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2 Big Limitations to Social Media

July 1st, 2007 | blogging, marketing

I’m getting a little tired of the ridiculous expectations and social media hype bloggers are setting for businesses. 

Some kind of virtual world like Second Life is going to gain popularity. Gartner says 80% of internet users will be using a second life kind of service in the next five years. Technobabble reminds all of us in publishing that this doesn’t mean businesses should expect ”going virtual” will turn books into bestsellers.

Even I have talked about how blogs are going to pit free content against purchased content in the next few years. And I believe that. 

Social media (including blogs) is definitely changing the world. But only in certain specific ways. Knowing how they won’t change the world is just as imporant as knowing how they will.

1) Blogs readers do not easily turn into customers.

When I subscribe to Wired, Chris Anderson and the magazine machine don’t use my subscription fee to produce the magazine. Instead, they use it to demonstrate buy-in to their advertisers. Every paying subscriber cares so much about the topic that we were all willing to pay to read about and to read ads about it.

That’s a powerfully primed audience for gadgets and geek toys.

Blog readers have no buy in, except maybe the cost of their own time. Because they have no buy in and no commitment, they do not easily turn into customers.

They just don’t.

Blog tours don’t boost book sales (at least no one has done it yet). Blog marketing campaigns don’t boost ticket sales either. (Snakes on a Plane, anyone?) One big reason I organized the first High Calling blog tour was to see if blog readers will even follow a call to action that costs them nothing.

2) A blog’s traffic potential is not a promise.

Technorati ranks a blog based on the number of inbound links. But this doesn’t mean a high Technorati rank will mean a high Google pagerank. Even a high Google pagerank doesn’t necessarily indicate how primed a particular audience is.

To be sure, Google includes inbound links and all kinds of other top secret ingredients as key elements in its algorithm. Google calls them “signals.” But I would guess that Google is just as interested in measuring the traffic that flows through those links. For more on Google’s algorithm, read “Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine,” an astoundingly bland title for an absolutely essential article.

If you haven’t read it, stop reading this insipid blog and go read it now.

Back to me. Technorati rank, Google pagerank and whatever new ranking system is floating around the blogosphere today, can only tell you a blog’s potential traffic. That’s it.

And if you’re an investor you know, that past performance is not an indicator of future success.

If you’re a blogger looking to monetize, you are probably learning that traffic is not an indicator of income–at least not without applying the conservative return percentages of direct marketing.

[Note to regular readers: I'm in Oregon until July 8 for the triannual Goodyear Family Reunion. Discuss amongst yourselves. And behave.]

Viewing 4 Comments

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    Hi Marcus

    IMHO your spot on. And the same goes for 'static' websites. You can use both to generate 'traffic' one way or the other, but it comes down to content (trust building etc) to turn readers/visitors into 'customers' (if that's your goal). And no hype is going to realise that for you, it's your own hard work that will make it real ;-)

    Karin H. (Keep It Simple Sweetheart, specially in business)
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    Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think it hits on what you wrote a little back. It's about relationship. My blog tour is coming up (thanks Marcus and Tina for all your amazing help). So far what I've learned is that people who know me are happy to help me.

    By far the highest percentage of people willing to host the tour have some sort of relational attachment to me and me to them. We help each other out.

    Timing is something too. Today, my book released and my rankings went down on Amazon (a good thing.) It's to be expected because of the release. Other things I can't control have to do with the society in general, the climate surrounding people buying books, etc.

    We'll be experimenting, hopefully with hard data, about how this blog tour thing works. Marcus will report his findings. I know all authors don't want to do blog tours if they're entirely ineffective. So stay tuned to what we've learned.

    And Marcus, get thee back to vacating!
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    If this turns out like most revolutions or serious changes to social structure, then no one can possibly predict the details of what we will end up with. I think you get on for the ride, try to do so in a financially conservative way, and then see what shakes out. If you're in the game, you're ready to make a move toward what turns out to be the reality of the situation. But if you bet all your money on a single outcome, you're likely to be in trouble.

    Of course, getting in the game without spending a lot of money is itself, a difficult thing, right?
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    Behave? What does that mean? LL, Craver?

    I think he wants us to keep house for him again, hehehe!

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