But will they come? Supply-side economics for social media

Almost four years ago, AdAge's Bob Garfield wrote a brilliant article on "the marketing industry's coming disaster." Garfield's "chaos scenario" suggested that the digital revolution was surely upon us, but would wreak havoc for years as the old order collapsed, companies made the transition, and agencies struggled to keep up with the demand for new talent and solutions to implement the emerging digital approaches.

Much of this has indeed come to pass, but I now wonder if we're seeing a bit of the opposite problem: too much "talent" and too many "solutions" chasing too few accounts. I'm not questioning the importance of the revolution, or its inevitability. And I know that all sorts of great companies, large and small, are doing cool and successful things with social media. But we're now years into the hype cycle for blogging, podcasting, social networks, Twitter, and the like, and progress is still relatively slow -- with the same business examples constantly trotted out to "prove" the value, and way too many in-group conversations and "research studies" where would-be social media experts are just talking with each other. 

Where are all the clients?

Catherine Taylor noted this almost in passing in her recent report on the OMMA Social conference Monday in San Francisco:

Among clients, social media is lukewarm. Many attendees were surprised, as was I, when my quickie poll from the podium about what kinds of people were in the audience yielded only three or four clients in a room of roughly 300. Agency people made up the vast majority of attendees. Even if my poll allows for some clients not raising their hands -- so as not to be attacked by agencies who want their business all day -- it makes you wonder if agencies have drunk the Kool-Aid, while marketers may not even know it's being served.

I wasn't at that event, but have had the same experience and reaction to all sorts of other events on social media and marketing during the last few years. Supply side economics was all the rage back in the 1980s with the Reagan Administration; build it and they will come. It worked pretty well for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, but not so well in real life.

Maybe it will be different this time?

Photo credit: St A Sh

Comments

[Mark Raskino]

I really enjoyed this post Rob. That creeping sense that all the experts are talking to each other, not customers, is a classic trough-of-disillusionment situation. I remember feeling it for the first time in the 'AI Winter' (that dates me!). It will pass. There are 4 important factors that move a technology from this phase firmly onto the slope of enlightenment: performance, penetration, integration, and payback. Of these, social media performance and penetration are progressing fine I think – probably much faster than many previous technology waves of a similar scale. It’s the other two that will need work. We don't yet fully understand how to integrate social media into the mix and to hook it into some of the other processes of the firm. For example I wonder how many corporate dashboards have social media metrics included at this point in time - very few probably. I don't suppose many conventional corporate execs discuss how their blogs are doing in the weekly ops meeting.
Then there is the question of generating and measuring financial return in a clear, standardized and repeatable way. That is still challenging many of the web 2.0 startups. But then - it challenged Alta Vista once, and eventually (via others on the way) Google solved it for search.
We think it will take one to two years for Web 2.0 to pass through the trough phase of the hype cycle, but that's actually pretty quick for something so substantial.

[Rob Leavitt]

Thanks Mark, all great points. Your four factors are a useful guide, and I agree that we're farther along with performance and penetration -- perhaps because so much of the effort (especially at larger companies) has come from the grassroots, which folks are less able and often less interested to address integration and payback. And perhaps just because integration and payback are more difficult!

I actually don't think we're seeing a reversal in spending at all, but rather a steady increase that is just less exponential than the number of people chasing it for work.

I, too, have full faith that we'll get there, but the combination of general impatience among the cognoscenti, the continuing rise of free agent nation, the anxiety among agencies to make the transition, and the nature of the new tools themselves are making this trough a particularly public one! I agree it's relatively quick in the larger scheme of things, and probably within a few years we won't be talking about "social media" at all, just media (and marketing, communications, etc.).