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Is Facebook Losing its Cool?

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I remember my senior year of college when this thing called Facebook came around. I waited rather impatiently for the time when they would open up Facebook to my university. Finally, it opened up and I was one of the first people at my school to sign up. As a result, my inbox was flooded daily with dozens of friend requests.

Fast forward a couple of years and we saw high school kids getting into Facebook. Fast forward a few more years and anyone with an email address is signing up for Facebook!

In the beginning, Facebook was an exclusive club with limited membership.  Now, this club has almost a billion members. Facebook has become the destination for extensive marketing campaigns and promotions brought to you by some of the world’s largest companies and brands. And, there’s this privacy issue that doesn’t seem to go away…

The mainstream media tells us that some teens aren’t liking Facebook as much as older users.  And, the comments in this SodaHead poll seem to suggest that Facebook has become a “geriatric social network”. There’s even this website set up for people that aren’t to jazzed that their parents are even on Facebook.

While the number of cool things that you can do on Facebook has increased, do you think Facebook’s losing its “cool” appeal to the masses? Was Facebook ever cool to begin with?

The Mid Atlantic Marketing Summit is coming to Baltimore on October 18th  where we’ll be be discussing Facebook’s coolness factor, content marketing and the next big thing. Hope to see you there!

Now it’s your turn! Take our easy Facebook poll below and then tell us what you think in the comments. To throw in some fun, we’ll be giving away a FREE marketing summit pass to someone randomly selected from the comments below.

Facebook- hot or not?

[polldaddy poll=”6580616″]

Search Drives Word of Mouth, But Don’t Discount Social Media

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Today I came across a resource site called Think with Google, containing digital marketing information, trends and insights and recently launched by (one guess)…Google. I excitedly dove into the wealth of information it provided, starting with Word of Mouth under its Think Insights section, thinking of the treasure trove of research, articles and posts about WOM, social media, digital marcomm. What I got was a treasure trove of Google-centric research about how search (Google) is the #1 spark of WOM conversations, how search (Google) is more likely to result in a purchase, and how search (yes, you guessed it) far outpaces social media sites as a resource driving WOM conversations.

No, I’m not surprised about this, for 2 reasons:

  1. It makes sense that search drives most WOM conversations, since that is the one place people will go to find information about a company or product. No, they don’t go to Twitter or Facebook, they go to search. Search has been around for ages in Internet years, far longer than social media, and it’s ingrained into our brains to go straight to Google (or your search engine of choice) to research a potential purchase.
  2. Why should I be surprised that a digital publication called “Think with Google” wouldn’t be Google-centric? It’s like Oprah’s O Magazine – she’s on the cover of every issue.

So the takeaway here is that companies should be focused on search marketing when it comes to generating WOM conversations, right? Well, yes – but the reason why I’m writing this is because I don’t want people to discount social media and its role in the WOM landscape. Search is, always has been and always will be an extremely important (if not THE most important) part of any online marketing strategy; but everything else you do online feeds into that.

  • Information shared through social media sites is included in search results (take a look at the Discussions tab the next time you search on Google).
  • The Twitter-to-Google firehose may be off, but retweets still impact how content is indexed on Google.
  • Sharing through Google+ will most certainly have a greater impact on search over time.
  • Social sharing impacts the creation of content that is then indexed in search results.
  • Building a strong social media network increases the likelihood that your content will be shared, therefore impacting how it’s indexed in search.
  • Relationships built through social media can lead to outside content-creation or linkbuilding opportunities.

So don’t think about how search is more likely to impact WOM conversations than social media, think about how your social media efforts impact your search marketing efforts to drive WOM conversations.