Comments on: Social Media Quagmire

By: Jillian

Jillian — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 05:01:06 +0000

May I dare suggest that the internet and its advertiser based businesses are mirroring the early days of television?

Eventually a few guys figured out a way to make people pay subscriptions for cable TV. My dad gladly signed up as soon as cable was available in our neighborhood. He said that he would gladly pay for TV that didn’t bombard you with commercials and showed a movie all the way through without commercial interruption.

That is the challenge for the next generation of internet and social media. To become the next cable TV.

By: Aaron Brazell

Aaron Brazell — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 21:19:10 +0000

You’re too cynical, Mark. I like you. Stick around, you’ll fit in juuuuust fine.

By: Mark Bean

Mark Bean — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:59:22 +0000

I get value from Gmail, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Reader, FriendFeed, Linkedin, and more recently Disqus. Only one of those services I would pay for (gmail). Big firms buy up or invest in small firms for the talent, the customer base or the features of the code in hopes they can turn a profit offering solutions to their existing customer base – who PAY for things. VC’s invest in companies that they think they can flip to the same bigger players. It’s up to the individual how much they decide to invest in social media or any other online service. Fair play to anybody who can persuade you to do that. That’s their game.
Without a palatable income base how can any business expect long term loyalty and how can we as users not expect at some point our efforts to build them up will have been wasted, The benefits of using a social service must outweigh the potential that you may be peppered with ads or lose your investment in the time you have spent there. If they let you export your data at the end of the experiment like Pownce did you pretty much have no real leg to stand on. Pownce was really just a Twitter clone whose business model was the resale of Amazon S3 space at a huge markup. Nobody fell for it so they shut up shop and got ‘real’ jobs.

By: Jason Baer

Jason Baer — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:47:27 +0000

Bingo. It’s not about the tools, it’s about the conversation and that takes place in a lot more places than one or two. You gotta be prepared to engage broadly (but not everywhere because you can’t keep quality high when you spread customer engagement too thin).

By: Ernesto

Ernesto — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 22:55:27 +0000

Pownce just sucked. It was good that they took it out back and put it down. Should have been done a while ago.

Beside that, yes, this is a good lesson in diversification of your “product or service offerings”.

Next topic.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:28:09 +0000

I’m not sure it is so significant of a problem. Look at it this way – if it is useful for you to be on, there will either be a large user base or a highly engaged user base.

Tools are quickly becoming commoditized. Does it truly matter if the one you are working with is on Twitter or on Pownce? Where a community ends up is largely based on initial happenstance.

The community is what matters, not the tool. One does business with people, not technology. A large community or a highly engaged community will not disapear with the tool – it will simply migrate to a new tool. As long as you can migrate with it, I think whatever business you’ve build up will largely migrate as well. Right now Pownce users are probably exchanging Twitter account information (or talking about the open source successor to Pownce… – more proof that communities sustain themselves).

I for one use Twitter :) @mmayernick

By: Zvi Band

Zvi Band — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:41:59 +0000

That’s definitely a big concern for any developer, especially one who deals with “Web 2.0″ if we dare use that term here. We are more and more reliant on third parties – Amazon for our products, Google for our maps, Twitter for our conversations. The second they shut down, change, or have any slight technical issues, we’re out of luck. And as they are almost all free services, there’s nothing stopping them. Diversification is the only free lunch, and never becoming so dependent on any one service.

If you would like to put on a tin foil hat, we could say that all net-reliant businesses are taking a risk. With all our IP invested on products and services that rely on a relatively free and uncontrolled medium, what happens if it all goes away? Or, more likely, what happens if Net Neutrality becomes a real concern for business owners?

By: Jay

Jay — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:11:27 +0000

It’s definitely good food for thought and I think Jason’s right.
They’re tools for use but no one should put all their eggs in one basket unless they only have 1 egg.
Social networks for companies are about building (or augmenting) their brand. I don’t mean that in the skeptical marketing sense, it’s about interacting with customers (Jet Blue) and finding “real use” which in turn promotes the values of brand.
You couldn’t be successful if you ignored emails and only responded to written post, or only answered hotmail.com addresses.

Any consultant on social technologies should have “if then” contingencies and iterative levels of increasing participation. Maybe Twitter, or Pownce, is how you start but certainly not the laurels a successful participant would rest upon.

By: simonbaptist

simonbaptist — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:49:58 +0000

A thought provoking post.

You talk about needing more than conversations, etc. and showing ROI. Well, what if the Motrin folks had hired a Social Media expert, it’s a big leap, but you could suggest they might have avoided the debacle that has definitely hit them where it hurts, sales.

As for services changing, etc. this is why I’m enjoying seeing tools that allow meta contributions like tarpipes come along. And I would suggest that any consultant/social media director that is not engaging with all new sm products is not doing 50% of their job.

By: Andrea_R

Andrea_R — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:19:43 +0000

How about build your own social network? ;)