Robison Consulting: Internet Expertise for Churches and Ministries.

Social Media Will Rule The World When...

The current bloodsport among internet advertisers centers around social media. Everybody wants to get in, despite the lessons apparently not learned through the MySpace experience.

Facebook, Twitter and their cousins are definitely the latest fad, but will they last? There's only one way that Facebook or something like it can thoroughly captivate the user experience: they must incorporate email.

Right now, advertisers are desperately trying to break the ice on social media. But remember what happened when News Corp bought MySpace for $580 million? Everything changed. MySpace was no longer that cool personal webpage connecting you with all your friends. It looked more like a city bus stop plastered with posters for the latest teen slasher movie. It got ugly fast.

People didn't just leave MySpace; they fled. In July 2009, News Corp laid off about 30% of their MySpace staff. Facebook was officially kicking their butts. The lesson: the fastest way to kill a social medium is to overcommercialize it.

So now the advertisers are desperately trying to get in on social media without killing it. They're building cool apps for Facebook and iPhones (success rule #2: go open source) and creatively tweeting to look like a non-commercial ad. But their bread-and-butter is still email. Talk to any advertiser and they will tell you that an opt-in email list is the holy grail of marketing. All else pales in comparison. That's why social media is a problem. Personal messages are moving away from email and onto social media. An email account is increasingly becoming a repository for junk mail. That's a serious problem for a marketer. Still, people remain tethered to their email address for various reasons...for now.

But the day that Gmail can be managed and read in Facebook, social media will rule the world. When valuable email can be delivered to the social media space and things like Outlook or even a seperate browser window for AOL become obsolete, social media will dominate a majority of the web user's interfacing experience. It also solves some of the marketer's issues, since email becomes their inroad to social media without becoming an unwanted visitor. Email may (emphasis on "may") allow advertising to peacefully coexist with social media. If so, social media is not just a fad, but the evolution of the internet.

- Randy Robison

The Internet: From Expense To Revenue Stream (Tulsa Symposium Outline)

Robison Consulting White Paper:
Ministry 2.0

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Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications

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