Socialsama

Sorry for the light posting.  Been busy.  But anyway – found this on techcrunch.  Important – and big – problem facing twitter and social media marketers.  Could have real downstream effects iff twitter doesn’t get a handle on it.  Course twitter is having other problems this morning…

Erick Schonfeld gives three reasons why Google Buzz was launched before its time – but really they are reasons to launch at all.  The final reason is the key:

We have seen this effect for awhile now – as have our customers.  More and more of the traffic to our site is not generated through search engines specifically.  To be sure, we certainly get a chunk from them, but solid leads are far better from our social media activities than from paid search.  That trend is only becoming more pronounced.  Social media directly undermines Google’s relevance (course I don’t see anyone else directly profiting from that change…).

OK – I promised a facebook PAGES post, but something got stuck in my craw over the past couple days about Twitter.  I have been using the service more and more and trying to learn from the folks who seem to have had success with it.  Currently I am following about a dozen or so people, maybe twice that.  Of those, the ones I find useful breakdown into these categories:

1. A business relaying crucial information about their operations or special promotions (e.g. JetBlue)
2. A business providing useful information to me and presumably other followers which is tangential to their day-to-day ops but important to their field (e.g. thinkwell)
3. A shameless link sharer/relayer/marketer who doesn’t add much value in each post but does tons of them and every now and then it is useful – it is like someone has done some searching for me
4. My friends sharing actual interesting comments: nickbart and wellsoliver about some stuff they are reading, others updating what they are doing when
5. Complete and utter crap largely from some corp exec/gen y types who seem to think that I should care about their sushi dinner or scenery in Napa (I won’t name names here, I am just going to de-follow).  This garbage is about ½ -3/4 of the feed, once I subtract out the folks in (2)

These categories suggest to me at least that twitter could be used for marketing and customer communication and keeping in light touch with friends (I realize this is not earth shattering analysis).  It also suggests to me twitter usage will have to mature considerably, otherwise the noise ratio will just become too high.  To those folks in (5), please remember, you don’t REALLY have something to say to thousands of people multiple times per day.  In fact, you don’t have something to say to thousands of people.