Why Everyone Over-estimates Business Success On Social Media
Written by Robert Bacal | 
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| The Never Ending Social Media Interview - Business and Social Media |
Once again, a question from Sam in Ireland:
Q:In an article on `Bad Advice´, you wrote: "Since many social media initiatives are failing silently, since few businesses want to have it known they can´t
make social media work (or they don´t evaluate), you are more likely to go wrong than right." Can you elaborate on this a little?
(what I meant was if you go by what you see you will severely overestimate the effectiveness of social media to business)
A: Sure. In April I started monitoring Twitter accounts that appeared to belong to small businesses. I found numbers that suggest (not definitive but suggestive)
that the failure rate of small businesses on twitter as measured by them giving up, and becoming inactive was about 20% a MONTH.
These are the unseen failures. Nobody sees them. They just disappear, and some of these companies were very active on Twitter, then bang. Gone. Why?
Because it didn't work.
If I run a consulting business advising on computer systems, let's say, and I try Twitter, send a few thousand tweets and do my best to learn, and then after a year, realize
I'm wasting my time, do you think I'm going to waste time telling everyone how badly I failed? Of course not.
One of the things you almost never do is admit your business is failing at anything (there are some exceptions).
So, the failures are silent. and massive at least as far as I can tell for small businesses.
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Scoundrel
MicroThoughts
You can tell your "social media expert" is a scoundrel or utterly ignorant if they use the phrase "They just don't get social media". The truth is that the expert doesn't get social media, or how human beings work and is unable to come up with anything better to refute arguments or disagreements about social media.
Mashable no-no
In response to a Mashable article about how Starbucks supposedly used social media to bring one million people into their stores in a day:
This is just terrible "journalism". First, the giveaways brought the people in. Second, we have no idea how many people came for the freebies hearing on it from Twitter or not. Third, They could have pulled people into their stores with this promotion in any of a number of ways. This is not a social media success, anymore than having sandwich board guys outside of each store would constitute a success for loitering.
Learn From Competition?
Some believe you should monitor and emulate your competition on social media. Here's a thought:
If you look at your competitors, will you end up looking like your competitors? The ongoing issue in any marketing or even in developing a network is how to standout FROM the competition, and not to BE like the competition.
Social Media Frauds
You know someone isn't worth following if they retweet compliments given to them by others. They are either frauds who are better at self-promotion than they are in their alleged area of expertise, or they are so insecure that they have to -- just have to, make sure that everyone knows how wonderful other people think they are. Hint: Run away. These folks are like empty drums. Bang on the outside and you get a cool sound. Empty inside -- nothing to offer.
Immersion
You cannot fully understand social media solely by being immersed in it. In fact, one reason why there is so much bad information about social media is that most of it comes from immersed people. The full picture is only available to people who can DISTANCE themselves emotionally and intellectually and see social media from the outside -- as most human beings view it.
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