Seth Godin, one of the Most successful personal bloggers and the writer of great marketing book “Permission Marketing” and “Marketers are liers”, says Social Networking is a big waste of time. He feels the relationships that remains in Facebook and Twitter are fake, and they don’t turn into business.
Analysis : Seth Godin’s Time is UP
At the time when companies are built on Social Networking and new trends in people behavior are arising, this old thought of Mr Godin is a clear indication that his time is up. He could not succeed much with Squidoo, and he could not understand the power of Social Networking.
Few questions and instances to prove why he is wrong:
1. Dell has done business of more than 1 M Dollars through Twitter.
2. Mashable becomes the World’s No. 1 Technology Blogs by Marketing actively on Twitter, and writing hugely about Social Media.
3. Zappos.com become a big online seller and sold itself to Amazon for close to Billion Dollars.
4. Facebook becomes Top 5 Site by number of unique visitors, and Twitter becomes 42nd this year.
5. Google owns Youtube and Orkut, and it has started connecting all Google Account users. Yahoo starts connecting friends thro Msgr and Mail. Google Wave coming to make Web more Social Friendly.
6. Microsoft invested in Facebook for ultra high valuation of $15 B and took 1.6% stake. All done to stop Google’s takeover of web through Orkut.
7. Barack Obama wins elections by efficient use of Web 2.0 and Social Media. He is believed to bring out 1800 videos in Youtube; Obama had one of the largest Twitter followers and active using it for election campaign.
8. Aston Kutcher, Britney Spears and many other US Celebs joins Twitter; market their movies and albums. BollyWood joins the race with Priyanka Chopra, Karan Johar and Gul Panag taking the lead.
Can all these people be wrong? Is there no real motivation in Social Media? I would better take side of these facts than accept the thought of Mr Godin. He got wrong today.
He was a master of Internet Marketing and Consumer Behavior Understanding. But remains no more!
8 Responses
Social networking specially micro-blogging networks like twitter are emerging as the strongest marketing tools.
May be Seth Godin has more points to prove himself.
He’s partially right… they are largely a waste of time.
However… that doesn’t preclude the possibility of making a lot of money by using it to send a shallow message to people with a lot of time to waste.
I’m not sure Seth Godin was saying twitter and facebook are a waist of time, he seemed to be saying fake connecting and networking is a waist of time..
The points against Seth’s position is merely an appeal to popularity, which is fallacy. Seth’s argument is far stronger. In fact, one can say that the watered down nature of Aston Kutcher and Britney Spears attracting millions engaging in shallow, worthless activity entirely waters down the medium, resulting in little more than endless white noise held aloft by marketing pros who have something to gain by people believing in miracles. Real, every-day businesses have to maximize and leverage both time and effort when it comes to getting their message out. They have to define and be able to reach a target audience with a clear, motivating message that is not watered down in a constantly shifting sea of nonsense. There’s little value in expending torturous days carving through endless jungles of white noise barely to be heard by audiences that don’t matter anyway. The increasingly expanding number of ‘Social Networking’ sources cannot possibly be effectively mined by chasing after every bright and shiny trend that pops up on a weekly basis. Really – how many of the hundreds of sources does one expend ones energy on? From my perspective, a single human being can only use two (maybe three) social networking venues and still find and contribute value. I’d say that a person who is a member of mulitple networking sites and who spends their time trying to gather tons of stranger-friends is worthless as a marketing prospect because they lack loyalty and are merely wasting time. As a business, I want to pick a couple or a few Social Sites and use a standard, reproducable approach that is simultaneously implemented on each. I don’t want to have to do ‘SOCIAL CHASING’ or play games in order to attract strangers who only want to build their worthless friends network. I want to reach my specific audience and contribute value to them. Seth Godin is right. Endless Internet Socializing on endless Social Sites is a waste of time, energy, and money. A small/medium-sized business needs to apply the 80/20 rule (and other sound principles) to the scenario, and forego the Twitter abyss in favor of something more substantial, something less like a ridiculous high school popularity contest.
Your Comments Seth’s thinking has helped me tremendously in my work, and his posts often stay with me, and challenge me to think deeper.
On this issue, I think he puts “non-profits” in a box that doesn’t really jive with reality. What specifically would he have some of these huge organizations do? And what would that mean to the massive set of work being done? Would a couple babies get flushed down the drain with the bath water?
