8 Responses to “Why busi­nesses think Social Media is a waste of time!”

1. Eric Goldman
   January 19th, 2010 @ 10:21 pm

   Thanks for post­ing this — a really inter­est­ing per­spec­tive. I think that Social Media Mar­ket­ing (SMM) is new enough, that I sus­pect there is a real dearth of expe­ri­enced peo­ple, look­ing for a job. No short­age of snake-oil con­sul­tants, of course — no, there are plenty of so-called experts for both SMM and SEO, but most of these peo­ple didn’t even know how to spell the terms 6 months ago. No, I think there are very few peo­ple who are well-versed in SEO and SMM tech­niques, who are actively look­ing for a job as opposed to con­sult­ing in the field. In our client orga­ni­za­tions, I would be lynched if I were seen talk­ing to one of their SMM experts — my guess is the good ones are cos­seted and well-fed and thus not look­ing for another job.
   By the way,you may be inter­ested in a very reveal­ing sur­vey which was con­ducted by Business.com, which com­pared SMM activ­ity in B2B ver­sus B2C com­pa­nies. The results were sur­pris­ing to say the least:
   http://bit.ly/4Jblxn
   The rea­son I give the link here, apart from shar­ing the results, is that they show that the prob­lem you cite — a dis­parag­ing view of SMM — is not com­mon and could well be the opin­ion of this one person.

2. Lee
   January 20th, 2010 @ 12:16 pm

   Thanks for that link Eric.

   Those results are cer­tainly inter­est­ing and a bit sur­pris­ing. Though when I think about it, the fact that hav­ing indi­vid­ual con­tacts in B2B is really impor­tant where mass com­mu­ni­ca­tion is pos­si­bly more impor­tant in B2C, it makes sense.

   If you look at the adver­tis­ing fig­ure on SSM it shows this, how­ever the dif­fer­ence is not as wide as I would expect.

3. Lawrence Fox
   January 21st, 2010 @ 10:19 pm

   Lee:

   The “short­fall” is prob­a­bly due to the rel­a­tive new aware­ness of tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing and PR firms to the exis­tence and power of social media–it’s one of those things that seem­ingly came out of nowhere and caught a num­ber of peo­ple by sur­prise. So now these tra­di­tional firms are scram­bling to fine peo­ple to help them because their clients are ask­ing “How can we use this new hot medium”?

   As for the ante­dilu­vian atti­tudes of the first respon­der to post–well, it’s that kind of dinosaur-like, “my way or the high­way”, “you’re here to work, nose to the grind­stone, shoulder-to-the-wheel, not play or have fun” that encour­aged me to work for myself!

4. Lee
   January 22nd, 2010 @ 1:38 pm

   I think you have a good point Lawrence and I think that type of atti­tude shows a com­pany ill pre­pared for younger gen­er­a­tions and more mod­ern ways of run­ning a busi­ness. By that I do not mean neglect­ing the point of busi­ness i.e. profit (in most cases) but rather get­ting the best out of people.

5. Laura Sheman
   January 25th, 2010 @ 3:05 am

   Great arti­cle! Inter­est­ing debate. These kinds of debates make blog­ging inter­est­ing, don’t you think? If every­one agrees with every­one it makes for bor­ing read­ing.

   I think the prob­lem here is the social media is still kind of new. The “stigma” is due to ignorance.

   It took me a while to get into the whole new “inter­net” thing when that first came out. And I remem­ber a friend beg­ging me to get a cell phone so that we could talk. Oops, I guess I just announced how old I am…

   And some peo­ple do mis­use social media, I’m sure. Play­ing appli­ca­tion games on Face­book at work (and for­get­ting to turn off the updat­ing fea­ture on their pro­file. Oops, two dozen notices about “Far­mville” is pretty embarrassing).

   Still, I’m pretty sure most peo­ple see the ben­e­fits of social media and rec­og­nize its value.

   Thank you for your arti­cle and for bring­ing this dis­cus­sion to my attention!

6. Lee
   January 25th, 2010 @ 9:30 am

   Hi Laura

   Thanks for your com­ments .

   I agree with you debates make blog­ging inter­est­ing and helps us to under­stand other peo­ples view points and the prob­lems they face.

7. Pam Bingham
   January 25th, 2010 @ 11:34 pm

   Great post! I must con­fess I’m prob­a­bly in the didn’t know much about SMM until 6 months ago cat­e­gory. Yes, I’ve had FB and Twit­ter accounts for a cou­ple of years, and I’ve also had a LinkedIn pro­file for 6 years, but I never con­sid­ered the mar­ket­ing aspects behind these medi­ums. Now acad­e­mia has also caught on and are offer­ing both under­grad and grad­u­ate degrees in Inter­net & Social Media Mar­ket­ing. Who knew?

8. Chris Franklin
   January 26th, 2010 @ 4:38 pm

   There’s def­i­nitely huge value with social media — superb blogs pro­vid­ing supe­rior intel­li­gence on any num­ber of top­ics, absurdly pre­cise demo­graphic ad-targeting with Face­book, a large fol­lower poten­tial with Twit­ter regard­less of one’s niche.

   But, in big busi­nesses defense, get­ting up to speed on social media requires one to wade through an ocean of unfa­mil­iar terms and strate­gies and invest time and resources with mul­ti­ple toddler-aged SM com­pa­nies with strange names/ no profit/little in the way of track record.

   I think even­tu­ally, the strate­gic case for social media will be made to big busi­ness in a famil­iar for­mat: lots of big busi­ness cases demon­strat­ing how social media lead to great finan­cial, polit­i­cal and enter­tain­ment success.

   So, in my opin­ion, give it 5–8 years and you’ll see big busi­ness go from reluc­tant to engage with social media to hav­ing a prac­ti­cally insti­tu­tion­al­ized com­mand of it.

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