The Social Media Cesspool

It was such a lovely dream.

A transparent medium in which marketers and consumers were on an equal footing. Where consumer decisions would be driven not just by the propaganda that marketers paid the media to broadcast, but by the forthright opinions and experiences of other consumers.

And like most Utopians dreams, it is quickly becoming a nightmare.

Social media marketing is an incipient cesspool.

In traditional advertising, at least our motives are clear. We're out to sell you something, and you know it.

Social media marketing is different. To a growing extent, it's sneaky, deceitful and covert.

It seems like every company in America has a team of squids working furiously to pollute and manipulate the social media environment with crypto-marketing. These slimy creatures are busy...

• leaving fraudulent reviews and comments
  
• "monitoring" conversations and trying to insert their hidden agendas in ways we can't detect.
• spamming us with dishonest Tweets from nonexistent people

Social media is becoming so compromised by manipulation, its marketing value is suspect before it even gains traction.

Last week in 3 Distinctions That Need To Be Drawn we said...

...the more that social media hustlers get their greasy hands all over it, the quicker its already questionable credibility will deteriorate.

Now social media may have hit a new low. On Saturday, The New York Times reported in a story called A Friend's Tweet Could Be An Ad  that ad agencies are now paying people to tweet ads to their friends and followers. The ads, of course, are disguised as tweets.

“We don’t want to create an army of spammers, and we are not trying to turn Facebook and Twitter into one giant spam network,” said (the founder of one of these agencies,) “All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us.”

Oh.

A distinction without a difference.

Social media marketing is no longer just a vast repository of demented ideas (see Wendy's Realtime.) It is becoming a cesspool.

Dive in at your own risk.

Gag Me With A Chopstick

Celebrity culture makes me sick. Businesses, and particularly restaurants, that try to trade on it make me doubly sick.

My family is headed to New York for Thanksgiving. We wanted to have dinner at Tao one night.

I went to their website to make a reservation. Here's what I learned on their home page:

"Tao New York is frequented by celebrities on a regular basis from Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Robert DiNiro, Beyonce and Jay-Z to Britney Spears, Madonna, Paris Hilton..."

I guess I'm supposed to go all vaporous because I might be in the presence of some overblown nothings who have contributed-- what exactly?-- to society.

Hey, Tao, never mind. If I want to see clowns, I'll go to the fucking circus.

What Reaches 92 Million More People In A Week Than Google Reaches In A Month?

Media knuckleheads, hysterics, and hustlers love to produce junk pieces about the "death" of this and the "end" of that.

On several occasions I have written about the fictional death of television.

Now it's time to pay some attention to another supposedly dead medium -- radio.

The first time radio died was 1952 when Billboard magazine declared, "Radio is dead..with The Lone Ranger and Jack Benny gone to TV, bye-bye radio."

The second time it died was in 2005 when Wired magazine proclaimed "The End Of Radio."

Of course, we are quite used to digital maniacs declaring the death of everything they can't click on. But when are we going to make these idiots pay for their mistakes? When are they going to be held accountable for the nonsense they engender?

Let's take a look at how dead radio is.

• Since 2005, when the arrogant dicks at Wired declared radio dead, it has added 6 million listeners. I wonder how many readers Wired has added since then? 

• If you think iPods and other MP3 players have replaced radio you're wrong. Radio has more than six times the amount of listeners that iPod and all other MP3 players have combined.*
  

• The average iPod user listens to radio more than 90 minutes a day.* 

• In LA, almost twice as many working adults listen to radio as watch prime time TV.
  

• Free local radio is kicking the shit out of satellite radio -- which has only 4% of the total radio listenership.
  

• And like my headline says, almost 100 million more people are reached by radio in a week than are reached by Google in a month.

Sound dead to you?

*Source: Nielsen, Council for Research Excellence, Ball State University, November, 2009. 
Special thanks to David Field

Recommended Reading...
Chain Store Advertising by George Tannenbaum over at Ad Aged.