POLL: What do you feel is social media's biggest pitfall?

It starts to leave the realm of productivity and enters into frivolity. Collaboration, producing new ideas, products or services, (or improving on existing ones), should be the only focus of social media in business. I could care less what you or anyone else ate at 1:03 a.m. Social media is partially responsible for encouraging personality disorders as a positive thing.

This is really curious. There are only two issues with SM - not having a plan as defined by Mark and not having having dedicated resources who manage the SM from strategy to moderating.

You must accept that it is just another media channel.

Just today, Social Times put out an interesting write-up and graphics on how social media affects the human mind. It says the average attention span has dropped to just 5 seconds; the average office worker checks e-mail 30-40 times an hour; 500,000 join Twitter each day, etc.

http://socialtimes.com/attention-spans-have-dropped-from-12-minutes-to-5-seco...

The biggest shortcoming of SM...

It's passive, indirect, uncontrollable, unpredictable and slow as molasses. (OK, that's actually five shortcomings.)

Personally, I prefer marketing communications that are active, direct, controllable, predictable and fast. But maybe that's just me.

Al Shultz
http://www.alshultz.com

The greatest pitfall with Social Media is vulnerability! This may be because of ability to create and use media without background check! Well this opens pandora's box for problems associated with identity theft. We need to find a way to make it secure and at the same token make it easy to access. This may slow down the growth of these media rapidly but slow and steady growth with security is better than rapid growth with uncertainty.

Vijay Dhoopati MD
Durham, NC

@Sandra. I agree with you. Keeping up with Social Media communications can become extremely time consuming when you factor in the need for constant monitoring, measuring, and creating fresh content/posts.

@Matt, I agree with your observation as well. Before a company engages in Social Media, they need to know why they're doing it. What do they hope to gain? Increase brand awareness, reduce support costs, repair a damaged reputation, identify new sales leads, etc. What is your desired outcome for engaging in Social Media, you must know why you're present first, then you can allocated the appropriate amount of time and resources and measure the right activities/responses.

I vote for "other". The most difficult part of social media is staying connected with consumers once they have engaged with your social media platforms. Online Brand Reputation is becoming increasing vital for any business. You can't devote some time to social media and it be effective for your company. Actually, your fans/followers could become frustrated with your brand if you contribute only some resources to monitor your pages. Now more than ever, social media users are engaged with SM platforms and choose who they subscribe to more wisely.

You either need to be 100% in or out. Remember, this is a double edge sword. If you decide to stay out, your consumers may consider you behind the times but you save money on valuable resources. However, if you have the resources, I feel this is a great way to stay connected with your consumers and create a strong Online Brand Reputation.

On a personal basis, time-wasting more than time consuming. On a business level, I'd say underwhelming for industrial companies. Sites like Facebook are great for communicating with customers if you own a B&B or bar and grill, but I haven't seen many manufacturers do FB well at all. If there are any out there, I'd love to know who they are so I can copy what they're doing! :)

6. Overrated. Do not get me wrong, Social Media is useful, but it is not an all-solving panacea. Managers and consultants seem to think that social media is "The" answer. The pitfall is that managers begin to see that their investments do not pay off as much as they expect, and then the bubble explodes, as yet another fad.

This already happened before. Overrated advertising was the cause of the .com bubble in 2000. People thought that online ads would solve everything. Then, managers saw that while it is a useful complement, it was not the solution to everything, as consultants and self-appointed gurus suggested. Today, I see social media in the same cross-road. Too much is expected indiscriminate of context.

Keeping up with social media is definitely time-consuming. People are spending hours each day viewing and sending messages, updating their information and responding to posts. If you aren't careful about budgeting your time, keeping up with social media can get in the way of other goals/accomplishments.

From a human perspective, it seems to me that if we are talking "social", focusing more and more on technology and disconnected interaction, can't help reducing our ability to be social and conduct our human interaction in an open and truly social manner.

