Social Media Overload

Hardly an hour goes by that I don’t see an alert, webinar, research study, news report or something referencing how social media continues to change our cultural landscape – from advertising/marketing to political upheaval (Iran) to the decline of traditional print journalism. Without a doubt, social media has changed the way we communicate with friends and family (see “How Facebook is Affecting School Reunions” for more) and the events in Iran over the past ten days have shown the power of it from a grassroots political perspective.

But from an advertising/marketing perspective, is social media really going to change the landscape like so many keep saying? I get a feeling sometimes that there is a small number of people, mostly tech geeks, agency people and some marketers, that are doing most of the talking.  And the majority of the world completely ignores most of that chatter. Sure, they might follow Ashton Kutcher and Oprah on Twitter, but are they really engaging in conversations with brands, like so many have said with excitement in a client meeting?

The Harvard Business Journal’s recent study showing that the median number of lifetime Tweets is 1 and that the average user posts ever 74 days doesn’t bode well for Twitter.  If a guy like Guy Kawasaki is posting 40 or 50 times a day, bringing the average down,  just think how bad the numbers really are.  Also interesting – 90% of Twitter traffic is from 10% of its users – the old 80/20 rule gets blown away in this case.

Don’t get me wrong – I am an active participant in a lot of different social media (and yes, I realize the irony of this being a blog and I’ll be posting to Twitter/Facebook about it shortly).  I’ve been part of client projects where social media drove fantastic results and I know that more of those cases appear every day.  But with the amazing noise and short attention span of consumers, those cases of fantastic results are going to get harder and harder to get – Forrester announced they believe that email marketing spend will more than double in the next five years (article here) and that’ll be the case for almost all social media.

The truth is, none of us knows what’s going to happen and agencies/clients need to temper their enthusiasm with the realization that social media is not going to make or break their futures.

As my friend Aaron Cathey so eloquently put it: “Brands and agencies. Social media is not an idea. It’s a delivery mechanism.”

What do you think – is social media going to be more important than I give it credit for?