This of course will come as no surprise to long time followers of excapite. We have spent a lot of time gathering the metrics to illustrate why putting ads on the menu hasn’t really worked out as a business model for So.Me [Social Media] and why trying to be social isn’t really working out for the world’s Rainbow Brands.
Rather than exploring why going social has resulted in Cocoa Cola dropping out of the Top 10 most valuable brands or Pepsi falling to 3rd place in the cola wars I thought it may be more valuable to try to explore a simple theoretical model that clearly illustrates why putting ads on the menu doesn’t work for So.Me or why trying to be social isn’t going to work for the Rainbow Brands.
At the moment there is a lot of talk out there in Web Guru land about how So.Me is a paradigm shift. A revolution in the way business interacts with its customers. The mantra is very similar to the CRM mantra of the 1990′s. Old fashion advertising is being replaced by relationships.
To help us understand very quickly what that means I have mapped where advertising sits within the historical landscape of ideas.
As you can see what I am suggesting is that it is advertising that provides us with meaning in modern market driven economy. Why? because, to paraphrase Don Draper of MadMen fame, it is advertising that shapes our desires and expectations in universe that doesn’t care. Within this framework advertising can be seen as a direct descendent of Catholicism – via the Protestant schism. If you doubt this line of continuity in western thinking go check my earlier post on the 7 Deadly Sins of Advertising.
If we add to the timeline the idea that relationships are now rendering advertising obsolete to this timeline we must also consider the idea that this paradigm shift in thinking also suggests that we must be moving into a post-free market (i.e. Social) economy.
Needless to say at the moment there is no clear-cut evidence that this is the case… however that is not to suggest that the internet may provide the catalyst to achieve such a radical rethinking of how society functions in the future.
The other reason I suspect that relationships are not replacing advertising is simply because the advent of the free market economy also coincided with the rise of individualism, consumerism and the bourgeoisie. Or more simply the repositioning of the self at the centre of “everyman’s universe”.
As we can see by the model I have created below this framing of the self at the centre of “everyman’s universe” required both an input (i.e. Advertising to shape meaning) and a feedback loop (i.e. an audience to attribute the status and recognition that generates self-esteem) to justify the output (i.e. Self Expression).
Once we understand how this three-way dynamic model of input, output and feedback operates within a consumer society it becomes self-evident that advertising and relationships have co-existed and played an integral part in the shaping the self throughout the relatively short history of the free market economy.
More importantly it goes along way to explain (visually at least) why Advertising (That’s So.You!) and Relationships (That’s So.Me!) are mutually exclusive activities that shouldn’t be mixed together. The target audience is far too self-absorbed in the activities of self-expression and seeking recognition to spend time being entertained and engaged with the advertising message.
The question mark in the middle represents the undiscovered territory and hence the market opportunity. At the moment So.Me juggernauts like Facebook are not operating successfully within this space. They dominate the So.Me overlap between the self and the pursuit of recognition and status (i.e. Likes and Followers).
Obviously, if Facebook or any of the other start-ups can discover the “secret sauce” to unlock that middle ground then they will have a truly revolutionary and very profitable business model.
It doesn’t take much to figure out what the revolutionary model will look like either… That’s So.Us!
or, in geek speak “Collaboration”.
Needless to say you don’t have to spend much time on any of the fauxionary So.Me platforms to understand why they are not revolutionary So.Us platforms… at least not yet anyway… and this is why I would suggest they have struggled, and will continue to struggle, to monetize all that self-absorbed So.Me traffic.
Posted on March 28, 2011
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