Guest Post by Amrit Pal
“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” ~ Mark Twain
Far too much has been said on the valuations of the social web startups.
With hundreds of “me-too” of them fetching record influx of hands-on capital, a dash of cynicism is all but obvious. Ideas like Color, which wouldn’t have cleared seed-level funding a year or two back, spent $350,000 solely on buying a new domain! Even for a startup that fetched $41 million, that is plain wasteful, if not irrationally exuberant.
The Guru is dead, long live the Guru.
Incessant “social media for business” workshops mushrooming all across India are minting unthinkable cash from what can best be justified as rudimentary skills in social media. Redundant strategies are disbursed in sessions with over 500 attendees, about an area as dynamic as social media! In other words, there’s a whole pack of self-proclaimed SM wolves (another designation, yay!), waiting to pounce on laggard corporations.
I posed this question to one of the breed recently at a conference. And the answer?
“Of course, we know this social-media-is-cool phenomenon makes big, bulky, white-elephant-ish corporations go tingly in their eyes. Currently, the money is fast and the firms naïve. Why miss out on making a quick buck?”
I decided to do a worst-case analysis.
What if Facebook comes crashing down tomorrow (or worse, people just get bored)?
How many jobs will the avalanche swoop with itself?
How sustainable is this and what is at stake?
Guru, evangelist, troublemaker, Chief {insert fancy term here} officer. Reflects a severe exhaustion in terms of usability with social media users, doesn’t it?
Honestly, most of the early adopters of Facebook are way over it, using it merely as a medium of being there because they have to be. Sure, it translates into a great parallel channel for personalized engagement with brands, but for how long? How long before the average Joe out there goes off-consumption too? How long before even “asking for permission” becomes noise?
I believe there’s an immediate need to constantly and renewably innovate for these channels to stay relevant and contextual.
[Twitter, I’m glad to say, still amazes me on a daily basis and I hope we’ll agree unanimously … on the fact that it drives us more towards a relationship-based trajectory than any other medium out there. Strangely, it brings some relief that it hasn’t been overvalued or ballooned.]
Gary Vaynerchuk recently spoke to TechCrunch about how “99.5% of social media gurus are clowns.”
To which I have a question: don’t we just get it?
Sorry, but I don’t need a valuation to figure out whether a person, brand or channel is genuinely interested in me or just another of the breed. It doesn’t really take more than a few conversations to figure out the genuine players amongst the fringe ones. I questioned myself a few times about the people I know via these channels and I always had an answer. Do you too?
That’s where I believe being contextual matters more than ever.
And why you shouldn’t be worried.
Because, from the very beginning, if the objective was not to build relationships, they were not going anywhere.
Let’s go back to the epicenter of all things social: relationships that matter. Will a relationship lead to building something together? Will the relationship cut across the noise and result in sharing something tangible?
Manifestos, mutual goals, helping each other achieve those goals, spreading happiness, celebrating global events. Together.
Will these lose their relevance? Never.
The tools to connect – maybe. But the relationships – never.
Maybe those are the inherent criteria for us to believe in social media. Not just in social media but also in being social.
Long live relationships. And well, good luck to the gurus.
Image: black vanilla via Flickr, CC 2.0
Amrit Pal is an undergraduate engineering student at BITS Pilani in Goa, India. A staunch Seth Godin disciple, he is engaged with social enterprise development and its intersection with social web. When not building startups across various sectors, he loves bickering about typography and design. His ramblings that occasionally matter can be read here.
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@HowieSPM I don’t forget anything, my friend. I have the memory of an elephant. My point is that I veer away from blanket statements. They make for great blog posts (and comments, LOL) but they can be dangerous.
I do agree that you don’t *need* social to buy stuff, etc. And I’ll be the last person in the world to advise anyone to put all their eggs in the social bucket without having weighed the risks, opportunity costs (didn’t know I was an Economics major, did you? See, I can do numbers too!), etc. Good marketing & communication are holistic.
But I do think that you’re contradicting yourself somewhat. People to people is what ultimately drives marketing as well. Social is part of that.
@Shonali what you just wrote is a myth in my view. People are making communities. Brands are not. When I look at Facebook Brand pages and I see less than 0.1% of Fans participating that is a really small community. You forgot I have the cold blooded finance/sales view here. Most brands are selling 99.9999% of their stuff without social media. Go into your pantry as a great point. Find 10 name brands you have products for that you love. Are you a Fan on Facebook? Do you follow them on Twitter? Do you talk with them? But you still buy their stuff right?
