The $10,000 Conversation

Social media marketing is a huge waste of money. That's the gist of an article in The Wall Street Journal yesterday.

I've been writing -- some hardened souls might say ranting -- about the stupidity of social media marketing for quite some time. (If you're new here, you might want to read: The Mindless Herd, Sure To Fail, Clueless, The Cluefree Manifesto, How The Narcissistic Keep In Touch With The Feckless, Is The Conversation Over?, and It's The Heavy User, Stupid.)

The Journal yesterday had a nice little piece called "Why Most Online Communities Fail"

"...most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit...a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities...(showed that) Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members... despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail..."

Can you imagine these morons spending over a million dollars and attracting fewer than 100 people for their precious "conversations?" At over $10,000 a pop, those conversations better be fascinating.

Why are they pissing away their money like this? Two reasons:

1. Their idiot agencies are filling them full of bullshit, and they're buying it.
2. If you look over on the right hand column and scroll down a little, you'll see one of TAC's time-honored axioms -- "There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

I rest my case.