For a pretty accurate picture of what may be ahead of us, see Asimov's "Caves of Steel", written in the early 50s and soon (we are told) to be a major motion picture. In that story, people have become so used to interacting remotely that they cannot bear to be in the same room with another actual human being (or robot.)

Quite frankly all choices on the poll except Competitive. And for 6 I'd include Expensive. Any marketing that requires experts only to manage leaves little room for the inventiveness of an entrepreneur who knows his product but absolutely nothing about social media to relay the right information to the marketing team.

Social is very difficult to scale - while it can be assisted by technology, true engagement takes people, and 1-to-1 time and energy. It is challenging to automate, particularly given that so many companies will only devote small budgets and junior staff (and then wonder why they are not getting results).

In category #6 can we add: “impersonal”, despite all of chatter about rapid/immediate connectivity??

I would say Social Media's major pitfall is that it tends to provide "unpredictable competiveness," and yes, I am using two of the suggested responses to count as one. There is a high degree of competitiveness gained when you are successful in creating "viral blooms." On the other hand, most marketing programs run on an integrated schedule. So, not knowing when a "viral bloom" will kick in (or if it will be significantly to your advantage, or for that matter, kick in at all), throws most marketing efforts off in terms synchronizing their various components to optimize overall success.

I would add that a second pitfall right behind this is "measurability" rather than simply saying "immeasurable." Social Media Marketing results are mostly not directly measurable because it is very difficult to put directly attributable metrics on constructs such as "assured viewer" or "devoted listener" that are the key dependent variables in "viral blooms." As such, Social Media Marketing results are best treated as "latent variables" (similar to love, hate, morale, etc.) and measured indirectly. The problem with that is the customary lack of persistent causality between "latent variables" and the factors that end up being used as indirect metric proxies for them due to pervasive non-stationarity of the co-variant relationships among those factors.

6 Other ...

The biggest pitfall is that there is nothing social about it. It has become a narcissist's marketplace to take a moment to sell, either him or herself, or a business's product.

The only place that you catch any remote form of social behavior are in niche market communities. In fact, social media has done more to create anti-social behavior because we now find "people" to be boring to listen to, unless of course they are saying something about what we want.

You may ask how this is a pitfall. The answer is that it is fake, and anything in the appearance of "fake" reflects on the business who is attempting to be social. For example, choices 1 - 5 can all be taken care of with technology and a great writer who makes it seem as if someone is really talking to a community in real-time.

Anyone who knows managing social media, understands that social media is anything but social. That's not good for business...conflict of meaning.

Agreeing with NIYA too...its distracting.

Starting with all kind of social media activities without knowing the precise objectives and not aligned to business strategy.

I would like to put a different perspective on this topic, the biggest Pitfall of Social media is marketing. Let's look at history for a second:

1) Telephones invented - telemarketing has killed the phone as a channel
2) Email was invented - email marketing has killed the value of email as a channel
3) Internet was invented - marketing overwhelmed the internet killing its value as a channel
4) now comes social media - what are we all jumping on (me included) we are trying to leverage this as marketing channel and very quickly we will overpower it causing it to loose its value.

So to me the biggest pitfall of social media is that we allow direct marketing to happen in this channel, instead of letting it be the social communication channel for sharing between people with relationships. If you have a product or service that has value then let the social channel spread it through word of mouth (the word of mouth is no longer a network of 1 person but of hundreds and thousands) businesses all know that a personal customer reference is worth much more than an unsolicited lead. If the majority of the communication is trusted word of mouth then it will remain a great channel.

As we all jump into the foray of pushing information through the relationship channel very quickly people will no longer be able to tell if this is a trusted relationship (i.e a friend, or a customer) or a marketing push the end result will be that we simply cannot trust any of it and the channel is dead.

Now don't get me wrong, marketing has gained tremendous value from each of the channels that I mentioned, and organizations have to do this to stay competitive. The speed of technology and adoption of this technology happens at such a fast pace that this speed will kill the social media channel in lightening speed. Look at the number of social channels that exist and expanding everyday, nobody can keep up, so which channels do you market too?

