Are Brands Sowing Seeds of Social Media Distraction The Way They Use Social Media?
There is an interesting discussion on Search Engine Land about whether marketing is killing social media. Essentially the post is about social media being used by marketers to target people might alienate those very people whom they are targeting.
What is certain is that all the major social network sites are struggling to find serious business models and will have to do something about this at some point. And until they do they’ll need to hang-on to the users that they have, even if some think they can’t afford to take on any more. And that’s why it will be so important for them not to allow their current users to be alienated by bad marketing & spam.
Now this is been something on my mind since somewhile. Here at WATBlog we often talk about a lot of brands coming on board social media, and I genuinely have felt happy about the acceptance. That’s because I believe in social media, and the power of conversations and their influence. However, when I end up seeing people use social media the way they do it is not just dissapointing but scary. They with their bad job on Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc. are pushing people off their radar than engaging them.
This will in the long run create further obstacles for other brands in getting into using this wonderful medium. This is because their predecessors have left a bad taste in the mouth for users. Just the fact that every new brand that comes on any new platform of interaction continues to be non responsive, automated, spammy and self centered they create a wall between themselves and the users. And this wall by default extends to all brands (at least initially) because people tend to generalize. So say a new brand comes to social media they will be met with skepticism and distrust regarding their social media use. So while it’s already difficult to initiate proper conversations, this just makes the task seem impossible.
The end result, social media will stop working for brands, and that would be a tragedy.
While just doing some basic searches for this post, I remembered Harshil’s wonderful post which was almost the same. In an exhaustive analysis he questioned whether we are killing the golden goose that is social media. And if you go through the post you will find the same qualms that ails me on social media use are on his mind. It is sad to see that despite a year having passed by we still see the same usage that might actually be sowing seeds of social media destruction.
Will there be people we can engage with if the lacuna of conversations exist in social media?
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Why is only a section of internet referred to as social media where the concept itself was based on creating communication lines. Why today doing blogging, being on facebook, creating forums networks etc called social media strategy.
Will be great to have first hand insight on same.
Cheers
Siddharth