Value doesn’t equal money

Image: Courtesy of Found Magazine

Remember MySpace as a community platform before it became a marketing platform and ad network? Remember Second Life as a new way to interact with people before it became the marketing vehicle du jour and a user annoyance? Remember widgets when they were valuable and an innovative way to pull in information before marketers over-widgetized the world? Remember Facebook when it was a community platform with a few applications before marketers started to build almost 50,000 applications (at last count)? Remember the iPhone when it was a new way to interact with the mobile web before the application store launched and now it’s almost impossible to cut through the clutter and deliver a valuable application to the consumer?

Is there a trend?

It’s the tendency of marketers to jump on a bandwagon, fall into the trap of the GMOOT Syndrome (Give me one of those) and overwhelm platforms or new opportunities with marketing messages, not understanding how to add value. Marketers have problems making that switch from being professional disruptors to value-adders. Only if you add value to the user experience will you be able to stand out. Period.

People will leave a platform and move on when they feel exploited, when their user experience diminishes while the balance sheets of the platforms improve. Short-term.

Sure, it’s not only marketers fault. Platforms are often pushed into allowing marketers in as early as possible to facilitate growth and high valuations. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams promised a revenue model by Q1 2009. Will Twitter fall into the old trap? Or will they found new ways to work with marketers to add new value to the platform by adding new features and functionality? Or allowing users to engage with a brand in new and exciting ways? One can only hope for.

Selling out Social Networks

We tend to value things by putting a price tag on it: The watch must be good because it costs $5,000. The Mercedes-Benz must be better because it’s more expensive than the VW. Applying the same method to relationships or connections seems laughable: What is the value of a friend? What is the value of a business connection?  

Unfortunately, Wall Street, many businesses and agencies try to value Social Networks just on a monetary basis. They see the overvaluation of Facebook as a reminder of the dotcom bubble and a warning sign that all this talk about Social Media and Conversational Marketing might just be that: talk. 

I agree: Facebook is not a $15 billion company. But, at the same time, I couldn’t care less. I’m not Mark Zuckerberg, I’m not an investor, shareholder, don’t really care if Facebook ever makes a profit. I don’t even care if Facebook survives the next two years, ends up to be another MySpace aka Advertising Network or thrives and prospers. But users care: Once they feel the sell-out, they’re moving on.

What I care about are changing behavior patterns: People don’t ask companies anymore to get them things, they ask their peers. People avoid advertising at any cost but they are open to valuable tools that facilitate their conversations. Facebook is one site where many of these changing behavior patterns manifest themselves. There are thousand others. And you can experience it outside of the digital space: In airplanes, at work, in pre-school, stuck in traffic.  

Debating the value of MySpace or Facebook might be an entertaining discussion. But it distracts us from the fact that people are changing. Relationships and connections are the real value of Social Networks. Not a Wall Street price tag.