Online

Every day I read about another promise of social networking to improve your business, increase your sales and give you success beyond your wildest dreams. And frankly, it won’t. In fact, it’s probably a big waste of time for many businesses.

I say that as someone who has been involved in developing marketing angles on social networking since Blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and others first began to emerge. I say that as someone who evangelized the possibilities of social networking as the future of online marketing. I say that as someone who believed and still believes that all the rules of marketing and brand management have changed. I say that as a genuine devotee of the The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Social Networking for many businesses is like…

1. It’s like jumping off the bridge with all your friends.
The sheer force of group action does not make an action right. The first question you need to ask is, “Why am I interested in social networking?” It may or may not have relevance to your market. There are plenty of businesses that thrive with absolutely no web presence. Make sure your interest in social networking fits into a larger marketing plan and not the cool, hip new thing to do, or you might be wasting time and money.

2. It’s like throwing salt in the ocean.
People are bombarded by information in ways they’ve never encountered before. When news readers first came out, I had headlines popping up my screen in a continuos animation of never-ending content (sort of like twitter is now). The screen chaos almost equaled the absolute confusion of watching cable news for any given period of time (a talking head, scrolling weather/stocks/sports, scrolling news headlines, logos, and more). At some point, it’s simply too much information.

I couldn’t process all the headlines that kept battering my eyes while I was supposed to be working. The cool app of constant news updates was overkill for me. Then I began to be more selective. When I was at SXSW in 2006, many participants rightly suggested that the challenge going forward was sorting content. There is simply too much content (whether it’s videos, news stories or hair brushes. BTW, Google returns 3,600,000 pages for hair brushes, and what if the brushes I really need is past page 10? I probably won’t find it.

If you’re not working from a clear strategy (and possibly even if you are), your message (whether its a tweet, a blog post, a video or something else), may be one of umpteen thousand messages your targeted audience will have to sort through. If anything, you can at least enjoy the fact that you’re a grand participant in the never ending online chatter. I guess the question here might be, “What is your message doing or trying to do?”

3. It’s like pulling an elephant out of a hat.
I saw Harry Blackstone Jr. pull an elephant out of a bunch of silk flags when I was a teenager. The audience gasped in delight. Of course, being the aspiring young magician, my eyes were crawling across the stage while he was pulling those silks out of a giant drum. Turns out, his assistants walked that elephant out in plain sight and almost no one in the room even noticed until it appeared in the middle of the silks.

He was a master of mis-direction. Social networking tools may be masters of mis-direction. They may get you to look left when you should be looking right. Of course, they’re not the only tools mis-directing your attention. I fear analytics may do the same. Analytics may lull you to sleep and cause you to think you know more than you know.

Analytics may cause you quit seeing real people and start seeing numbers, and scenarios, and potential markets. None of that is a problem unless it causes you to forget that your marketing to real people with real families and real issues. When you forget that, you might be in for a sudden rude awakening. (And Cluetrain Manifesto may give you a few hints to what I’m talking about.)

Whether you’re tweeting, setting up a Facebook account or tinkering with a myriad of other socialnet tools, the idea is to speak to real people with real faces. So the question here might be, “Who are you talking to?”

4. It’s like sticking a square peg in a round whole.
Social networking has exploded over the last four years because of a perfect storm: a shift in trends from the early adaptors to early majority, the open source movement in software, leading to the convergence/mashup of various tools, making it easer than ever for “average Joes” to adapt and use those tools in unique ways.

What all that means is that housewives, grandfathers, children and people of all ages can suddenly customize a variety of applications to fit their personal preferences and explore their personal interests from chatting to blogging to making videos to connecting with old friends. I’ve introduced multiple people with little technology background or online experience to blogging, flickring, and more. Some became “masters” in short periods far exceeding anything I was doing.

Now this is all pretty cool. The problem crops up when you’re “forcing” an application that is not part of your natural flow. When that happens, you may be investing time and money that might not be worth the investment. Social commerce is cool if it fits your normal workflow, but if you end up expending too much effort for too little results or automating what should be real human to human interaction, you may kill the magic so to speak.

Not every person, business, group should be using twitter. And some who find success on one tool might not see the same success on another tool. So the question might be, “How can I best reach the person/people, I am trying to reach?”

