Social Media types are sheep
Chris Brogan on Twitter left an interesting bon mote with the statement: “Social Media types are sheep”.
I think there is some truth in this. What do you really get out of blogging, Twitter, Jaiku, MySpace, YouTube? No I don’t know either. So why do you keep subscribing to them?
Back in the bad old dotcom days (1999-2001) when we launched Venturedome.com we thought we were going to change the world and make a lot of money (so did boo.com, netimperative.com, etc – askalex.com too, remember them?).
What did we actually do? Answer: Had a lot of fun and lost a lot of money.
I’m not proud, even now. But it does make me wonder what we are doing today. My hope is that we are bringing people together, starting a conversation and generally democratising everything and for a communications specialist this is very interesting… but have we all just joined up to a queue because there seem to be a lot of people in the queue? I mean, if there are that many people queuing, it must be really good. Right?
Wrong. When you get to the front you find a vendor selling snake oil and other nonsense.
As my colleague Simon Collister always points out – “you gotta do the right thing, it’s not about making money!” I agree but people are making money out of Social Media perhaps because “Social Media types are sheep”.
Think for your self – let me know your thoughts.
3 comments:
I think that one of the massive draws of social media is that it disrupts conventional wisdom about consumers communicate although ironically this is meant to be bringing us back in line with the way things were befroe mass markets.
As idealist as I am I simly think that we aren't quite at the stage where we are ready to monetize the social web beyond a) traditional methods (ads, sponsorship etc) or b) in unquantifiable ways such as goodwill and reputation - which is why PR people are so at home in the emdium.
I agree with a lot of what you say Simon - as always my Young Padawan you speak the truth.
But I think the monetirisation is inevitable and many blogs and social media sites are already making monet via Web2.0.
You may be interested to know that boo.com is relaunching, it's all about user generated content, social networking and a better user experience, we are almost there, will keep you posted
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