And would the recommendations for this larger non-profit be the same for the smaller non-profit? Do all non-profits need to have the commercial sex appeal of charity:water? Or would it be better to just pay some super boring bureaucrats to sift through government documents to find important information that an evaporating journalist base is overlooking?
There is no one right way to be successful as a non-profit organization. Sometimes what seems lame to him might actually seem really remarkable to someone else.
Some organizations are incredibly bureaucratic and slow because they’re hyper-concerned about the facts and getting these facts just right. Sometimes we need organizations to just spend their time getting the facts right because if they didn’t, we’d never know.
Sometimes being a really big organization means you have to be kind of safe. Being offensive or even cutting edge might not always play well to your audience. What makes sense for Madonna might not help an organization that’s trying to achieve more than name recognition. This doesn’t even touch on the differing sensitivities globally. What might feel remarkable to Seth in the US could be totally lame to the millions in Africa or Asia.
What makes an organization remarkable? And who decides this? How can I communicate this identity? These are the questions that Seth helped me think about with his post, and so although I’m not sure I totally agree with everything he writes, I still appreciate his point of view.
Steve
And right, it’s not about resources. It’s about making choices. And making choices means saying “no” to good ideas, and ideas that are championed by at least someone inside the organization. Most non-profits work by building consensus, when what they really need is a few people making decisions. I believe anyone doing online advocacy and fundraising and organizing should be a very senior level staff person, able to make far-reaching decisions. But this mostly doesn’t happen. The people w/ the power right now are still traditional direct response directors.
As a side note / vent, non-profits that build by consensus like to think of themselves as democratic and inclusive, when in reality, they’re simply allowing anyone with a loud mouth to hold the organization hostage. IMHO, this is incredibly destructive. It’s the new organizations that haven’t quite learned this culture of inclusive-faux-democracy that allow a few people to make big choices. I think this is a part of what Seth pushes for and on this point I agree with him.
Seth is a bit of a drama queen though, which is why he makes for great reading. I was at some of those meetings, not sure which one he’s referring to in his post, and when I was there, it wasn’t that the meetings devolved into endless lists of why they couldn’t do anything.
The meetings I attended mostly were consumed with staff trying to do the responsible thing of keeping the money coming in while stretching themselves to take risks. When non-profits live on these razor thin budgets though, one minor set back can mean a program and staff getting cut.
This leads me to my main grip, which is, get specific man! Dig in a bit, maybe volunteer and work on the inside, to get a feel for what the challenges are. This is not easy stuff to figure out. The theory is great + helpful sometimes, but the real work and the real heroes in my mind are the staff on the inside that are actually trying to make this stuff work. They’re often working in dysfunctional environments, with a ton of demands, and I think what they really need is more tangible ideas and examples of things to try. What does it mean to flip the funnel?
What exactly can we do right now? And how do we know this is a good direction that’s producing results? As soon as you scratch the surface and start talking about the real world, it’s not so easy to figure this stuff out.
I followed Seth Godin before I became a blogger. Now I am a blogger and some might say that I am addicted to Twitter (via HootSuite). Since becoming a student of the art of blogging, I find it very offensive when a blogger does not allow comments on their blog.
I discovered this about Mr. Godin a few months ago and have become very disenchanted with him since. I feel that he only wants to spout ideas without any interaction or feedback from his readers. I often see links on twitter or headlines that mention his name, as I did with this article. Being a fan of this site I was really quite pleasantly surprised to see that this was not an article in praise of Mr. Godin.
There is a time and place for everything, and it is obvious that he has no place on Twitter, rather his time has come and gone is yet to be seen. I noticed that no one is talking about “Brands in Public” anymore, or maybe they just aren’t tweeting about it!
I wish him well and hope that his books continue to sell, but I will not be reading them unless he changes his tune.
Thanks for the article and the discussion. We can all agree to disagree but only time will tell, so I am bookmarking this on Diigo for future reference.
@Ileane
Playing games and chatting with friends will not profit business at all, and why should business pay for time spent socialising. On the other hand Social Media is essential for businesses today to compete in the market, but there is a big difference between using social media to promote a business, offer great customer service, increase brand awareness, engage with customers – and using social media for your private life. We at Silicon Beach Training use Social Media every day but everything we do is to improve service and attract custom. Our Social Media Training course for business is our most popular course.