Better late than never. Trawling through my backlog of trade magazines, I came across an issue of Marketing from September 30. Almost a month old. I’d be a really crap journalist.
Luckily I’m not. And neither is Mark Ritson, who wrote this (to my mind) brilliant article. Mr Ritson is an ‘associate professor of marketing’ – whatever that is – and these are his thoughts on the parallel between what’s happening now with social media and what happened 10 years ago just prior to the dotcom bust. Here’s a flavour:
“If you believe the hype, Twitter is the future of media and marketing. John Borthwick, chief executive of web investor Betaworks, told the New York Times last week that Twitter ‘represents a next layer of innovation on the internet’ and that the investment was justified ‘because it represents a shift’. Ten years ago, I would have gulped, assumed I was missing something, and nodded my head at this.
“These days I am older, fatter and a good deal wiser, and I say (in fewer that 140 characters): bollocks to Twitter. And bollocks to it being worth a billion dollars.”
It’s nice to know that I’m not alone.
(Mind – a month is a long time in social media and Mr Ritson may already have changed his mind.)
thewordmonger 
I saw your post over on Linkedin (“What’s the craziest, wackiest most embarrassing place you’ve ever Tweeted from?”) and thought I’d weigh in here. I’m also in the camp that Twitter isn’t worth $1bn. Monetizing something that people would probably quit using if it cost even $2/month is quite a tricky puzzle. But I do think the point that’s getting missed is that Twitter is important. It might not ever live up to the hype, but I do believe that it is another tool that is changing things.
Sure, it turned out that Myspace wasn’t the end-all of social media, but it was a significant step towards this new face of the internet. Like Yahoo! before Google, Twitter might be paving the way for something else. Whatever it is, I believe that the basic idea behind Twitter is definitely worth keeping an eye on (even if it’s a skeptical one).
Hi David – thanks for taking the time to post
Wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying here – it would be very foolish to ignore Twitter (and indeed, from a wider perspective, social media in all their forms) – it exists, people are using it, it will (as you rightly say) probably lead to something else.
My money’s on a consolidation of the social media – Twitter has spoken about offering video, putting it into the youTube space, if it offers audio, it’ll put itself into the Audioboo space – I think there is probably only room for two or three ‘large brand’ social media. But then someone once said that there was probably a global market for three, maybe four, computers. Ooops.
The point I try and make, where I can, is that social media, used socially – great. They’re here – they’re probably here to stay. In some form or other. What they aren’t, however, is valid (and value-adding) marketing/sales tools. This is why Twitter isn’t worth tuppence ha’penny and why businesses and brands dedicating time, energy and resource to ‘social media strategies’ are pissing in the wind.