Apparently I am being followed.
Somewhere, out there, in the ether, someone is following my twitter feed (you can follow me @ianchughes.
You can also facebook me, I am Ian Hughes (no surprise there).
Oh, and I am on linkedin.
I used to be on bebo and myspace as well, but you can ignore those. I have an MSN account and a Yahoo account and several email addresses that are required for mystery shopping purposes.
You can check my blog out at www.consumerintel.com or here at dmionline.com. you can email me, call me or text me.
In short, I’m on the grid.
So now what?
It seems to me that with all these connections my life is not that much richer and neither is that of those around me. You see I can facebook my daughters (can you use facebook as a verb?), I can twitter with my eldest. Some of my friends are on Facebook, some are on LinkedIn.
But in all of this I am finding little extra value as an individual. And if I can’t find value, well it won’t survive.
A recent survey of twitter found that less than 10% of the users are creating about 90% of the traffic, or content or something like that. Bottom line, most people are inactive. MySpace has even announced that it is laying people off.
IMHO (also know as In My Humble Opinion) there is a lot of communication but not a lot of conversation going on.
And it is this conversation that engages people.
For me, a large amount of facebook and twitter is just that, it’s a lot of people making noise. It’s a bit like someone in the old CB radio days (remember those), randomly pressing the transmit button every now and then and saying “I’m driving along”, “Now, I have stopped”, “now I am driving again”.
It’s the electronic equivalent of saying “look at me!”. Before you know it, people will be writing columns for magazines. God forbid!
But where is the value for you as a marketer. There are some great examples of marketers that are using Twitter, like Jet Blue and iPhone. And my good friend Aleksandr Orlov is on Facebook with nearly 500,000 fans.
But the question is, does it make me want to buy car insurance, an iphone or fly jet blue. And the answer is….no.
So what’s the point?
We have tried doing some advertising on Facebook and, I have to say, it worked to a limited degree. But is that because Facebook is a good place to advertise, or because we happened to be one of the first. Will it really work long term?
Let me give you one example of where social networking does seem to be working. On LinkedIn I have a group of people who went to Harvard with me, we are spread across the 6 continents of the world living disparate lives. LinkedIn gives us the ability to reconnect our community. As a result of linked in we are organizing a physical reunion, in order to match the virtual reunion. And this does seem to be working, and it is very simple.
However, recently we had a recruiter try to join our group in order to try and offer members of the group a job. Needless to say we declined. But what would be something that we as a group would be willing to accept? And could the company make money out of it?
Folks, I don’t know. I am not sure what the value of blogging is, or the value of being connected. But here’s what I am planning to do. Over the next month or so, I am going to try my best to get and stay connected. I am going to try to immerse myself in this new digital.
I am going to try and become as connected as a man can be and see what I think some of the angles are. And then I will report back.
Right now, I enter this with a preconception that says this: the only company that has successfully managed to make money out of mining the interests of consumers is Google. Every other company that has worked to build a community of content, which it gives away for free in the prospect of making money from other sources, has failed.
It fails because people get bored or because they object when companies overtly try to monetize the relationship then all this fuss and nonsense is all fuss and no fizz.
Nice content and very good knowledge – I have bookmarked your blog.
Having perused your twitter account I can see why you’re not getting much out of it – you’re not putting much in yourself. I was sceptical about twitter too for a long time, until I started engaging other users and linking to good content. Over time you build a network and you get more out of it than you put in.
Thanks for the input Barry,
There are some days when i am tweeting 2-3 times per hour.
The concept of linking to good content is a good one. But, i don’t have the time to do that, i read newspapers because i want them to synthesize what’s good. Not for me to have to do it.
Having said that, i will try harder.