to pay off will end up drying up the venture capital.

Poof. And guess what keeps Twitter alive? Venture capital. If you want advance warning, watch the venture capitalists. When they go off social media, watch out.