Are Social and Social Media the same?

Jason Boslow surfaced this article by Cliff Watson about social media and I just had to comment on it. It says that teenagers are leaving Facebook in droves and flocking to other, new, social media sites.

Why is this important?

Advertisers, of course, find this disturbing because they love planning. This erosion in the sanity of media planners started with cable TV and has been increasing since. Advertisers, big companies and planners like to plan in advance. This lets them count on the predictability of the returns on investment that they get from their media budgets. The quickly changing landscape of social media means that they have to react quickly. Unfortunately, most large companies simply don’t have the ability to do. It means that unless they figure out a way to shorten planning cycles and to tolerate more inconsistency of results, they will not be able to take advantage of these technologies.

If you can draw a crowd, you can make money. That is the whole premise behind the bloated IPOs for companies like Facebook and Groupon (anyone remember that ‘social media’ debacle?). Unfortunately, crowds in today’s world wear roller skates and jet packs and can vaporize in an internet millisecond.

Wrapping it up..

The phenomenon discussed in Cliff Watson’s article is bound not only to continue, but to accelerate. This is one of the reasons Razoyo offers services to help small merchants take advantage of opportunities and trends that large merchants can only miss out on by virtue of their size.