As my knowledge of Scotland is by and large confined to “Trainspotting,” I was surprised recently to learn that something other than kicking the sheets, vomiting into trash pails, and watching dead-baby hallucinations crawl on the ceiling goes on in the bedrooms of young Scottish men.
Some choose death. Some choose life. Some, like Pete Cashmore, choose to create a news site about social media that grow into a proper a business with nearly 30 employees in five years’ time. Yep, Mashable, the site Cashmore started in his Aberdeen bedroon, is five. That makes it older than both Twitter and Foursquare, two of the companies who regular grace its pixels.
As you’ll see in the video below, Cashmore has a square and stubbly jaw, enviable hair and an accent that gives off a nice burr without sounding as though he’s speaking through a sheep. And he has four million uniques per month. It’d be far too easy to begrudge him the success he’s had because Mashable, in all its giddiness about the proliferation of what we’ll call social platforms, is an easy target.
This isn’t about hating on the handsome devil’s creation, especially not on its b-day, which was celebrated with a Googlesque logo redo on the home page, videos, Cashmore’s first post (it’s about machinima) and (nice!) sponsored content. It’s creation offers as good chance as any to reflect on where what we’ve come to describe as social media is today.
In cultural terms, this is easy. Facebook, now with half a billion members, is the subject of a forthcoming movie that will have David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin rehash the social network’s not-so-LOLy early days. Twitter has 100 million users. And, again, I’ll point out that four million people stop by Mashable every month, good evidence that the attention span for short-attention span media seems perversely long.
Putting these companies in business terms is another story entirely. And it’s a grimmer tale. Here’s a completely arbitrary barometer: Of the seven stories comprising Ad Age’s Digital newsletter yesterday, fully three had bad news to deliver on the matter of these very famous sites being of use to advertisers.
One actually called into question just how well-known Foursquare is. Research by Forrester found that only four percent of adults had heard of the geolocation service, which often –and, apparently, deceptively –feels ubiquitous. Another described how some Starbucks’ baristas weren’t aware of a Foursquare promotion that should have won the writer a discounted beverage in reward for his mayorship. (No caramel frappuccino for him!) While blame for this bungle has to go to Starbucks, this situation is more a metaphor for the rough time social apps are having as they try to get into bed with corporations. Finally, a long study of brands on Twitter by the digital agency 360i, also reported in AdAge found that, despite the best hopes of marketing types, only 12% of Tweets that were studied mentioned any brands. And only 1% were part of a conversation with a brand. Consider that advertisers as a matter of course book up a full one-third of an hour’s worth of TV programming. (Yes, there’s no guarantee anyone’s watching those ads, but still…)
Taken altogether this is far from apocalyptic news. But it does show that for all their popularity, the biggest names in social media have a long way to go before they become indispensable to advertisers. Some of the pressure to make it work is on the advertisers themselves and the agencies they pay for good ideas with enough imagination to take the audiences that live and breathe on these platforms and turn them and create a sustaining and sustainable environment. That comprises an ecosystem that hangs in the balance.
That ecosystem is this site’s jurisdiction. I’ll aim to separate out the truth from the hype in the heavily-hyped topic of social media and try to do it with some humor.
Let’s hope it doesn’t end up like this: