This Ad Patient Needs Social Media, Stat!

I was reading one of my favorite blogs on social media, Media Transparent, when I came across a post on the “slow” death of advertising that I wanted to bring to your attention. By advertising, Pat Kitano (the post’s author) means traditional one-way advertising — from advertiser to consumer.

Pat calls attention to conversations, enabled by social media and networking strategies and technologies, at sites like Yelp, Epinions and Amazon.com. All are effective in their own ways at distributing the messages of consumers to one another. In the process, they avoid the traditional efforts of advertisers. In the process, these sites build their own communities, which have leaders and followers (read: participants). And of course, all of this is happening outside the control of these advertisers.

I like how Pat sums it all up:

Advertising is now viewed as obviously biased, even a form of propaganda.

As an aside, I actually covered the whole third-party ratings issue in its infancy back in 2002, in this article for E-Commerce Times. It’s interesting that even back then, user-supplied ratings and opinions helped to spell success for Epinions and Amazon.com. Of course, the pundits weren’t exactly supportive of it:

In general, e-commerce analysts recommend steering clear of this approach — even though companies like Amazon and Epinions have had great success with customer reviews.

“You’re going to get all kinds of crazy people saying all kinds of crazy stuff,” GartnerG2 research director Geri Spieler told the E-Commerce Times. “They’re not reliable comments. You may get some idiot who doesn’t know how to use a camera, and you don’t know if that person has a legitimate complaint or if he’s just a malcontent.”

Guess I was on the cutting edge back then, eh? That’s usually where you’ll find me, actually. (Okay, self-congratulation mode is now “off.”) I think what you were seeing back then was the beginning of what is now pretty firmly ensconced in the world of Web retail, and what Pat picked up on in his post.

What do you think? I’d like to hear from you in the Comments section. And yes, you can assume from this post’s headline that I’ve seen way too many medical TV shows.

Full Disclosure: We have partnered with Pat’s company, Domus Consulting Group, to work on social media-related projects for real estate and other companies. Even if we didn’t work together, I’d be putting a link up to this article. After all, if we didn’t agree on how to “do” social media overall, we wouldn’t partner with Domus.