« Ad Age Bemoans the Aging of MySpace | Main | Thinking Theater »
October 31, 2006
Saturation and Maturation in Social Media Spells Opportunity
We may be at somewhat of a civilization plateau in the social media evolution. I'm not at all saying that this cluetrain is going to derail or lose steam. It's more like we've been in the midst of a wild and frantic land grab and now the settling begins. Some of the cities are established in the form of places like MySpace and Facebook. And lots of independent souls are out there blogging and podcasting in the wilderness, uncertain that anybody's listening. (Yours truly excluded, of course.)
It's still the Wild West . . . too wild for some of the people we want to socialize with. However, consumers can only consume so much of this consumer-generated stuff. Compete's report on Social Commerce says consumer visits to social networking sites have increased 109 percent since January 2004. They call it "explosive" but barely doubling in almost 3 years sounds a bit slow to me. It also says, "Consumers have limited social bandwidth . . . People only want so many friends." The report says that people tend to fix on a network and then become "impervious to other media." Also, Gallop said (way back in February) that blog readership hadn't increased over the previous year, "even though Americans are spending more time online."
At the same time, older audiences and commercial interests are jumping in, leading to a steady maturation and commercialization. FaceBook is opening up to older audiences and to marketers. Organizations are creating their own MySpace to represent their cause.
Some see this as good and some see it as bad. It's typical. Remember the Internet early adopters gnashing over the commercialization of the Web? As the social media metropolises go mainstream, the general population will get to understand social media . . .which is badly needed because most people out there -- and I'm including a lot of smart business professionals -- don't understand it or see any reason to change their behavior . . . yet.
So with socialites settling in on the mainstream social networks, should you bother? The opportunity lies in the niche. Certainly for consumers, but especially for B2B marketers, where you often have a highly concentrated audience of people -- engineers, medical professionals, attorneys, etc. -- who want to hear from or listen to the experts dialoging on things that matter in their specialized world. There is tremendous positioning power to be the company kicking off the conversation. You'll have to decide whether or not you should set up camp inside the walls of a mega park like MySpace or stake out your own claim, which is pretty easy to do given some very affordable software tools out there. One of the big advantages of setting up your own social network is that you save your readers from being insulted with ads.
However, given the competition for attention, you still need to market the hell out of whatever you do online, making sure your blog, social network, etc. pops to the top of search engine results, shows up in e-mail in-boxes, is mentioned at live events and in the media, and so on. With all the competition and confusion, we're right back to working hard to be in the right place at the right time. Which means you need to be in a lot of places at the same time.
Posted by Bob Brin at October 31, 2006 10:22 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.psbblog.com/mt-tb.cgi/40