The Teckki Says

Last week I attended two seminars, one that had a panelist on social networking, the other was about social networking. This topic seems to be dominating the business community right now. My thoughts? This will die down at some point.

Anything that has a huge audience mass and astronomical growth rates is going to attract businesses willing to exploit the numbers. However, social media seems to be built for two reasons:

1. To actually be social - Who would have thought it? I can share with a group of people my thoughts, pictures and videos, and get back a response. I can be a part of a conversation. I can make friends around the globe. This is great. Since I am in front of a computer for much of the day, this is a nice diversion. Since I’m on the phone the other part of the day, I can keep up with those diversions. I can continue my social life with the help of these tools.
2. To make the founders rich - Some of the college-aged kids who created this stuff quickly realized that they could become billionaires before they matriculated. At that point, does matriculation matter? Now, in addition to doing something they did for fun or creativity, they can hang out with the stars.

Here are two things that Social Media hasn’t done:

1. Make money – the ultimate investors, like Fox who purchased MySpace, and Google who purchased YouTube, have yet to make money from their investments. MySpace in particular is suffering the ultimate blow – a mass migration from it, it has suffered spectacular losses, and has fallen out of favor to Facebook. YouTube, while still popular, is still a financial sinkhole, and Google is still trying to get the ad revenue to work out. I personally give them more hope since their founders are only a decade removed from their college careers, but time is running out before they become what Microsoft has become to this generation – an old school company that young talent would rather seek employment elsewhere.
2. Turned into major advertising mediums - Actually, this point should be first, because it better explains why they are not making money. Why haven’t they turned? Could it be that people want to be social? I look forward to videos, pictures and messages, but only from the people I want them from. We might want to take a lesson from email here. While still popular, laws eventually had to be created to regulate advertising via email. It was too easy and cheap to send millions of messages to people who did not want them and could not turn them off.

I think that we forget why radio, TV and print are still effective – because people choose to use those mediums, and accept that they will be marketed to. Like cell phones and email addresses, social media are much more personal, and by that very nature, much more filtered.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that any medium can be viable under the right circumstances. As cliché-ish as that sounds, I believe that social media is personal media, not a bunch of people out there waiting to buy something we are selling. Blogs, email, websites and other old 'hotties' have not gone away, but they have found a place and purpose that lets them thrive beyond the hype.