Social Media is Not a Fad

Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest may turn out to be ephemeral (remember MySpace?) but social media is as permanent as the Internet. Marketers who haven’t figured it out yet or who think it will go away when the kids find some new shiny objects to play with need to think again.

There is no shortage of newspapers, magazines, and corporate web sites on the Internet, but the majority of communication online takes place in the context of social media. That’s especially true for young people. You might still think Facebook and Twitter are newfangled, but as far as young people are concerned, email is the new landline.

Social media isn’t just a way to keep in touch with friends and to make new friends. It’s increasingly where people learn about new products and services. If you doubt this, just broaden your definition of social media slightly and you’ll see why this is true.

Look at Amazon. It started out as a bookstore, but today it sells almost everything now, from car stereos and video games to groceries and kitchen cleaning supplies. Just about the only things you can’t buy on Amazon are motor vehicles and real estate.

Every product on Amazon has a place for customer reviews, and only the newest and least-selling products have no reviews. Customer reviews are so ubiquitous there that you can learn something about a product even if it has not been reviewed. At the very least, you know it’s not selling.

Amazon isn’t exactly a social media site, but there’s no question that its vast customer review section is social media. It’s an online media space where individuals are given a microphone and a soap box to talk to a virtually limitless number of other people about nearly every conceivable product. Call it something other than social media if you want, but it certainly isn’t traditional media.

No one would dispute that Goodreads is a social media site. It’s where bibliophiles review books for each other. The exact same conversations take place on Amazon.

Nothing beats word of mouth marketing if you can earn it. Sticking with Amazon for now, consider that some of the best-selling books have launched to the top of the charts with no traditional marketing whatsoever. Hardly anyone had ever heard of science-fiction author Hugh Howey when he self-published a post-apocalyptic short story called Wool, but a handful of people stumbled upon it, loved it, told their friends it was great, and praised it in reader reviews. A slightly larger handful of people then found it, told their friends about it, and wrote more reader reviews. This continued in an ever-widening circle and convinced the author that he should expand his short story into a full-length book and then into a trilogy. It wasn’t long before Ridley Scott optioned the film and made Howey rich.

All thanks to word-of-mouth marketing on the Internet.

This kind of word-of-mouth marketing is everywhere on the Internet now. Amazon’s customers rely on it not only when deciding which books to read, but also which smartphone and which set of headphones to purchase.

Amazon is just one example. All kinds of local businesses are made or destroyed by customer reviews on sites like Angie’s List, Urban Spoon, Trip Advisor, and Yelp.

This is revolutionary.

Naturally occurring word-of-mouth marketing has been with us for thousands of years, but in the pre-Internet world we could only spread the word to friends, family members, and acquaintances. Today, however, one person can broadcast a message to hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of strangers.

If you’re still skeptical about social media marketing, let that sink in and reconsider web sites like Facebook and Twitter. They weren’t designed up to sell anything like Amazon, nor were they designed for word-of-mouth marketing like Trip Advisor and Yelp, but millions of people live online in these virtual spaces, and they talk about everything there, including, sometimes, which products and services they love, hate and why.

The Internet is simply where people talk to each other now, and since most of us don’t have a column in the New York Times, most of that talk is on social media sites. These places are the new office break rooms, the new corner coffee shops, the new sports bars, the new grocery store lines and the new community centers. They are the new billboards, the new classified ad pages, and the new bumper stickers. They are where almost all digital discourse takes place.

This will only go away if the Internet goes away, and that’s only likely to happen if a giant asteroid smashes into the planet.

So ask yourself: do you want to be part of those conversations or not?