I’ve accused certain people that I follow on Twitter and whose blogs I read about Social Media as suffering from groupthink. There is a certain type of evangelism that refuses to look critically at products and services and instead gets caught up in reinforcing unfounded PR statements.
As a marketing consultant, I move between industries and get exposed to different voices. Looking at new marketing techniques through a ‘sports marketing’ lens gives a different view of the world from an SEO point of view. This week, a couple of reports based on statistical rigour from companies like Forrester and ComScore have shown that the effect of social media might be less than first thought and that location based services are well and truly the bleeding edge of marketing.
My hunch is that had these reports been positive, then the self appointed Social Media gurus / experts / specialists / consultants would have been retweeting and digging and backslapping all round, but instead – relative silence.
The ComScore Report about online shopping behaviour shows that very few people consult social media or blogs in the first instance when buying a computer or consumer electronics. Instead - manufacturer sites and search engines are the driving force.
The Forrester report looks at location based services and the results shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who lives outside of a metropolis like London or New York or Melbourne. Forrester finds that 96% of U.S. online adults have never used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt and of those who do, 99% don’t update these services more than once per week. In fact, only 16% of respondents have never heard of such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.
Apart from the lack of utility that these services provide people, letting your location be known in real time to a large number of people quite a big behaviour change in societies where privacy is highly valued. Nevertheless, in some markets there may be a brand fit between the audience for location based services and a company’s target market. If you are looking to target men between the ages of 19 and 35 who have college degrees, then location based services might be an interesting test for a fraction of your marketing budget.
With all the hype, real numbers based on research and not hearsay get lost, especially when they don’t help the nascent social media ‘industry’ sell consulting. The lesson, apart from sticking to the fundamentals and viewing new technology as one of many promotional tools, is to widen the voices you listen to.
