By now you’re late to “early in.”
By now we’ve pretty much hit our collective stride.
Social Media is far from the days of being bright and shiny.
It seems as though we’re coming to the end of being a specialized skill and now we will start to see social swallowed up into the the larger category of digital marketing.
We had our chance to shine. But we had two conflicting forces working against us from the beginning.
Money
The first is that we needed to monetize relationships quickly to keep the train on the tracks.
Despite years of not measuring the ROI of every activity, Social Media arrived and immediately got thrust under the microscope to be dissected, analyzing, and criticized.
Social never got a chance to be what it was. It had to grow up too quickly. We woke from the dream too quickly.
Motivated by Money
The second is that in trying to monetize social, the hucksters came from all sides, enticed by a new fangled career with no barriers to entry and totally fucked it up.
They sold too hard, they promised too much, and consequently they fucked up a burgeoning industry.
But what about Social for Business
By and large, companies are all now using social media to some extent, albeit poorly in most cases.
They use it for marketing. A few salespeople have discovered a trick or two of using Linkedin.
Perhaps we have reached the plateau of productivity in the Gartner Hype Cycle though I’d argue we never fully achieved the Slope of Enlightenment and perhaps I’m stuck in the Trough of Disillusionment.
So here we are…
This is it. Many strategies are simply a remix. The elements are known.
Rarely do we see the tools of social talked about outside of marketing. Rarely do we hear meetings that talk about the audience as a person rather than a persona.
It’s not worth exploring up and coming sites for most businesses. They don’t have the time or attention and results must come swiftly so risks are strongly discouraged. Social Media has come to mean Facebook and nothing else is considered success. Apparently millions of users is no longer enough and success only measured in billions.
Organic social media lives on but is generally ignored because it takes too much one-to-one work.