Social Media Decay Signals
July 22, 2013
In the Overflight system were two news items which struck the same chord for me.
The first story is “LinkedIn’s Most Glaring Deficiencies and How to Get around Them.” On the surface, the write up provides some tricks and trips for the job hunter or competitive intelligence professional who uses the LinkedIn service. Some are obvious such as replying to a message in an invitation. Others require a bit of tinkering. The underlying message for me was that LinkedIn is making some users do extra work to perform routine tasks. The most interesting point in the article for me was:
I got this head’s up from my friend Erik Bernskiold on Twitter. I HATE when companies require a credit card for a free trial. Nothing says desperado spammer quite like that requirement. And then apparently, if you do it, good luck canceling your trial, according to these woebegone victims. In all fairness, I didn’t test this, although I did try to find a free month upgrade option to try. But it does align with their other desperate tactics.
I noticed the word “desperate.” Interesting.
The second article concerns the would-be giant in social media, Google Plus. The service as you may recall was positioned as “Google.” In the wake of the recent earnings report and Glass, I am not sure Google Plus is as important as shoring up online advertising performance. This story is “Google+ Spamming People Every 2 Weeks to Put Up a Profile Photo.” Interesting angle: The author associates Google with spam. Probably sour grapes?
My take away is that, like other online services, the social media arena is starting to show what I call “online decay.” After a run up, a level of usage is reached and then getting more buy in takes a lot of work.
In these two instances, the “work” may be alienating some users. The decay can be a difficult problem to remediate.
Stephen E Arnold, July 22, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky
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