The Press Is (Rightfully) Cynical
Posted on April 13, 2008
Posted by Mike Berkley
For those of you who follow me on Twitter (mike_berkley), you may have noted that I was in NYC the week before last on a press tour. I met with some very smart and very savvy journalists who cover digital media and marketing for top-tier publications like AdAge, AdWeek, MediaWeek, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Business Week, Fast Company, etc.
It was a good trip for SplashCast, but I came away realizing: the mainstream press is very cynical about social marketing.
The social-network-as-marketing-channel is a new phenomenon, and there is a lot of experimentation going on. With lots of experimentation, there is naturally going to be a lot of failure. In addition to the countless number of failed Facebook marketing applications, the social networks themselves haven’t figured out how to exploit their own platforms, as exemplified by Facebook’s Beacon blunder and Google’s miserably performing MySpace display ads.
As an industry, we don’t help ourselves. Case in point: we call our primary product a “widget”. A widget? WTF? And we claim to be marketers. Now everyone and their hamster is creating widgets. Flashback to 1997 when everyone and their parakeet was a web designer.
It’s no wonder that the press is cynical.
The good news is that the journalists also believe that the high-decibel noise in our industry won’t last forever: a major widget shake-out is coming! [See what’s wrong here: you can’t even put the word “major” before the word “widget” without it feeling stupid]
A lot of less-than-prudent VC money has flowed to model-less widget companies (again, hello 1997), which will delay a shake-out.
But it will happen. Many widget companies and agencies that create widgets are struggling because they are simply repurposing destination site content (news, photos, videos, RSS feeds, etc), and don’t take advantage of what’s uniquely possible with distributed content (social games, leveraging the social graph, aggregating user-submitted content from different sites, etc).
When the shake-out does happen, it will make my job telling the SplashCast story to the press a lot easier! 
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SplashCast is a leading provider of social marketing solutions that gives brands direct access to teens and young adults where they live: social networks.
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[…] The Press is (Rightfully) Cynical Mike Berkley writes “For those of you who follow me on Twitter (mike_berkley), you may have noted that I was in NYC the week before last on a press tour. I met with some very smart and very savvy journalists who cover digital media and marketing for top-tier publications like AdAge, AdWeek, MediaWeek, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, Business Week, Fast Company, etc.” […]
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