5. It’s like whistling Dixie.
Depending on who you ask, “whistling Dixie” can mean talking about things in a more positive way than the reality or engaging in unproductive activity. It may sound good, but it may not be doing anything. Social networking is not some kind of marketing panacea. It is part of a strategy of engaging customers, and at it’s heart it’s about engaging customers. In other words, it’s not about shouting one more message to the nameless masses.

Social networking or should I say social commerce is about listening, interacting, adapting and evolving. There’s no one solution for all businesses. And some businesses  are probably wasting they’re time and money because they’re not really ready for the social part of the commerce.

Social commerce connects with another idea that is inherent to social commerce: the long tail. Reading wikipedia’s article on long tail was a bit like sticking my head into a classroom of physicists arguing quantum mechanics. I wouldn’t be sure if I was there or if I was there. But Chris Anderson makes it easy enough for goofs like me to see that there is a big difference between “blockbuster movies” and the straight-to-dvd-sci-fi flix that people like me like.

Long tail suggests that while “blockbuster” movies or products focus are reaching a mass of people in a short period, there are niche movies and products focusing on a very specific group of people can actually make more money over time. The relative explosion of the internet has made it easier than ever to connect very specific and unique groups of people. From Facebook to Twitter to Ning, these people are creating their own space and own forums for friendship and discussion. These micro-markets are the future. And if you’re willing to invest in time, you might build a long term conversation with some specific groups that will benefit you and your business as well as them.

So this last question might ask, “When do you expect results?” If you want a quick bang for your buck, social networking is the wrong place to look. But if you’re willing to start “seeding” your ideas, products, services, etc, in a variety of places. Over time, you might begin cultivating some unique markets that can yield some amazing results.

So before you go spending lots of time and money on social networking, you might ask yourself a few questions.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Or at least the door is cracked! A couple years ago I wrote a post about online software and pointed to Boing Boing’s piece on Open Office running ads on the buses back and forth to the evil empire.

NY Times reports that the the intense ad war may just have worked! Microsoft is releasing an open document format in the updated Office 2007.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The mandatory “is” in the status line disappeared today. Rock!

Popularity: 2% [?]

I just download the latest version of Flock. If you interact with a variety of blogging, media or social networking sites, this the best browser I’ve seen. While I had been using an old version of Flock, this newest version is better integrated than anything I’ve seen yet.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Facebook junkies can now send gift icons to their friends and donate to charities at the same time. While the early adopting may be slow, I think this is a cool way to integrate supporting non-profits into our social networking experiences (as opposed to siloing that experience on some offshore site. Now I am wondering when the IRS is going to have cash icons that we use to pay our taxes.

Popularity: 4% [?]

I heard an ad on Ancient Faith Radio for an Orthodox MySpace. Interesting. If you’re Orthodox and want to enter into an online community of Eastern Orthodox Christian visit the Orthodox Circle.

Popularity: 4% [?]

In another experiment with online interactivity, Jeep and Marvel comics are creating a user generated comic book. While its not really open source, it still offers a sense of community participation by inviting users to submit story panels that may be translated into a developing comic book. Joe B informs me this is a variation of an idea by comics theorist Scott McCloud.

Popularity: 2% [?]

if you’re like me, you’d rather leech onto someone else’s brainpower, than try to do too much figuring out yourself. Some when it comes to technology that allows me to create quite painlessly (from a mental sense), I’m on board! Like ning, openkracow is a open source site that shares code and make creating applications fairly simply. This site is focused on craiting masup. Pretty cool.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’ve explored a few different social searching sites, but nothing really grabbed me or made me feel like I was missing something if I didn’t use them. Not sure if this one will be any different, but it has some interesting features. Searchles allows you to connect with other folks who are doing similar search and post those searches to a common pool. Sort of a social my delicious I guess. You can search tags and groups to find like minded searchers. And the idea behind it is that people may find potential networking parnters for business, creative projects, etc. I notice several business groups on their, so this might have some interesting possiblitites. Time will tell.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Uplay me promises to track your listening preferences and connect you with other people who listen to the same music. Could be interesting, could be freaky.

Popularity: 2% [?]