The next bubble
Social media is everywhere these days. It has grown monumentally in recent years. Face book, Twitter, Posterus, Linked-In, Ning and dozens (or more likely hundreds) of other social media platforms are out there with the number of users growing daily. Per recent figures Face book is so huge that, if it were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world!
Ability to log into and use social media with mobile devices has increased the user and amount of usage even more. A recent study reported that the average person who uses Face book logs in 3-4 times a day and stays logged in for an average of 34 minutes each time they log in.
The whole area is incredibly exciting with millions of people jumping onto the bandwagon to offer social media and internet marketing related services and products. Major corporations have shifted their advertising budgets to social media services and are paying big bucks to be on line and in your face. The buzz just seems to be growing exponentially.
But all this buzz seems symptomatic of something that we have grown to be wary of in recent years… a bubble. Is social media just the next bubble that will pop and leave us all high an dry in a social media desert? If too many people clutter the system, won’t it become impossible to function in the face of it all and won’t small time advertisers be pushed out?
I don’t think so.
When we have a real estate bubble, it pops because the selling price of the real estate far exceeds the ability of the market to bear the weight of the selling price. The market then appears to collapse, but in reality it is just readjusting itself to a more appropriate level for the supply and demand. When we have a bubble on wall street, it pops because all the hype pushes the price of a stock way above its actual value. More people are buying than selling and pretty soon the hyped up demand can’t hold water any more and people stop buying. On the stock market, many traders are like lemmings and when one jumps off the cliff the rest follow. The result is that the over demand is again adjusted to fit more with the supply and demand.
Despite the similarities of hype pushing the value of social media, there is one big difference. Social media is not just one thing, it is many things. Blogs, Social Sharing sites, Forums, Communities, Videos, Networks, Articles, Bookmarks, News feeds. These are all part of the virtual social media world. Sites and platforms can come and go (and do) without much effect on the rest of the social media universe. If Twitter were to collapse tomorrow, would Face book fail? Would people stop blogging? Would you stop trolling the video sharing sites or shopping on line? I think not. You would simply move your attention from Twitter to some other form of status updating and carry on with you friends or buddies or whatever, the next newest platform calls its connections.
Regardless of the huge growth of the buzz, it would seem that there will be no such thing as a social media bubble to pop as long as we have computers and the internet. Rather it appears to me that we have a sort of effervescence. Thousands of little bubbles that rise through the mix, some bigger and some smaller, and each popping or not at its own time. Even when there is a pop, it may almost seem delightful as the effervescence tickles the nose and tingles on the palate.
If those with the funding to dominate the market with sheer numbers of communications come on to strong, the little guys just unfriend or unfollow or unlink and move on. If someone does not deliver as promised, he gets reviews that say so. If someone is not polite and breaks what have become the social mores of the web, people who see this just ignore that contact from then on.
Social media appears to my eyes to be the near perfect, self-regualting effervescence of the virtual free market.