There has been a fraud in my opinion by the Facebooks, Social Agencies, and Media promoting this view that we want to talk with Brands 24/7 on Social. I rarely ever talk with brands. I can name maybe 5 I talk with and support regularly. And there are some brands I am diehard passionate about. I will tell you to buy them tell you how great they are. That I am a Fan on facebook. Buy their stuff always. Yet never ever talk with them.
That is my point. You see my Tweets for Chobani. I LOVE CHOBANI. Great product. Great people. They just became the number 1 yogurt in all of the US. Yet with 6,000 Twitter fans and 40k+ Facebook fans that didn’t happen via social. yet they have one of the most passionate communities ever.
The problem is 1] Time – how much time do you have to allocate for talking to Brands 2] did you see the tweet or the Facebook post? almost never. The fallacy is the poor platforms that are meant for people to people not marketing.
That is my view and I am sticking with it! Still not 1 success except for the one time $300million hit Ford got on the Fiesta Nation Tour as the only big brand success I have seen as true and it was a 1 time hit. Ford needs about $5bil in Fiesta Sales per year btw.
I don’t really think it even matters to me what is real or what is not on the social media platforms, “engagement” (a word I’ve come to despise yet makes the most sense to use) is what I enjoy about social media. Sometimes that engagement is in the form of a heated debate (which I don’t particularly mind) and other times it’s warm communication. I agree with what you’ve written here. What will remain after the bubble has burst (it will, somewhat) will be the relationships…and books. Lots and lots and lots of books. And lots and lots of so-called “social media gurus” asking themselves, “Now what?”Hugs :) @Shonali @bdorman264 danperezfilms
@bdorman264 There was MUCH frivolity in NYC, but I did get some work done. :p This reminds me a little bit of a conversation we had a while back here at WUL – it was before you & I “knew” each other, Bill – and danperezfilms made a similar point to yours.
As to the SM expert wanting to charge $1k/mo to manage your FB page… I’m not advocating for or against that number, I think everyone has to figure out what works for them, but perhaps it was based on how much time s/he would be putting in? I don’t know, just thinking out aloud. On the other hand, if s/he didn’t have too many clear ideas about how to do that, they were probably blowing smoke.
I don’t think relationships will ever go out of style either. That’s what it’s all about.
@HowieSPM Just curious… how is social media the biggest failure for brands and marketing if they are successfully using it to build community, spread awareness, and then start converting those communities – which they build by connecting people with people, as you point out – into tangible benefits for their organizations? I’m not saying everyone is doing it successfully, but isn’t it a little harsh to imply no one is?
Great post Amrit!
Sucker is born every minute. 80% of the US is suckers. They are lower income and let the upper 20% kick their butts in everything economically. Yet they could change that if they voted in their best interest. And they don’t. Suckers.
Wall Street stole $4 billion from LinkedIn. Then they stole $3 billion from US investors. All in 1 day! to buy $1 of apple profits cost $18. To buy $1 in LinkedIn Profits? $1312
Great post. Social Media is the biggest failure for Brands and Marketing since the dawn of time. It will not get better. Social Media is about people connecting with people. Period. It is technology.
So we need to get past this bubble. smart investors will bet against Facebook etc when they go public. And eventually we can get down to business.
As long as it stays social, I’m ‘all in’. The vehicle can change but at the end of the day it’s all about relationships, which I don’t think will ever go out of style. Success for me has always started from the social end and if I do that in a sincere manner it seems everything else just falls into place. It might not be the best business strategy, but I’ve done ok so far.
We had a so called SM expert by our office last week that wanted to charge $1,000 a month just to manage our FB fan page. Huh?
It will be interesting to watch it evolve and how fast some of this becomes obsolete. I say we made it this far so I’m sure we will continue to evolve with it as well.
Hope you are back home all safe and sound and there was not too much frivolity in NY and you got some business done.
I hope you have a great week.
Personally, I loved this post and the right in the face approach to specially the Social Media gurus. Well, the tools should be merely used to obtain the relationships and not just use them as part of the strategy. However, we find people on these Social Media platforms and most of the times we end considering Facebook / twitter or any other tool as the strategy to connect your audience. But, it should be other way round. We should rather gather data about our audience present on what platforms, and that’s where the Social Technographics approach comes into the picture. Based on that data you actually understand who is doing what on a social media platform.
Coming back to the job opportunities. Going ahead it will be a tough time for agencies to sustain in this business as most of the corporates would have deployed social media experts in-house. And I strong feel that is the right way to manage social media via in-house efforts!