You know that dream where you’re naked….
Social Media and proper commentary on same is at a pretty interesting place right at the moment.
In one corner you have the decriers of Social Media positioning it as nouveau ‘Emperor’s new Clothes’ and on the other you have it’s staunch defenders who muster protective cries of ‘Luddite’, ‘Don’t Understand’, ‘Old Minded’ and if all else fails, ‘thicko’, on any who question it’s authoritie*. Currently I am as yet undecided in which camp i lie in.
I’m a dyed in the wool technologist having inherited a full gadget gene from my father. I am one of those poor informational ‘Twitcheters’ you see rather commonly now, constantly pressing buttons to feed myself the latest news, sport and other social currency. I believe the interactivity, especially in real time, that digital can provide us is truly amazing from a personal and from a marketers perspective.
But from a business perspective i am becoming much more questioning of the ROI on the money spent within standard page and fan engagement on the likes of Facebook. Certainly the per message/contact figures (i.e. the amount of money spent divided by the number of people who are exposed to said activity) are very high compared to any other media. And when overall marketing budgets are so very tight and have to deliver so much i would question whether or not in most cases standard SM support can be said to be delivering – especially when most of the content is so lazy and when so many of the people being communicated to may not either ever see it or even exist. (If you haven’t seen it check out https://www.facebook.com/corporatebollocks for a decent pastiche of the above).
I can already here the defenders sharpening their stones.
But i wonder if there aren’t many other people out their thinking the same especially at a time when Social Media’s main exemplar, Facebook, is under so much scrutiny after its relatively disastrous stock launch (even at $18 dollar’s a share it’s valued at more than 28 times its expected earnings for next year versus the 15times figure Apple is valued at).
Feel free to throw those stones….
*Copyright Cartman
