Is the Social Media Bubble Bursting, or Will The Tsunami Continue?

According to Umair Haque, Director of the Havas Media lab, the social media bubble is about to burst, here is an excerpt from his post on HBR March 23, 2010, “I'd like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.” You can read the full editorial and it is actually quite an interesting myopic look at the new world of Internet communications: http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-WEEKLY_HOTLIST-_-MAR_2010-_-HOTLIST0329&referral=00202

What is most fascinating about this post is that he tries to draw a connection in the form of a metaphor on the subprime loan business? Quite bizarre indeed if you think about it, the subprime loan scenario evolved from the perfect storm of:

· Giving anyone a loan that could fog a mirror.

· A spectacle of American greed where banks and investors were not and are not being held accountable even today, so much for Sarbanes Oxley.

· Digitization of mortgage loan origination systems where loan processing leveraged business process management software to take loan processing time down from months to less than several days.

(There were business rules engines in the BPM systems that could easily kick out those with low credit scores, but somehow they were tweaked to let those less worthy in.)

I simply don’t get this metaphor, do you?

Trust Enters the Global Social Media Landscape

All right lets attack this hypothesis. The customer is king and has just been given a new pen that moves at Internet business velocity and the only thing slowing down the social customer’s influence (word of mouth marketing) are time zones. One of the issues that Mr. Haque argues is that social media sites lack trust, well that may be the case for some sites that are blurring the lines between our personal and professional lives, but they are not creating fake thin relationships in my world. In fact we decide to enter into them and they are bringing us closer to our friends, past friends and relatives that we still want to know more than any other platform. In the business world we know exactly how social media helps to bring us closer to our customers and how they are leveraging the platforms to drive change.

One of the key findings from our SNCR research last year was that professionals do trust information and relationships on social media sites. This is key for any business and for many companies it’s all about influence because trust is the foundation of influence on the social media planet influence flows like water, it’s everywhere. This is why I always say that social media is the new word of mouth marketing. In several of my previous posts I have demonstrated how P&G, Indium, Kodak, SAP and others are gaining competitive advantage through social media. Is your company leveraging social media to their greatest advantage?

Why the Internet is the Greatest Innovation of Our Time

When Proctor and Gamble decided to build a social network of more than six hundred thousand mothers, do you think they were worried about trust? Probably not, but what they did was build and leverage a social network to build their brand and get competitive advantage. This is a story best told by the most social customer of us all Paul Greenberg, the inventor of Social CRM. The Internet has not only connected us in ways that are innovative and great but from an anthropological standpoint it is melding the cultures of the world.

As a member of the WWW conferences I had the pleasure of working with many early Internet pioneers who would have never predicted the social media tsunami. At the time we were still babbling about how a protocol standard called TCP/IP had just created a global area network called the Internet and debating the nuisances of stateless vs. stateful protocol streams. Remember that this was just sixteen years ago. For those of us that have gray hair we remember how Microsoft fought the Internet and would not endorse this routable protocol even though theirs wasn’t routable. Wow times sure have changed, but guess what, now I am a social customer, author, participant and B2B marketer.

· I don’t think my relationship with the hundreds of people that read my blogs each week is weak or fake.

· I don’t think that sites like YouTube are a fad.

· When I don’t like something in a business I go Yelp about it.

· When I need information I do a search.

· Before I buy a product I do a search.

· My sales friends are using Facebook and LinkedIn to do “digital hard rock mining.”

· When I need to find old friends and relatives I go to Facebook and most of them are there and I don’t think my relationships are weak.

· When I join a professional group I go to LinkedIn.

· When I watch baseball now it’s on the IPhone with MLB.com.

· And today I did not join 304,059,724 against Obama's Healthcare takeover.

· I would really like to know how the Havas Media lab positions itself as a platform for a new kind of strategic advisor that helps investors, entrepreneurs and firms experiment with, craft and drive radical management business models and strategic innovation.

Net/Net:

The Internet has rapidly expanded to become a global network of seamlessly connected computers and devices that has revolutionized information sharing and communications, challenged governments, broken down cultural barriers and driven innovation and business velocity to levels never before imagined. One of the most important successes of the Internet is how it is enabling globalization and more importantly business model innovation. Today’s most successful companies are driving product and business model innovation from outside their own walls by leveraging the Internet as a collaborative community building platform. This platform has allowed organizations to harness the innovation power of the community and not just individual innovation.

There are many that would argue that many of the enabling technologies that drive the Internet and Web 2.0 today have been around for some time. The reality is that we are finally leveraging their potential in new and exciting ways, there is more to come, because the Internet is all about innovation.