Social Media

To add to the already confusing landscape of advertising and marketing we now have social media. Wikipedia defines in part " Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). Literally, it was a speech and now it is a conversation.

Should we spend money in this arena on material handling, forklift sales and other B to B industrial type businesses. Lets first look at some recent data;

Business Week states that while the trend is still growing it is slowing considerably. MySpace, the largest reached a peak of 72 million users in October but was down to 68.9 million by December. The total number of people using social networking websites is still growing at around 11.5% but that is down considerably from past growth rates.

Last year the ad spend was up 155% to $1.2 billion according to E Marketer and is expected to grow 75% to $2.1 billion in 2010. On January 31 Google announced that they did not generate as much on social networking sites as they had expected. Google has a $900 million deal with MySpace to place ads on their site but many "in the know" say G is loosing money on the deal. One reason given is that users pay little attention to the ads as they interact with "friends". As a matter of statistics only 4 out of 10,000 MySpace users respond to the ads. This compares with 20 out of 10,000 on general web traffic.

OK, back to us. Should we chase business in this arena. I have a difficult time believing that the purchasing manager of a local distributor of pet supplies is going to be motivated by my "pay per click" ad that happens to be on the same page as the exploits of his high school buddies. You might say...."if they do not click, I do not pay". There is a cost involved with the process of chasing the click. I believe that money should be spent, but in another area. Remember this the next time a salesperson is trying to convince you to mount a "TWITTER" campaign ...when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

There are several areas to spend money where the viewer is motivated and pre-qualified. Spend it there. You knew that didn't you?