Social Media Is Getting Boring…Yawning Again

Yep…I said it. It is getting so boring and overused. How is it overused…well, let me put it this way…it is overused as a marketing/pr strategy that we have forgotten the social core.

Social Media is all around us and has become such a common place that the innovation that pushed us to today’s technology is no longer pushing for something more. Yes, there are new technology spin offs from the current platforms emerging each day…but it is the same stuff on a different day.

I walk into more and more meetings and the idea of social has been lost in the social media. We are using Facebook as a pure marketing outlet, sometimes the only social media solution in the bag of tricks. We are designing cover photos like billboards with branded messages…no social messages.

What is social about a logo and a tagline on a cover photo, nothing. It is just the same ole thing moved from our interstate highways to our information highways and is probably just as equally effective, maybe…yawn. Time for some coffee.

We are putting together spiffier quarterly and annual reports, including metrics from our corporate social outlets. We include engagement numbers, clicks, traffic increase percentages, etc…and why…because we can and it makes us feel good. We have successfully transferred our marketing accountability efforts to tracking social outlets like websites. This is the same thing as trying to take the broadcast news industry and transfer it into a website, just the same thing in a different delivery method.

What is so fun about that? We have bought into the routine, the routine we had before these social technologies began to emerge and excite us. We were excited because it was a new way to engage in new conversations. Now it is just routine because we are trying to track, react, and code engagement so we can justify our resources.

Why can we not just look at the social of the media and just accept it for what it is…it is a place have online conversations. Why can we not just find new ways to have richer conversations whether public or private and not worry so much about accountability? Oh yeah…the bean counters again. Yeah…traditional bean counters. Yawn again.

Where is the new innovative, executive leadership?

We are stagnant…we have become boring…and we are not giving our communities any other reason to engage in conversations other than getting our updates based on a daily metric.

Even the communities, the people truly using these outlets are getting used to the proliferation of marketing messages on these social outlets. We do not fuss as much anymore when we see sponsored messages come across our timelines. We just scroll by them like they did not exist. Why…because we are tired of fussing about it. Maybe we do not see them anymore. Or maybe they are working and we are actually clicking on them.

The social media innovators are stagnant as well…they now have to make money and focus less on the innovation that drove the social adoption. I meet more and more people either dropping their social outlets *or* they accepting the fact that this where they get their news and information. Is that social? Is it social just because it provides news updates that we now depend on?

It is time to take off our marketing hats, our pr hats, our community manager hats, and remind ourselves why we used social outlets in the first place. Because we wanted to connect with new people, find new ideas, engage in new conversations…not just market our widget or share our latest news item.

Time to break away from our new reality. Time to be social again and not marketers and pr professionals.

*Image from ADW.org’s blog: http://bbr.tw/13J20Mb