Snacking on social media’s future

If you read between the lines, there’s a sense of uneasiness about social media in 2008.

Facebook was the Internet’s darling in 2007, having effectively squashed MySpace’s mojo and diverted much of the blogosphere and traditional media’s attention away from discussions about blogs, podcasts and vodcasts. But as Facebook hurries in its efforts to grow up and get a real income, Facebookers like myself have taken a good hard look at the information we publish about ourselves online. Heck, if you breach the social network’s code of ethics you could get struck off, like Robert Scoble. (It’s old news now, but apparently he committed a page-scraping crime in the name of innovation.)

Regardless, it’s dawned on the Facebook community (again) that this social network is not their network. They provide content to Facebook, but ultimately they don’t own that content. Not that this should be seen as some new, evil crime by a big company, mind you. Those of us who work in the media have long understood that the trade-off for a salary, or freelance invoice, is that we surrender copyright to the organisation that publishes our work. That’s life.

But to step back a moment, these Facebook and user-generated content debates highlight an important trend that’s unfolding in 2008. We’ve become social media and online content snackers. We browse Facebook, YouTube, scan Digg for some interesting yarns, poke around on our local newspaper website, scan some RSS feeds, then get back to work (unless reading and blogging is your real job, of course).

Trend Watching has wrapped the term “Expectation Economy” around this trend, and made a good point. Our high expectations for instant access to free, engaging content on the web is also making us irritated and indifferent. Kind of like eating sugar all day. At some point you just want a really good steak (or vegie burger).

A parallel trend here is the proliferation of social media marketing tools. Vandelay lists 233 different social networking sites you can use to market your blog, or get plugged into online conversations. Now, I’ve just resurfaced last week from a long Christmas and New Year holiday. With the exception of checking email and a bit of web surfing, I was basically offline for a month. I do it every year as a way of resetting the brain. But the good thing about getting reconnected again is the sites Vandelay lists will get you up to speed really quickly. The downside is that I’m not particularly loyal to any of them. Actually, to use Twitter as a case in point, I’ve virtually abandoned the service because I found it too distracting and wasn’t delivering value. So I move on to snack on other stuff like Spock.

But there is an interesting upside. In November I invited some of my business contacts and friends to do a quick online survey on how they were using social media. I received 35 responses – all from people who were high net worth individuals, ran a business or occupied some form of senior business management role. To my surprise, they’re strongly in favour of using social networking tools to recommend products and services (see slide below). That tells me we’ve started to move beyond snacking to eating bigger meals, as it were. Product reviews, particularly by business users and consumers, are one of the most powerful developments in social media. That should be music to marketing ears and for the industry at large. What about you, how do you feel about using social media to rate, evaluate and share your experiences with products and services? And should this be the greatest utility to come from social networks?