Let’s rewind the clock by a few years. Where did we come from with traditional advertising, where did we hope we were going with social media, and where are we now and where are we headed?
The year is 1998. Companies are spending a lot on advertising and PR. The message is, “Buy our product”. The companies don’t listen to feedback often from consumers, or do so in a slow way. Email mass-marketing (spam) is everywhere. Everyone wants to get rich quick by making an internet store out of everything. You can even buy a pet online. People are getting excited about filesharing and downloading music online!
Now we are in 2007- Twitter is the new hot toy from SXSW. “Authentic” and “transparent” are the new hot buzzwords. The concept of blogging for money and not giving an honest opinion of the product is foreign. Only two years prior Barcamp set the rules for unconferences and set a stark difference in comparison to the exclusive FooCamp. If you have more than 5,000 followers on Twitter then you are probably in the top 3 of social media. We get the impression that we can shift money away from traditional advertising and a new flourishing industry will spring up. Podcasts will empower the layperson to become a broadcaster, but no one really listens to them- yet. Blogs are the new mouthpiece of the people and will empower everyone to an opinion. In the future we will see far less advertising, because companies will wake up and realize its not effective. Spam is passe, but our inboxes flood with it. People start talking about social media for the sake of talking about social media. The message is, “I’m listening and we can interact”. There is a certain sense of humility and a feeling that everyone is on fairly equal footing in the community. Anyone can start a social media consulting firm, and over the next year many do.
The present 2009- The most popular accounts on Twitter are a celebrity that likes to play pranks, and a news service that is basically a tabloid with some occasional AP articles for good measure- each measuring over 1,000,000 followers. Inbox spam is down, but Twitter spam is up. The name of the game now is to find new ways at getting thousands of followers. Quality doesn’t matter, it’s all about quantity, branding, and being able to “broadcast” as much as possible. The big users on Twitter don’t follow anyone back, let alone ever actually interact with their followers. It is about what they want to say, and us looking in. Everyone is worried about tweaking out their SEO in an attempt to push their product as much as possible. The message is “Buy our product” and almost no one is listening to each other. Social Media conferences spring up offering $1,000 tickets for you to learn how to make the most of Twitter.
Transparency goes out the window as no one wants to share their secret sauce, and authenticity is something that you look for in a Thai restaruant where you will sit and plan your next eBook or attempt at a viral video to bring more attention to your company.Blogging for money is perfectly acceptable, and all product placements and reviews are suspect. You get the feeling that you had better connections with people on Twitter back in 2007 than you do now. Oddly enough, thousands of jobs haven’t sprung up, and only a handful of people seem to be making money at doing purely social media campaigns. Yet, the PR and advertising companies still exist and more money is being spent on advertising than ever. People complain about not being able to have more than 5,000 “friends” on Facebook. Everyone is either an expert, guru or rockstar. Few people listen to Podcasts.
201x, the future – There are places you can go to and buy an instant 500,000 followers on Twitter (I might be the one running the site). Many blogs have replaced static banners paid placements of Twitter feeds from select companies. RT4Cash has just gotten their B-round of VC funding for their proprietary ReTweeting for money service. Twitter has gone public, but no one can make up its mind about how they will make money, although it seems almost certainly to come in the form of advertising. No one reads their main timeline on Twitter, because it moves faster than the traffic on the Mass Pike, but the AI for the bots that talk back to users has gotten rather good and most people are tricked easily. Authenticity is now just a setting on the Bot. Typing 140 characters has just gotten too hard for most celebrities to actually do. The concept of actually “listening” on Twitter is absurd. How would you do that with so many followers? Small social media companies close doors, because they don’t have the leverage to compete with the big social media companies that used to be PR firms. Yet, the jobs that were hoped for and the profits are nearly nowhere to be found. Brand monitoring companies are established by the dozen in Bangladesh.
A new social media rockstar is born when AT&T sends them a $25,000 bill after accidentally receiving 250,000 SMS messages when they allowed all of the updates in their network to arrive on their 4G iPhone, and they forgot to buy the ‘unlimited texting’ plan. This of course, makes the nightly news. Everyone in your family is on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Digg has replaced CNN as your “trusted news source” and oddly, the news hasn’t gotten any better or worse quality. A 12 year old doing something stupid on YouTube has the first video with 1B views, and is suspiciously all of the clothing he’s wearing match products for sale in the side advertisement. The message is “Buy our product, and tell your friends too!” And still, less than 1% of people online listen to Podcasts regularly.