Maybe a pitfall is 'unrealistic expectation.' Good responses Edgerton and Stephanie. SM is an emerging tool for the tool belt. We err when we think it will do our work for us. Better to watch multiple marketing/communication streams and invest where there is greatest customer preference for communication. We are beginning to see that some prefer SM streams and are glad to provide opportunity for communication this way. But, again, this is one tool in the tool belt.

For the B2B small marketing team I see Social Media to be a time challenge and in many situations a resource hog. Having worked with many companies they seem to say the same thing "I know we need to do it but I do not have the time". Everyone is talking about Social Media yet the how to, the when, the how often is still the challenge for the marketer. We have given the small marketing team a single application to manage email campaigns, landing pages, social media broadcasting, tracking and more allowing a more simplified, easy to manage process. In the end it helps to get things going with-out having to manage 3-4-5 different applications. I’ve always found that if you are going to get involved, start small, allocate about 25-30 minutes per day and have fun.

Leanne and Jeff have valid points.

I see the biggest mistake many companies make is behaving as if they will own a social media platform. As a community manager at Voice123, I work heavily in this dept. The hardest thing to connect is whether social media is leading to increased profits.

Jeff, you are right. It has to be fun, and as such, if youre social media appears anti-social...it wont work.

Leanne...Getting in first is important, yes. But still, no one owns a platform. Your presence on it will gain traction. If you ignore it, so will they.

I see businesses waste valuable time on irrelevant social tools that no one pays attention to, and never will, all the time.

I would say in my position that my efforts have led to two important aspects:

1. Finding new customers
2. Customer retention

Social efforts have to be about building a community around what you do. Honestly, if you know how to have serious fun, and take it seriously enough to produce reports that explain how efforts are working, you will find social media works for you.

I just wanted to quickly mention...Many fail at social media because they fail to realize it is just a big show to get a new audience. If you know entertainment and can translate that into social media, you will have people watching your brand.

Leanne,
I can agree with that. The issue is though is that community behavior defines how a social tool will be used.

I say this seriously...instead of letting it be a crap shoot, hire internally anyone who knows the brand, and also has a background in either sociology or psychology. I see sites come up all the time too. If you know the people who follow your brand, you can watch a social tool for a couple of weeks and see where it is going. These types of employees can usually be younger, lower paid, and assist anyone who works in R&D.

One example of this is Linkedin. Their searches were private until this year, but we had people on staff who knew why the people who used it were important, and we were able to develop strategies for it. Although not necessarily a "social tool", when they went public, we were better prepared.

6 - Other - It's immature and disconnected.

The social media channel is evolving rapidly, but as a business comms, marketing and sales channel it's very immature, in terms of who uses it, what they use it for etc. It is important to participate and learn, and as Social Business develops more 'real buyers' will come on-board, and declare their wants, needs and desires so vendors can respond.

It's disconnected from sales funnel processes and systems, although vendors are coming up with integration, to create 'single view of customer' in their CRM offerings.

Now, are they pitfalls of Social Media, or an expression of expectations that somehow it is something other than what it originally started out as.

On a personal basis, time-wasting more than time consuming. On a business level, I'd say underwhelming for industrial companies. Sites like Facebook are great for communicating with customers if you own a B&B or bar and grill, but I haven't seen many manufacturers do FB well at all. If there are any out there, I'd love to know who they are so I can copy what they're doing! :)

1- It is overwhelming. Even when a thread is interesting it can quickly become too time consuming to keep up with. It doesn't help that sometime people begin to spam these threads and waste everyones time with some blatant advertizing.
4- Related to #1 too much information, it the fact that I delete more conversation updates than I read, just to keep my in-box manageable.

It's addictive.

I would add distracting.

My vote is for other in exponential expansion of social media. Now this may fall into the overwhelming category, not sure what overwhelming means as it is a fairly generic term. Each day or week another site comes up or a past site surfaces as it gets more play. From a strategic position, determining what social media sites to participate in is almost a crap shoot. Get in on the ground early and hope this sight takes off. Get in late and you lose.