Tweet this: social networking hasn't won the battle yet

In every business with a marketing department, there's now a weekly meeting in which the company's "social media strategy" is discussed. The person in charge of social media leans forward and, in a voice hoarse with excitement, confides that four people have signed up for its Facebook page in just the past week.

This means the organisation now has 73 friends, of whom two — yes, that's right, two — have posted responses to the latest communication from the company.

At this point, a senior manager will shake his head with wonderment and say "well done".

There is something enormously comical about the current enthusiasm for social media in the world of business. Well-paid people in large companies spend hours a day moderating sites that are read by as few as a dozen people. They could ring them individually and it would be a better use of time.

I'm not attacking social media; I'm an enthusiastic Facebooker myself. As a method of flirting with old girlfriends, it's hard to imagine a more effective piece of technology. And, of course, in a place like Egypt, it's obvious that social media played a key role in last week's uprising.

Yet, as with any new technology, there are killer applications and humdrum ones. The problem is that most of those who talk about social media have a vested interest in talking it up: they are consultants keen to achieve further employment.

We need someone to volunteer for the role of King Ludd. Oh, OK, I accept.

Here's the first point: mainstream media is still enormously strong. Reports of its death, as Mark Twain might have said, are an exaggeration. People become enormously excited when a three-minute video gets 100,000 hits on YouTube, yet up to 2.8 million people watched the TV drama Packed to the Rafters. Most made an appointment to spend an hour a week with the show for much of the year. The finale of MasterChef peaked at 5.7 million viewers, most watching for the whole evening.

So how come there's breathless excitement when, say, a newspaper column gets 60 retweets or a blogger achieves 1000 hits?

I plead guilty to this sort of thinking. The podcast of our weekly comedy show, Thank God It's Friday, recently hit 5000 subscribers. Wow. We ran around the office at the news. Yet 130,000 people listen to it on the wireless each week and have done for years. Is one sort of listener better than the other?

People like radio and — by a huge margin — they like it more than podcasting. Similarly, though many have the technology to digitally record TV programs and watch them later, most aren't interested. According to recent research from Deloittes, the technology is only popular among people who hardly watch television anyway. (An example: of the 2.8 million Packed to the Rafters viewers, 93 per cent watched it live.)

This gets us close to the nub. Social media enthusiasts imagine a world of participation, in which people are sharing media, commenting on media, as well as being signed up as a "friend" of the company that makes their breakfast cereal.

This may suit some people but only some. People who work in radio have long known that about 1 per cent of people want to take part in all the fun; the other 99 per cent want to listen.

There's a kind of egotism in a model that imagines everyone wants to actively participate. Most have other priorities. They have their family, their business, their friends, their garden and then – in about 42nd spot – the TV or radio show they have on while they do the washing up. They can't be bothered time-shifting it, tweeting it, podcasting it or commenting on it. It's not that important to them.

As for becoming a "friend" of the company that makes their cereal . . . well, just how bored do they think people are?

Despite all this, traditional media loves talking up social media. A queue outside a shop caused by MasterChef is not worth much of a mention but a link to Twitter or Facebook makes the story more hip and exciting. It's as if the traditional media has developed Stockholm syndrome in relation to its tormentor.

Against all this, enthusiasts will say "yes but it's the future". And they'll point to the growing proportion of the population signed up to sites such as Facebook.

It's true that a popular sporting team might have an impressive 15,000 people signed up on Facebook or Twitter; it's less certain how many are regular users. Certainly on most sites, you see the same handful of people participating.

More importantly, people are using Facebook and Twitter to serve their own needs, not those of the business or sporting club. People who think they can turn social media into a passive billboard to display free advertising haven't understood the medium.

If you want advertising, consider buying an ad in the Herald (which still sells a thumping 340,000 copies each Saturday) or perhaps air-time on Packed to the Rafters?

Or, if you'd rather, keep sending messages to your 73 friends on Facebook. Who knows, one day one of them may even log on and notice.

richard@richardglover.com.au

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