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No Such Thing as Social Media

There’s no such thing as social media.

There’s Facebook, which is eating up what we used to call the Open Web.

Those who speak of “social media” remind me of those who used to tell you that you could submit your site to 100 search engines. Last time I checked, 95% of the traffic I got came from that one search engine whose name replaced the verb to search.

Those who speak of “social media” seem to forget that the largest of these social media sites, currently worth a cool 340 billion USD, actually bought what is now the second or third largest of these “social media” sites for a mere 1 billion USD.

Is Instagram really much more important than what Google Images is compared to Google Search? Maybe – and just maybe, only for those in fashion or sports apparel. Is Twitter of any importance beyond tech companies? What about Pinterest?

And what should my company, a proud maker of dishwater detergent, do on Snapchat?

There Is No Uber Model

There is no Uber model. There is the taxi industry, which is of course a multi-billion dollar business worldwide. Getting you from A to B without using public transportation, if available at all, and without owning or renting a car (or having a friend drive you) is a real service in the real world. If you can do it better thanks to technology, you can beat an industry, the taxi industry, which often seems like it’s stuck in the Seventies.

On the other hand, pizza delivery is not a multi-billion dollar business. At most, it’s an added service available for free (and a tip to the young and poor) from your local pizza joint. In a similar vein, bringing home your fruit and veggies for you is not a business — has everybody really forgotten about Kozmo.com? And if there’s no business to start with, there is very little to “disrupt”, no matter how well-designed your app may be.

And the real news is that the NY Times seems to agree, for once.

Managers

From Hegarty on Advertising:

Sadly, most businesses are just trying to manage what they’ve got. The entrepreneurial spirit, the zeal to do better, to experiment and to try new things has been long lost. In many ways we shouldn’t be surprised – after all we title many senior people in companies as ‘managers’.

If you were to see a long-lost friend and ask them how they were getting on and they replied, ‘Oh, I’m managing’, you’d be really sorry for them, be concerned for their well-being and try to seek ways to help them.

But in business, we’ve elevated the ‘managers’ to run things. Bizarre, isn’t it? We use words without realizing sometimes how profound they are. Go to the dictionary, look up ‘manage’ and it describes quite succintly why most companies are at best ordinary.