Let’s have a little more conversation and a little less communication, says Ian Hughes.

Apparently I am being followed. Somewhere, out there in the ether, someone is following my Twitter feed.

You can follow me, too: @ianchughes. You can also ‘Facebook’ me: I am Ian Hughes (no surprise there). Oh, and I am on LinkedIn. I used to be on Bebo and Myspace as well, but you can ignore those. I have an MSN account and a Yahoo! account and several email addresses that are required for mystery shopping purposes.
You can check my blog out at www.consumerintel.com  or here at dmionline.net – or you can email me, call me or text me. In short, I’m on the grid.

Extra value?
It seems to me that, with all these connections, my life is not that much richer and neither is that of those around me. You see, I can ‘Facebook’ my daughters (I am using Facebook as a verb!), I can ‘Twitter’ with my eldest. Some of my friends are on Facebook, some are on LinkedIn.

But in all of this, I am finding little extra value as an individual. And if I can’t find value . . . well, it won’t survive.

A recent survey of Twitter found that less than ten per cent of users are creating about 90 per cent of the content. Bottom line, most people are inactive.  MySpace has even announced that it is laying people off.
 In my opinion, there is a lot of communication but not a lot of conversation going on. And it is conversation that engages people. 

For me, a large amount of Facebook and Twitter is just that – a lot of people making a noise. It’s a bit like someone in the old CB radio days (remember those?), randomly pressing the transmit button every now and then and saying: “I’m driving along . . . now, I have stopped, now I am driving again.”

It’s the electronic equivalent of saying: “Look at me!” Before you know it, people will be writing columns for magazines. God forbid!

But, where is the value for you as a marketer?

There are some great examples of marketers who are using Twitter, like Jet Blue and iPhone. And my good friend Aleksandr Orlov (of Comparethemeerkat.com fame) is on Facebook with nearly 500,000 fans.
But the question is, does it make me want to buy car insurance, an iphone or fly jet blue. And the answer is . . . no.
 
So what’s the point?
We have tried doing some advertising on Facebook and, I have to say, it worked to a limited degree. But is that because Facebook is a good place to advertise, or because we happened to be one of the first? Will it really work long term?

Let me give you one example of where social networking does seem to be working.

On LinkedIn, I have a group of people who went to Harvard with me, we are spread across the six continents of the world living disparate lives. LinkedIn gives us the ability to reconnect our community. As a result of LinkedIn, we are organising a physical reunion, in order to match the virtual reunion. This does seem to be working and it is very simple.

However, recently we had a recruiter try to join our group in order to offer members of the group a job. Needless to say, we declined. But what would we as a group be willing to accept? And could the company make money out of it?

Folks, I don’t know. 

I am not sure what the value of blogging is, or the value of being connected. 

But here’s what I am planning to do. Over the next month or so, I am going to try my best to stay connected. I am going to try to immerse myself in this new digital world.

I am going to try to become as connected as a person can be, to see what I think some of the angles are.

And then I will report back.
 
Community of content
Right now, my preconception is:  the only company that has successfully managed to make money out of mining the interests of consumers is Google. Every other company that has worked to build a community of content, which it gives away for free in the prospect of making money from other sources, has failed.

It fails because people get bored or because they object when companies overtly try to monetise the relationship – then all this fuss and nonsense becomes all fuss and no fizz.