Social Media Strategy Lifecycles: Why Social Media Brands Need More Depth

The FourSquare "Game": This year's model in barhaopping, and not much else?

 

[tweetmeme source=”MarkBrimm”] 

There is a great piece (great as in hilarious) that vents on FourSquare making the rounds today. The argument is not a new one, but ages well over time. It runs along the lines of “we’re sick of seeing your pointless FourSquare updates” and extols the virtues of real-life connections over virtual ones. In part, I think this is dead-on, and in another sense I think the ennui of virtual connections has mostly to do with their inherent shallowness of purpose to begin with. A lot of the shallow/surface short-term limits of social media tools like FourSquare are about context and can easily be overcome with some longterm branding vision.      

Say you’re a location-hopping fool and just too social to know what to do with yourself. FourSquare’s “check-in” game makes sense if you are checking in for the sake of connecting with just the people you know well. It becomes a surreal, futuristic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie when all the personal elements of one’s day are turned into a voyeuristic game for anonymous onlookers to engage in from a window. Afterall, do you really want everyone to know what you’re doing 24-7? Are there really no negative repercussions to checking in everywhere you go? In fact, we all know there are. FourSquare may be banking a little too much on the “game” lifecycle of its own service.      With social media comes more opportunities to socialize and make new connections. Networking for business benefits from social media and so do tribes with common interests. When it comes to forward-looking insights on how social media does and doesn’t make sense, FourSquare looks a little like another 5-year company to me (being generous here), unless they can seriously come up with new ways to market their service to young professionals and entrepreneurs and innovative company management.      

For instance, checking in makes sense to your boss if you’re on company time and he’d like his team to spread out, get things done and stay plugged-in with each other. Same holds for family and friends. As a gamy fad, however, it’s not a business proposition so much as a bet on how long a fad can be stretched before it implodes and fades away under the fierce cacophony of public derision that once also embraced MySpace as an open-ended social media tool.      

Social media tools with investment behind them need to have better longterm strategies than they currently do, or else there is going to be a bubble for them, too, and then the investment just won’t be there anymore for the true innovators of the future. We need more niche content partners and fewer monolithic vertical companies trying to do everything and absorb it all into a over-extended brand (Take Google’s gradual digestion of the Twitter and YouTube brands and their continual “user interface improvements” which will probably hurt the brand in the short-term, not help). We all get hurt by poor strategy and over-extension in the end, not just the companies, but the audience who could truly benefit from the tools, but ultimately won’t due to poor brand management and short-term gimmicks like games that age and start to annoy and lose relevance in the eyes of advertisers. Have we forgotton how to “focus” on the brand? Where is focus in the age of social media marketing? Is the lifecyle of a brand automatically reduced to 1.5 years peak and then resigned to being dumped into the cyberspace wasteland? Why are so few companies seriously thinking about the longterm viability of the brands they’ve creating and asking others to invest in (both capital-wise and attention-wise)? [tweetmeme source=”MarkBrimm”]