Customer Speak – A Marketing Blog from Bridgz Marketing Group

The Dichotomy of Social ME-dia by Bridgz

It will be interesting to see how social media evolves as a marketing tool for companies wanting to engage customers in meaningful interaction while driving new revenue. That’s just not what it was built to do, and in fact it appears to be headed in the opposite direction.

Social media is built for scale — opening the aperture to sharing more personal information with more friends and followers. Marketing, meanwhile, is about narrowing the aperture to smaller, more targeted communities, down to a one-on-one level of engagement.

As media focus continues to shift from utility to content, social media may also have to move from a quantitative to a qualitative model that makes sense for business, not just the public at large. This is clearly not where the self-proclaimed leaders of social media are headed, like the celebrity Twitterholics who view it as more of a popularity contest than a method for meaningful personal communication.

Ashton Kutcher, who has become known more for his social media exploits than his acting accomplishments (Dude, Where’s My Tweet?), was the first to gain a million Twitter followers and is now claiming four million. Where does he go from here, ten million?  The experts who study social media contend that once a following gets too large, any meaningful communication disappears and the members fade to the background, as the person being followed becomes larger than life. So it’s more ego-centric than it is market-centric.

I came across an article about Kutcher in the Delta Sky magazine in which he states that social media is “the most extraordinarily valuable communications device ever invented in the history of man.”

It might be a little premature to make that kind of claim, but it certainly could serve to extend his personal brand a little longer, until nobody cares anymore. Keeping four million followers engaged in today’s attention-deficit world for any length of time could be a monumental undertaking.

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