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This is yet another non-news blog post with a sensationalised headline (which, to his credit, he admits).

Here's another problem. The author hoists himself on his own petard with this nugget of wisdom:

Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers.

So it's shocking, shocking that marketers would "commandeer" a service that was expressly designed to aid and abet marketers. Hm.

3 comments

Well, non-news blogs posts seem to be more the rule than the exception these days :)

I've never been a MySpace user, was it really truly built as a place to market to young people? It always felt to me that it was built as the Geocities of the 2000's, and the whole marketing thing happened only after they realized:

  a) they had a critical mass of users

  b) they had no idea how to generate revenue.

Facebook wasn't designed to abet marketers - not in the way that some people do it, using their own profile to advertise their company. (Facebook Pages and feed messages are completely fine.) Neither was MySpace originally, though once it started happening they reversed positions pretty quickly.

I think he means in terms of placing ads. While it's nice to think that the founders of Facebook and MySpace really wanted to create ways for people to connect, in reality they were creating a service with mass-adoption potential in the most highly sought-after demographics. These audiences are golden for marketing and in some cases, it creates deep opportunities for demographics that were previously difficult to market to...especially teenagers.

What this guy is talking about is how companies are now trying to build lists of friends on MySpace/Facebook/Whatever for what is essentially "free" marketing. This is some sort of secondary marketing and probably wasn't the intention of the services as they aren't providing any revenue. When executed wisely, this strategy is actually really good and can actually provide value to the service, the company as well as its "friends". However, I seriously doubt the ability of most SEO's to adapt and succeed with quality results in social media. It's not as cut and dry as SEO and actually requires "white hat" creativity.

MySpace, yes. It came from a very corporate background. But Facebook really did start as a small little network for Harvard people that spread like mad. (I think if Zuckerberg had really been out to make a billion dollars with Facebook, he'd have been much better prepared with an advertising solution than he was. Considering how good the Facebook team is with innovating and expanding themselves, advertising dropped the ball - I think because they didn't prepare any solutions ahead of time.)

The "friends list" is exactly what I dislike about such systems. Especially on Facebook, where systems already exist to handle such systems benevolently. I don't think that counts as SEO, though, since there's nothing SEO to putting a page on a private network. That opposed to Twitter, where some people link to every single blog post they write to boost their link status. (Then again: I don't understand Twitter and probably never will.)

Twitter, Facebook, even the biggest social network, MySpace, which was built as a place to market to young people, has been destroyed by the attempts to commandeer them by marketers.

Where in the article does the author prove or even offer evidence that Facebook has been "destroyed"? In what way have the social networks been "destroyed"? Certain Myspace is in flux, but not because of marketeering. Twitter is destroyed? Really?