“Social media has become a tiresome hobby” complained a social media expert over coffee, “my heart is no longer in it.”
There’s been much hype about social media, if you listen to some people services like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest were going to revolutionise marketing and fundamentally change business.
Now the hype seems to be escaping from the social media industry as its practitioners, and the businesses who’ve embraced it, become exhausted with the long, hard grind of fighting a revolution.
This exuberance followed by exhaustion is fairly typical in the technology industry, consulting company Gartner describes it in their Hype Cycle, which shows how a new product goes a period of excitement, peaks and then tumbles into a trough of disillusionment.
It could be that social media is approaching that peak.
That’s not all bad news for social media, after a product falls into the trough of disillusionment, the technology matures and industry figures out how to best use the product.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates put it well when he said “in the short run we over-estimate the effects of technology, and in the long term we under-estimate the effects.”
Probably the best example of this process is the World Wide Web itself, the irrational exuberance drove the dot com boom which peaked at the turn of the century and then plummeted into the trough of disillusionment.
Companies like Amazon and Google who stayed the course through the dark days of 2002 and 2003 were richly rewarded when the market came good.
For the social media people who can stay the course through that dismal period they may not become as successful as Amazon and Google, but there’s good opportunities for those who survive.
In some ways, passing the peak of inflated expectations is good news. It means the hard work and adding value is just beginning.
Image from Gastonmag via sxc.hu
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