Social Media shake-out

Posted by Jeff Hora on
Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 9:16 am

In a blog post today on CNET, Caroline McCarthy reports on the effect of the economic downturn on social media consultancy.  She makes some interesting points, not the least of which is that the real experts will remain once the smoke clears.

However, the tone of the article seems to imply that the bad choices made by some companies and the ongoing vagueness in many minds around what exactly social media means to their business are more a result of bad consulting than that of strategies and projects that were tried and failed. She mentions the truism of marketing money, which is “half of advertising money is wasted, we just don’t know which half.” She then says that it’s easier to identify when a social media project fails, because it gets “plastered all over the Web.”  I don’t feel that’s true.  There are so many social media projects in flight, and many of them go forward with a ill-defined measurement of success, that it becomes a manner of spin whether it ACTUALLY failed or not.

She does make a good point that many companies create their Facebook pages and apps, fire up the Twitter feeds and “go to town” without consideration of the community.  There does seem to be confusion around the differences between social media and community.  I discovered an interesting post by Rachel Happe on just that topic, which spoke to me in my work at Microsoft Learning.  This upholds some of the points made in Caroline’s post in that it further delineates the line between the tools, strategies and dynamics that comprise social media and the community….who are people.  A strategy does not speak to a person…a person does.  There are more rich contexts in which to listen, talk, energize, support and embrace, but it is still engagement with people, albeit a much more open and (potentially) transparent one.