Social Media Is A Freekin’ Mess
After three years of analyzing Web and Social Media behaviour and engagement for clients and reading many other reports like those of PEW Internet, Forrester etc., I’d like to formally state that Social Media is a total and utter mess.
It’s just a messy place. In terms of information, both useful and not. Because it’s very hard to define what is or isn’t useful.
Just look at blogging platforms alone; there’s over 300 blogging platforms out there (i.e. Blogger, WordPress, TypePad) and then there’s the search engines for blogs…Google’s blog search, IceRocket and Technorati among the leaders. Recently when we looked at the results our system brought back from Google and compared them to IceRocket, we found Google had an average of 62.4% more spam and unrelated content than IceRocket and don’t get me started on Technorati.
Think Twitter is the only Microblog? It’s not. There’s over 170 different microblogging services being used. Think Facebook is the only Social Networking service? Yup, you guessed it. There’s over 40 of those and their fragmenting everyday.
Then there’s aggregator services that enable you to share all your information or suck it up into one place. Google’s Buzz is a kind of aggregator combined with participation.
All of this to say; Social Media is a massive tangle of data.
It’s not information until you can make sense of it. There are a number of “reputation management” tools out there that enable some form of aggregation of the data into information, but so far none have proven overly useful.
There’s nothing wrong with this messy place called Social Media. It’s part of the progress. It’s wonderful because ideas are being shared, new approaches being developed towards a better world and well, that’s good.
It’s just a messy, unmanaged mess right now. And it likely will be for a while yet. This creates a nightmare for marketers, PR pro’s, businesses, government and the average citizen.
To me, Social Media will evolve to more simple systems. Such complexity is not sustainable.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, CEO)
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I do share your point that, as a whole, it’s a mess. The DNA of social media are conversations. There’s tons of spam and a lot of noise so it’s hard to find the good ones in such a clutter.
One approach that works well is to find ‘sources of content that are from relevant experts’. There are lots of them out there on any given topic. And then subscribe to what they say.
That’s I think why broad monitoring is useless. It brings back all kind of stuff from all kinds of sources, thus the low signal to noise ratio.
The best for a brand/company is to focus on relevant communities and handpick the sources it want to listen to. Then the nightmare kind of goes away