Jumping Off the Social Media Cliff
The movie “Happy Feet” is on the television as I write this post. For all that don’t know, “Happy Feet” is a kid’s movie about penguins (I won’t go into details). Anyway, there was just a scene where all the penguins follow each other off the cliff into the icy water.
These images make me think about how easy it is to follow the crowd. We saw it in the financial markets. We saw it in the dot-com heyday. We saw it in real estate investments. People just follow without asking questions. Well, we’re seeing it today in the social media world.
The landrush to grab Facebook vanity URLs was ridiculous. Loren Feldman made a quick video explaining the stupidity behind it. I think Loren touches on a point that goes far beyond Facebook. The business world has become obsessed with social networking and social media as a whole; To the point that they forget what they’re selling or what their marketing goals are.
Why would a company advertise Facebook.com/mybusiness or Twitter.com/mybusiness instead of mybusiness.com. Sure, it’s great to have both Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to foster community but the point of EVERYTHING is to make sales. Maybe not short-term, but in the long-term (by building brand loyalty and customer satisfaction). All this hype around Facebook vanity urls is ridiculous. All the hype around Twitter is….well….it’s not ridiculous, but it’s over-hyped.
All these sites are tools to use in your marketing plan. Tools that are experimental and have trouble clearly connecting to revenue generation. While I recommend all my clients and all businesses as a whole to do some form of social media marketing, I recommend it with a disclaimer. Don’t expect social media to bring in money. If you want money, build a great product and market it via the measurable marketing methods. Social media is the party that you need to be at in case it becomes the next big thing but don’t jump off the cliff because everyone else is.
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