by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), San Francisco Bay I guess you have to admire the shamelessness of their duplicity.
And I guess you have to marvel at the stupidity and naivete of an industry that not only allows such BS to exist, but doesn’t even 
seem to care.
The subject is social media marketing, and the perpetrator is Facebook.
Let’s go back a few years. Social media marketing was going to disrupt the traditional paid advertising industry big time (by the way, if I ever hear you utter the word disrupt I’m coming with a shovel to disrupt your face.)
You see, you and I were going to “join the conversation.”
We’d be going on line and having conversations about brands. And these conversations would be read and shared by our network of friends and followers. And this would create a multiplier effect that would make folly of traditional paid advertising.
According to an article at Entrepreneur.com, Facebook’s Global Brand Experience Manager once believed that companies need to… replace random display ads. Those… ads will fall by the wayside, like so many other obsolete processes and technologies.
Well, by now it’s pretty clear that the whole thing was an infantile fantasy. Or as McKinsey & Company put it a few weeks ago…
“E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media — nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.”
Now it seems that even Facebook, the former poster child for social media marketing, is joining the rats in abandoning the social media marketing ship.
Now that Facebook is a real company and has to make real money and is finding that real advertising is its real business, it is singing a new tune.
Last week, Time magazine reported that Facebook’s Pages platform reaches only 6% of a brand’s followers, and is headed down to 1 to 2%.
When questioned about this by Time, here’s what a Facebook spokesperson had to say…
“… if businesses want to make sure that people see their content, the best strategy is, and always has been, paid advertising.”
Boy, am I confused.
The Ad Contrarian is Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian), the author of The Ad Contrarian and 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising.
This column has been republished from his blog The Ad Contrarian.
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