HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS pushes his way through web clutter to check out an ‘era of social colonisation’.

Sigh. The ongoing and endless argument between ‘brand’ enthusiasts and ‘results’ enthusiasts now has a competitor.

We’re all ready for this one: Are ‘social media’ competitive with commercial media as marketing weapons?

The word best describing wild expansion of Internet communication is ‘clutter’. Some marketers say they seriously consider Facebook and MySpace and LinkedIn and YouTube and Twitter and Plavix as meaningful ways to reach prospects.

(Did that last sentence slip past you? You won’t circulate within anything but your own circulatory system with Plavix. Plavix is a proprietary medicine prescribed to prevent blood clots. It sounds like Plaxo, a LinkedIn cousin.)

A mixed bag
An obvious question is whether opening our promotional programs to the public is a positive or a negative marketing move.

Here’s an email from a US vendor of computer software using the name, ‘Twitter Profit House’. The message: ‘Anyone can make MONEY with Twitter
– $250 PER DAY WORKING AT HOME – FAST – EASY – CASH! Click here to qualify.’

The click opens an unsurprising stack of blank spaces to fill, with boiler-plate encouragement: ‘1. Get Your Risk-Free Twitter Profit Software Kit … 2. Use Simple Typing Skills to Fill Out Online Forms … 3. Watch The Money Start Rolling In!!!’

I entered a phony online address and was rewarded with ‘You qualified!’ for ‘137 Secret Twitter Money Getting Resources’ accompanied by a request for a Visa or MasterCard number so they can send me information – just US$1.99 charged to the card.

Nope.

Aside from the scamminess of the offer, I’m not about to patronise a marketer who wildly uses initial caps and all-caps and triple exclamation marks.
But wait: Do Twitter and its less obnoxiously-named parallels represent profit-centres comparable to established commercial email and the more traditional media?

It’s possible.

But it’s also dangerous, because we see episode after episode in which opening the digital graffiti floodgates brings a flood of blogs and comments criticising the originator of the dialogue. Plus, identity theft is rampant.

And everybody is a critic. Here’s a website named Cruisecritic.com, in which cruise addicts tell us what they like and don’t like about specific cruises. Here’s Epinions.com, challenging users to help create ‘Top 10’ lists of almost anything. Here’s one sponsored by Amazon, asking us to rank books and movies. (I qualify: Some of the movies I’ve made are quite rank.)

Each of these is an invitation to stuff the ballot-box. The validity is about as solid as a peace promise made by the Taliban.

User reviews are an open invitation for a business to praise itself and even in the embryonic phase of this subculture we have exposés of marketers allocating employees’ paid time for spurious chest-thumping.

Human nature being what it is, one ‘Awful’ comment offsets a dozen ‘Awesome’ comments.

A muddy future
Authoritative comments abound. A trade magazine printed this comment by an authority who for all I know may have believed she was telling us something we could penetrate without a pick-axe: “Content is king. It leads to social networking, not the other way around.”

And in sync with the need for obfuscation, one of those research companies hovering around our playground, looking for a reason to exist, has called the immediate future ‘the era of social colonisation’.

As is true of so many pseudo-profundities by would-be gurus, those rate a solid ‘Huh?’ Hmm. Maybe the column you’re reading achieves that same dubious rating.