SM is BS?

I just finished Social Media is Bullshit by B.J. Mendleson and I wanted to share my thoughts while they were still fresh. Overall, I didn’t want to like the book because of what I perceived to be the author snarky, know-it-all attitude. If I attempt to uncouple the book from the author, I will admit I appreciated some of the content. In the end, I find myself more skeptical of social media than I was before, so if the author’s goal was to persuade people that social media is indeed bullshit, he gets a B- from me.

I agree with Mendelson’s assertion that the largest companies with the largest advertising budgets are the ones who stand to gain from social media. I also agree that usually the perception that these social media advances are actually a combination of traditional media spending, and social media. (See the Old Spice and Kia case studies).

One of the things that troubled me most about these big company “success stories” was that the gain in sales in many cases were a very large amount of money to the average business. However, in terms of amounts relative to these companies’ overall budgets, many of the gains were tiny. As with the Dell example, they supposedly gained $3 million by using Twitter…but their revenues were $61.1 billion. So, in scaling that to an amount that normal people can understand, if someone were making $61,100 a year, their Twitter gain amounted to just $30. Furthermore, this success was not sustained year over year, as they lost a whopping $9 billion the following year. Maybe they should have focused their time on innovation.

Mendelson says, “Unless there’s something to be gained by being on Facebook, you shouldn’t have a presence there. All traffic and attention should always be focused on one Web site – one that you own.” (pg. 101). I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. Very few websites are interactive, but Facebook is. I believe that smaller companies, especially local businesses, can stand to gain from this interaction. I think it can work if the small business manages their presence, or more likely, if they have an engaged owner who simply likes using social media. I think a well-done social media presence, in particular a good Facebook page, can go a long way to engage an audience. While it may not bring in much new business, it can help entrench a very loyal, regular customer base.

In the end, I agree with a lot of what Mendleson says. I also think he’s a blowhard, and he is a little off the mark.

As a post-script, of note to me was that Mendleson’s “epiphany” comes on a failed road trip to raise money and awareness for people to check themselves early and often for what is presumably cancer. Mendleson states he employed every thing he knew about social media, and it just didn’t work. As a professional fundraiser with more than a decade of experience, I could have saved him the trouble of making the trip by telling him that is simply not how fundraising is done. His epiphany is bullshit.