Tech PR: All That Twitters is not Gold
At the height of the mid-1990s dot.com mania, Business Week adorned its cover with a tulip. Later, when real estate became the next sure thing, Business Week warned of a bubble. So when BW’s Stephen Baker writes “Beware Social Media Snake Oil” (12/14/09), I take notice. As should you.
Just as 1999 saw the last great splurge of the dot.com era before an inevitable correction, will 2009 be the crest of all the hype about social media before reality sets in? Business Week thinks that might be the case. One sure sign of an imminent backlash is this year’s explosion of “experts” promising to lead everyone to social media riches. Baker jokes about the number of out-of-work real estate agents now posing as social media gurus — and there are, in fact, quite a few who do so. Whenever everybody and his dog (or realtor) jumps into a market, run for your life. The end is nigh.
To be clear, Baker does not pan social media. He urges companies to look for actual results that put this new phenomenon in perspective.
Whenever some innovation comes along, its proponents always proclaim the end of the Old Order. Such was the case with eCommerce in the 1990s. And, at every holiday shopping season, analysts still get worked up about the “rising growth of online sales.” The fact is, according to Forrester Research, online sales account for just 6% of total revenue in the U.S. retail sector. Sure, online retail is important — but it’s certainly not the whole thing.
The same is true of social media. It’s new, it’s hot, it’s exciting, it’s changing traditional media. And, like all movements touted as “tranformative,” it will most certainly experience a backlash and correction, after which we’ll all have a clearer understanding of how it works, and its place in the overall mix of media, marketing and communications. Actual metrics will replace the practice of taking social media on faith, e.g., assessing its value via “numbers of Twitter followers,” blog mentions and YouTube hits.
To digress a moment, the current obsession with numbers of Twitter followers tickles me to no end. So I conducted an informal experiment to test the impact of negative versus positive tweets on followers. The results were predictable in most cases, but mysterious in others.
Posting a statement like, “We’re all gonna die and go to hell,” was a surefire way to lose 15-20 followers. However, I could get them all back and more the next day by posting some soothing pap like, “Every day in every way we are getting better and better.”
The most interesting finding of all: I could gain 10 or so followers per week for weeks at a time by doing absolutely nothing — zero posts.
What does it all mean and what does it say about the value of Twitter? I have no idea. Nobody else does, either, I suspect. Until we have a more informed basis for the commercial use of social media — particularly in the B2B arena — the jury will remain “out” on their precise, accountable ROI and business value. The answer is out there. Bring on the market correction!
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