I need to be foolish to make such a statement and hope that I become a social media marketer. But that is the truth, facebook notwithstanding!
Its both unnecessary & convoluted to be inventing marketing once over, because we've this new destination called a social network.
For those marketers and brands which spend a lot of $$ on tracking user behavior on these networks, I have a few questions:
1. Are you sure these profile owners tell who they really are - by age, by sex, by location?
2. Do they behave like how they do in the real world?
3. If the premise of social network is that you can shed inhibitions, lose some rationality & perhaps moral code of conduct freely and feel less guilty about it, then what grain of success are the brands chasing, while trying to sell themselves to people who are not what they seem to be?
4. If building imagery is a way of bringing quasi-rationality to otherwise irrational decisions, should one not, by design, move away from media that promotes irrational and infact false behaviors?
I understand that I am taking an extreme view of the reality of the users of the social media. However it makes sense to note that, social networks don't really deserve the attention that the brands and marketers give them!
Think about it..How many facebook user groups are there in each city and how many times they meet offline vis-a-vis the facebook application developer groups in each city, that meet once a month. Who bonds the most? The users or the benefactors?
Isn't it getting obvious?
