Social media – time for some clear heads?
Jinfo Blog

18th October 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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No surprise that social media continue to transform marketing. But what’s at the top of the hype cycle, and what’s already on the way down? ‘Extraordinary’ is how Outsell describes the uses to which intelligence professionals can put social media, and in its new report Changing Forces in the Market Research Industry it suggests a raft of possible actions to pursue. Become an active social media member, obviously – but also deal with the vast scale of output by subscribing to monitoring services, and use the rapid growth in widely available ‘free’ data to further your research techniques (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bcqej). It offers plenty of caveats too – particularly about blogs. With only 15% of people actually creating a blog, can you be sure that they actually reflect the opinion of an entire customer base? And, it warns, bloggers may also have a special agenda. Too right. Indeed, the microblogging service Twitter is completely open about it. Earlier this year it launched the concept of Promoted Tweets (in other words paid-for advertising – see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29204 for some background on this) and now it’s following that up with Twitter Promoted Accounts. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter looks at who’s following it and determines the other accounts they tend to follow too. If a user follows some of those accounts but not the advertiser’s, Twitter will pitch that Promoted Account to the user as well (http://digbig.com/5bcqek). It may be a necessary strategy in light of the recent finding by social media monitoring company Sysomos that only 6% of Tweets actually get retweeted (http://digbig.com/5bcqem). Twitter can’t rely on the whole thing happening spontaneously, it seems. In one respect this may not matter because the scale of the whole operation is so mind-boggling. As Twitter reaches a landmark billion Tweets a day (and has introduced a new search architecture to cope with it all – see http://digbig.com/5bcqen) Sysomos looked at 1.2 billion Tweets over a two month period – so the retweeted items still amounted to an astounding 72 million. But scale doesn’t necessarily equate to stability in research terms – especially if you believe the 2010 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies from technology consultant Gartner (http://digbig.com/5bcqep). Microblogging is already well over the hill and sliding rapidly into the Trough of Disillusionment, it says, and cloud computing has also just passed the Peak of Inflated Expectations – an interesting finding in light of Penny Crossland’s report from the Internet Librarian International conference that the future lies in the cloud (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30983). In reality, though, the mixed messages offered by these various reports represent an opportunity for infopros. As the bandwagon careers headlong down the hill, now’s the time for some serious thought about sustainable uses for these extraordinary tools.

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