02/24/08

A few weeks ago, the popular Web 2.0 blog Mashable started a poll with the question, “Are you suffering from social networking fatigue?” Get this: last I checked, 73% have replied yes. And this is a site essentially devoted to the social networking movement! In fact, it was the first major blog I know of that tried to morph itself into a social network. (Yes, it’s one of many networks I’ve joined in the past year.) Well, I guess I admire Mashable’s honesty, anyway, for seemingly bringing into question its own future by running such a poll.... :-)

Yes, a bit of the bloom seems off the rose lately. The media began giving us an almost continuous barrage during January about how social networking was losing some of its luster—which of course those same media had built up, incessantly, in the first place.  Okay, that’s what the media seems to do....maybe you’ve noticed?

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11/21/07

Viral marketing. So many aspire, so few succeed. It’s like humor. The percentage of viral marketing campaigns, like attempts at humor, that actually work—get results—is painfully small. That’s the real joke. But I propose we just kill off the term now and start over.  Herewith, my treatise to call bullshitake (with thanks to Guy K) on two words that have been massively over-served upon us all.  Here are my five reasons:

1) It’s based on a really bad analogy. I mean, I love Steve Jurvetsen, who flogged the term incessantly after his VC firm scored bigtime when Hotmail was sold to Microsoft back in ‘98 or whenever it was. But who wants marketing that’s associated with disease-bearing organisms?  I don’t want to be sneezed on, slobbered on, or otherwise infected, thank you very much.  A decade is enough of this.

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11/14/07

Did you know that spending for social media and conversational marketing will outpace that of traditional marketing by 2012?  That’s the key finding of a survey of marketing professionals conducted recently on behalf of the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR). The purpose of the study was to assess senior PR and marketing communications professionals’ awareness and knowledge of social media and conversational marketing, and their priorities for including it in their strategies and initiatives.

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