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Why social media is no replacement for traditional media

February 24, 2010 |

Before you move some of your surviving budget into a spiffy new social-media campaign and give up control of your brand to "the conversation," consider that you might be replacing your old-fashioned, excruciatingly commercial marketing with newfangled irrelevant nonsense.

The Edelman 2010 Trust Barometer found that only 25% of people it polled see friends and peers as credible sources of consumer and business information (that's a decline of nearly 50% since 2008). Folks also think less of their peers as credible spokespeople. Should these findings cause worry for the almost four out of five companies planning to take TV ad money and put it into social?

It's altogether possible that people didn't initially rush to social media because they found their peers so compellingly helpful, but rather that they ran away from commercial speech because advertising had proven to be so irritatingly useless. Conversational media could never be anything more than secondary, anecdotal research on products and services, along with partially reliable color commentary, but that's an accomplishment when compared to the predictably inane or dishonest content we usually put into ads. Want proof? Contrast a random chat-room conversation about a product with the last assortment of Super Bowl spots.

Maybe consumers found the anonymous crowd simply less bad than branded communications? This is my theory, anyway, and not a conclusion of the Edelman study, although when the research also says that "traditional authorities and experts" have regained consumer trust, it suggests to me a broader, perhaps maturational trend is under way.

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