The Medium is the Message

Today's WSJ has an interesting article about the lack of projected advertising revenues currently realized from social networking sites. While announcing lower than expected fourth quarter earnings Google cited poor revenue results from its social media business, You Tube. MSFT has been facing an up hill battle in trying to figure out how to monetize Facebook as well.

With all due respect to both Google and Microsoft....you got it all wrong. You see bloggers and those of us who travel the blog-o-sphere and cavort virtually don't give a rat's behind about ads. One of the reasons we went there initially was the refreshing lack of ads, banners, pop ups...all the annoying stuff we hated about our home pages and surfing to find a suitable date or new automobile on-line. I can assure you that I have logged thousands of hours on-line blogging and visiting folks on Vox and Facebook and have clicked on ONE ad in the past year....

That's not to say that social networks aren't gold mines for marketers, but mining the rich veins will require a different approach. One that has more to do with listening, watching and engaging members of the blog-o-sphere rather than realizing technology, crunching numbers and throwing banner ads on heavily trafficked sites.

Bloggers are by nature rebels, we want to have a voice, be heard and be part of the conversation.  Marketing to us should follow suit. We're also smart--regardless of how much Google and Microsoft paid for their respective social networks, we know we are the real owners.

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