Here was my surprise today. eMarketer threw in this little doozy as the third bullet rationale for lowering their 2009-13 social network ad spend numbers yesterday.
I'd seen the lowered ad stats for social networks last week when they came out but CNET left this little gem out of itsreport. Today, after saying to myself, "Huh, they really think that spaghetti of social tool sites, browser plug-ins, Twitter-groupie-apps, widgets, Friend Connects and other stuff that doesn't make sense yet will rule the world?" it occurred to me; "Oh my gosh, they think that spaghetti that doesn't make sense yet will rule the world!" Whyever they think it, eMarketer's assumption seemed like rather major news to me since they're essentially predicting that as early as 2009 the big public sites like MySpace and Facebook will start to give ground to the smaller Ning-like niche sites wherein the "core" social networks congregate around individuals (i.e., free agents) instead of communities (i.e., more easily co-opted by commercial and other interests).
Personally, I've just been happy to blame the lousy economy. I haven't gotten there on the social personal browsing yet and here's why.
Even assuming the spaghetti made sense now, when I look at my own sprawling social network experience over the last few years I find myself connecting with different groups of friends/contacts/colleagues etc. on different sites for different reasons. As many of us do, I use Facebook for more personal interactions and LinkedIn for more businesslike connections. For pure business I subscribe to some specialty networks and for purely personal reasons I subscribe to others. In the latter category, I sometimes use totally anonymous names so I can be free of my "public business persona" while pursuing hobbies and the like. Bottom line is that while I like overlap in some networks, I value the total separation of some others. Do I reallywant to have them all mashed together? Just like in the real world my answer is, "Not really." On the other hand, where there is overlap, some streamlining of it seems valuable. Services like OpenID are promising for managing multiple personas, and if the spaghetti can ultimately manage this issue, perhaps it will become the be-all-end-all virtual meal, but at the moment most of them just tend to think in terms of "privacy management" when in fact the issue is much deeper with tendrils penetrating a person's "identity management". They don't really even have the privacy thing down yet so I haven't been holding my breath on the identity thing - part of a whole other usability crankI get on a lot.
All that aside, however, I think that in the end my experience and the eMarketer prediction are consistent. I expect that most public social networks will eventually be "niche" in the sense that they will form around shared interests and that the "global interest networks" will be more personal, woven together out of each individual's personal social graphs. We all really want to be the center of our own universe anyway, and technology is moving to the point where it can deliver us that illusion, and to some extent that reality as well. Maybe I'm late to this party since I just dug up this thoughtful post about it from over a year ago.
Of course, this impending reality is a nightmare for traditional marketers who are used to targeting media by negotiating with ad reps peddling demographic clumps, the marketers and the ad reps being totally divorced from the actual people who they now have to "participate with". Direct marketers have a better handle on the dynamics of one-to-one targeting, but are used to dealing with consistent channel variables (i.e., snail mail ALWAYS requires postage and print). But in this new, messy universe where every individual target is his or her own unique demographic AND channel, marketers just don't know how to even think about reaching them in our usual terms like media, impressions, reach, frequency, cost per etc. (My brain hurts just imagining building that promo plan spread sheet!) Sadly, marketers can't figure it out on our own either. The social networks and social browsers - as well as all the socialappwidgetthingies in between - have to help too, but as Facebook Beacon demonstrated and eMarketer and others predict, they're not there yet either.
Being an optimist, I think when this all shakes out it's going to be brilliant. Better for the companies. Better for the individuals. And I do see some bright spots for new social models and will blog about them separately. But thanks to the current economy and the sheer messiness inherent in the process of creation, it looks like the traditional ad-supported media model has to implode first in even more fiery displays of layoffs and revenue stream shrivelups than we saw in2008. I thought it was still over a year off, but reading between the lines of eMarketer's revised ad projections, I'm rethinking my timeline. 2009 may be the year to pull up your bowl of popcorn and watch the show. Join me?