Antibrands

Social media, all buzz and no results?

12/31/08 11:51 AM

Interesting thought from Jonathan Salem Baskin; For all of the buzz about social media this year, I think we saw that all of that conversation did a lot for agency revenue, and it kept the Twitter crowd busy telling one another how with it they all were. But making the leap to impacting sales, or building anything sustainable (and sustainably valuable) over time, remained a chasm that has yet to be crossed. It's the void between fiction and fact.

I think we're seeing that people don't believe companies when we pretend that we're not selling stuff to them. Corporations have spent the last few years effectively lying to the public, and we're surprised that it hasn't done much for sales? Corporate reputation is already at historic lows, as is customer satisfaction. For all of the effort companies have made to embrace social media -- what big company doesn't already have somebody blogging because, well, "ya just gotta do it and experiment" -- only 16% of Americans actually trust what those companies blather on about. Only about one-third of consumers who post anything in a company-involved social media experiment believe they're even heard, let alone subsequently satisfied.

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