MadScam

I am also in your way.......may be this too wasting time...

Well said George. Give it two years and it will be gone. It's so sad to see people moving **down** the hierarchy of communication. Frank Lowe used to insist we avoid using the internal telephone in his agency because "the conversation you have on the way may be more valuable than the one you went to have."  140 characters???? In the communications business?? Ho ho.

I think both are great and use them lots.  The backlash from George and many others is a reaction to excessive hype.  Too many people hail such developments  as revolutionary products that will sweep away everything that already exists, when they are just neat ways to communicate with friends and contacts.  And I say that as someone whose job is to represent commercial TV.  I love seeing people tweet about what they are watching on TV, and big TV events - the latest of which were The Brits and Comic Relief - end up dominating Twitter and Facebook.

Whilst working for a very big client in Russia we did some market research. Clients love the quantitative number-crunching empirical evidence. At Grey, we also researched the qualitative evidence. It was the qualitative evidence that gave us the campaign that struck the Russian's hearts and made our product Brand of the year. Just think how much qualitative evidence is out

there! It's unlimited. Asking a person in the street, or asking someone online? there is the point of who are they? and how reliable is the evidence? but these days whole markets have collapsed over rumours. Yes we all get fed-up of the idiots, but sometimes isn't it good to just be a bit silly?...It never did Morecambe and Wise any harm.

You clearly have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I hope BR isn't paying you for this crap. In fact, they probably aren't.

What a non-post. It's just a Luddite saying "I don't get it, harrumph." I'm sure people like George worried that novels would rot the minds of the Victorian working classes, and the rock and roll would destroy the morals of 50s teenagers.

Move along, nothing to learn here

No need to be on Twitter to know about your bowel movements, as this post is one of them.

Mike, Nicholas, Alistair...

See you all on "Second Life."

Cheers/George

The likes of Facebook and Twitter obviously have a place in the market. The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) posted information recently about the growth of web 2.0. The report indicated that social networking is now more popular than email among web users around the globe.

Figures from Facebook suggest that they have more than 175 million active users in total which means that nearly 3% of humankind is on Facebook!

Visiting social media sites acoounts for 1 in every 11 minutes of time spent on the web with the fastest growing user demographic being the 35 to 49 year olds.

It may not be everyone's cup of tea and may not be the advertising medium that people hoped but it's here and it's in vogue.

Twittering is definitely over hyped at the moment, but I don't think Facebook is at all. Some people don't get Facebook, while other people enjoy using it as the solution to tying all of their social networking needs in one place. The people that enjoy it treat it as they would a real life friendship network, i.e. you only let in your genuine friends. You wouldn't invite strangers to a house party, but if you did you would have to be prepared for them to either vandalise or steal something. The way I deal with the problems you have George are to a) ignore requests from strangers b) block all of the features I don't want. It doesn't take long to do this and it really helps clear your Facebook account for proper use. Of course, Facebook falls flat on its face if your genuine friend network isn't using it but for the people that do, it won't go away any time soon.

I'm totally with you on one thing though: monetisation of these. I wonder if Facebook would ever consider supplementing ad revenue with a monthly/annual fee? I'd pay it.

Good man George... give them geeks a good literal slap, they are so caught up in their own giddy hype about twitter I think they must have eaten a whole pack of skittles between them. These things may have a place but its nowhere near the amount of media coverage they deserve. And of course the $500m is over priced nonsense. Hey, I'm all for being silly and having fun. But the hype is a real turn off. I've already had mates who have said to hell with twitter... are people getting bored already. Which brings me to Jack's stat of 175 million "active" members on Facebook. What is the definition of this "active" member? Is the study by the same people who tell us that people are "screaming out to engage with brands".... 'cause if is, that's just more nonsense. The odd brand maybe will be engaged with but 99% will not be.

@John

When Microsoft bought Hotmail for $400m, people went "that's overpriced nonsense", before they realised that email was, at the type, the stickiest web service that guarantees people coming back to your service every day, making it a very cheap customer acquisition channel

When Murdoch bought MySpace for $580 million, people said it was "overpriced nonsense", just before he sold a guaranted Google ad deal that guaranteed $1 billion over 3 years.

I admit that some deals have been overprice (Bebo, AOL), but there are meaningful, media-changing businesses out there.

A new generation of teenagers are rejecting *email* as being archaic. They communicate via the instant means of text, instant messenging and social network. THey expect their search to be realtime (that's what Twitter really is: real-time search. The Hudson plane crash broke on Twitter - expect breaking news to show up on Twitter about 24 hours before Google's current algorithms catch on).

So by all means guys, don't use Twitter (it's better for everyone else if harrumphing Luddites ignore it). But to dismiss just because you don't get it: well I can't think of a more arrogant attitude to communication, which doesn't bode well for brand guys.

Why do people so easily resort to the argument that if someone thinks something has faults or problems and voices them cogently, then that person doesn't get it? I think George has a point and it also seems to me that many commentators on social media continue to fall into the trap of claiming that all communication is and should be tractable to advertising and marketing. Maybe not. Maybe that's why Facebook has yet to make a profit. Maybe its just not a marketing medium. You know, like the letters I put in the post box. (Large red thing on street corners; not at all instant, very archaic).

Rick

Good point... Not everything has to be an advertising medium... God forbid. That's why the title of my new book is "The UBIQUITOUS Persuaders."There's more of it, and it's less effective. It isn't that we have more ways to reach consumers... It's that consumers now have more ways to tune us out.

Cheers/George