Steve Mills - Life, the Universe and the Digital World

The inevitable social network backlash

I was reading an excellent article over on Justin Thurleys site today about being innovative in order to get publicity for your brand, music, book or whatever creative endeavor you currently pursue. He has a heap of interesting tips, all very useful and well thought out information.

The basic premise of online marketing is to make use of the features of the internet (connectivity, ease of transmission), and the best way to do this by making something that is unique, that stands out from everything else and draws enough attention to get above the noise of everything else.

And this has worked with spectacular results in the recent past, and for some individuals it will work wonders in the future. But I can see that at some stage in the near future, or even right now there will be a tipping point.

The nodes in your network, and those in the larger network will start to burn out. The message won’t be passed as far or as wide. People can only be enthused about so many things at once, and with so much viral content out there , people can only share so much via their social network. There is a chance that your great content will not find an audience if you do not also have some interesting mode of transmission as well as content.

The most interesting time coming up is when the social networking backlash begins, when people start getting sick of having to wade through piles of moderately to minimally useful junk send to them by their “friends”.