Photo Credit: Fabian Oefner
Discuss on Google+
Social Network Marketing is Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary
Social networks are not a quantum leap forward in marketing. Neither, as a general rule, was the internet (with only a handful of notable exceptions), and we've seen how many bubbles (e.g. the "Dot Com bubble") the belief in its revolutionary marketing has fueled that later burst.
Social networking isn't a bubble, anymore than the internet is a bubble, but much of what is driving the "social networking revolution" for marketers is, in fact, pure hype, a bubble waiting to burst in the faces of countless millions who have banked (in some cases literally) their hopes on it. Some new development in social networking could prove me wrong, but right now there is nothing in the realm of social networking technology that is an enormous departure from earlier forms of marketing. Evolution? Yes. Revolution? Absolutely not.
More to the point, if and when such a revolution should arise, it is less likely to come from the pure social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and more likely to be built upon pre-existing business models that work: Google Search, Amazon's e-retail business, LinkedIn's social-professional model, etc...
Why isn't Facebook or Twitter, or anything like them, a real revolution in social networking? I could rehash the endless debates about how many accounts are fake, the weaknesses of the various demographic targeting mechanisms, the general unwillingness of consumers to trust pure social networks with their payment information (e.g. credit cards), but it wouldn't matter if any and all of these problems were to be solved. There still wouldn't be a social network revolution for marketing.
Why? For two related reasons. 1) Most people don't trust their "friends" as much as marketers think they do. 2) Today's concept of "friendship" is evolving, becoming something different than yesterday's concept, and tomorrow's will be even more different.
Part 1: Who Do You Trust?
When I say people don't trust their "friends", I don't mean "a friend"; people do trust a friend. They don't trust "friends", in the sense that they know not all of their friends are a good source to trust for everything. We all either have, or can relate to the idea of, the friend whose taste in clothes or art doesn't match our own; whose business acumen is lacking; whose interests are very different from ours; etc...
Do we trust those friends to recommend clothing or artwork, to give us business advice, to inform us about our interests? Probably not. But don't tell a crowd of social network marketers that: too many either don't believe it, don't want to believe it, or can't sell that truth to their clients.
This is related to the "faux friends" problem: the belief, or rather delusion, of some social network marketers that everyone in your "Friends list" is actually your friend. Sometimes that's true, but very often it's not. But while that problem relates to people who are not your friends, this problem relates to people who are, but whose value to marketers is as insubstantial as any fake friends.
I'm a tech nerd. When I was on Facebook, none of the people in my "lists" were especially tech savvy. Did I care what any of them thought about technology? Not in the least. On Google+ I am surrounded by tech nerds, whose opinion of technology matters to me. Nonetheless, and depending on the specific technology, many of their opinions would have no affect on my purchasing practices. I won't buy an iPhone, no matter how many of the people in my Circles might sing praises and hosannas to Apple.
Note that the people I know in real life have few to no opinions of technology that are of value to me, while people I have never met in real life on Google+ often have opinions that do matter to me because I followed them precisely for our shared interests, and yet few of them matter enough to influence my purchasing practices. Of course, marketing isn't just about purchasing practices, but that's like saying sex isn't just about making babies: it's true, but if it never leads to the latter (in at least some cases), the former has absolutely no raison d'etre. Bills still have to be paid.
I'm certainly not some oddity. Most people have tastes or interests that very few if any of their friends, colleagues, and acquaintances share, and even when they do share similar interests, that doesn't mean they directly influence each other in ways that generate revenue for marketers, directly or indirectly, in either the short term or the long term. Yet social network marketers, all too often, live in a fantasy world where friends market to friends in some global "tupperware party" model.
That's not to say there aren't exceptions. Food marketing is one that, to some degree, transcends personal and interpersonal differences. Female fashion is another area where differences are minimized, relatively speaking, though of course individual fashion tastes do vary. Food and clothing are both, to different degrees, physiological needs. But these cases are the rare exception, and even then the benefit of social networking is evolutionary in general, not revolutionary. It isn't a new model of marketing, fundamentally, just a new medium for marketing. Reaching more people faster isn't revolutionary.
Google Search was revolutionary, not just because it was a new approach to search, but because never had such a technology effectively reached hundreds of millions, now billions, of people with advertising at the moment they were searching to buy with advertising relevant to their purchase, often from reliable sources. After all, if these advertisements were never from, reliable sources, Google Search would have died long ago. A reliable brand can be more trustworthy, at times, than the opinions of even your very best friend.
Amazon was revolutionary, not because as an online retailer they reached more people faster, but because they reached those people with nearly everything they were searching for, at competitive prices, and with a system for ranking and recommending things alongside user reviews. People trust quality reviewers of a product they have both purchased and used more than they trust the opinions of their best friends who either are not quality reviewers, have not bought or used the product, or both.
Social networking as it exists today (with the possible exception of LinkedIn) has nothing like this, nothing that radically changes the basic nature of the game and reinvents whole markets. Nothing. And no amount of hype will alter that today, tomorrow, or in a hundred years. Only a radically new approach to social networking that doesn't yet exist or isn't fully matured would do that, and then only if people embrace it.
I'm over-simplifying my arguments, of course, but not as much as those who believe the social networking hype oversimplify theirs. Social networking does have value, of course, even immense value if used correctly; just not as much as many marketers fantasize.
Coming Soon: Part 2: What is "Friendship" in a Connected World?
Post a Comment