On the subject of my post – No Myth, No Music – from Joshua Bell to Igor Fokin and his Puppet Doo Doo. Just when the last holdouts succumbed to the peer pressure to open their own blogs and just in time for the first Oprah tweet, there are two significant voices casting a doubtful shadow on the personal marketing opportunity of the millennium. Say it aint so… What a “social media expert” to do? Two mega ‘gurus’ are declaring websites, twitter and even email kaput! First is Steve Rubel – The End of the Destination Web Era. Steve is being very vague about the future, but he is certain that attention dedicated to a web address is gone:
“In March the average American visited a mere 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What’s worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention.”
Wait, there is still Twitter? Not according to Seth Godin – Friction saves the medium. Seth claims scarcity is the key:
“Email is dying because it’s free. If you can send an email for free to 100 of your closest friends, instantly, you probably won’t abuse the privilege. But someone else will because they might define ‘friend’ differently than you or I.
100 times 100 is ten thousand. Spam.
So now, people don’t reply when you send them a resume, because it costs too much to do that ten thousand times. Twitter is next. The paradox is obvious: to grow, you need to remove friction from the medium. If it’s not easy and free to use, people won’t. But then it gets big and it becomes profitable, so people use it too much.”
Twitter post Oprah is quickly becoming what Yogi Berra said about that restaurant – “it’s so crowded, no one goes there anymore…” What’s next in myth mongering? Whomever knows the answer is lying.
Further reading:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Ben, Great post – very interesting. I came across your post via TENG. I know everyone thinks Twitter’s exodus signals impending doom. But eventually people will see that Twitter’s value goes beyond following and being followed. In many ways, Twitter is just a short-text, more organic version of the broader Internet. Just like the Internet, you can search on topics and find things of interest. But unlike the rest of the Internet, you can almost see those topics change in real time. For example on Tweetdeck you can continuously monitor several different “searches” – that are essentially continuous Twitter news feeds. Eventually, we’ll see this as the true power of Twitter.
As for destination websites, companies will always want to be found so SEO will continue to be important. But there’s a fundamental shift taking place… rather than companies bringing prospective clients to their websites, those companies will need to “go where the prospects are” – placing content in the venues that prospects frequent, such as trade publications, Twitter, Facebook etc. In other words, companies need to go where prospects will find them naturally. I wrote a blog post on this a few days ago: http://solutionmarketingblog.com/2009/05/04/go2…
Cheers, Steve
Steve, thank you for your thoughts. You are right about the change and about the direction of the change. But every one of these platforms is unique ecosystem. And like every ecosystem that is alive there is an evolution within each of the platforms. So as far as Twitter is concerned there is apprehension that a small numbers of users with huge following are turning Twitter into a broadcast model. Moving away from the model that allowed people to engage directly. Similarly, there is still email but people do not read as they used to.