A few weeks ago I wrote a couple of blog posts entitled The Slow Painful Collapse Of The Social Media Fantasy (Part 1) and (Part 2).
The thrust of these posts was that...
"The idea that consumers were enthusiastic about having conversations about brands online, and they would activate their network of friends and followers to share their enthusiasms and create a socially transmitted tsunami of sales has proven to be deeply fanciful."and
"Social media are quickly evolving into just another channel for delivering traditional interruptive advertising."This week, a wonderful video from a science blogger about his testing of how the accumulation of Facebook "likes" really works has been flying all over the web. If you haven't seen it yet, here it is. It is 9 minutes long but it's worth every second.
This is just more evidence that the assumptions behind social media marketing are turning out to have been naive and unrealistic.
In the fullness of time, Facebook will be seen to be no different from any other website. Its primary value to advertisers will not be in the infantile fantasies of social media marketing -- the value will be in its ability to deliver traditional paid ads to a large audience.
Which, coincidentally, just happens to be the way it makes money.
