Facebook isn’t a trend… get over it!

Posted on 20. Mar, 2009 by Tom in marketing, social media

This post is originally posted on Who’s Reading Anyway?

I don’t really have anything against trendwatchers… if I could make money by telling people what they already know, I wouldn’t complain. Recently a lot of items came up telling people Facebook is the new trend, or Twitter is the trend of 2009. That’s not really true is it?

hype

Facebook isn’t really a trend, it’s just a hype. The reason why Facebook exists… that’s the trend. The growing need to identify yourself, to pull yourself out of the crowd and scream: “This is me!”. Ever since the world got smaller and communications got more easy, people needed a way to distinct themselves from their peers. That need to identify yourself is a huge opportunity for marketers, it means that if you can find a way to reach them at an emotional level you can keep them, make them yours, loyal and ever-buying.

The use of Facebook is just an illustration. It shows how people desperately look for short-term solutions for long-term answers. Trends are something that evolve… slowly. It’s not something like Facebook that pops up one day out of the blue and answers to a certain demand.

Most people try to find ways to monetize hypes, while they should be finding ways to monetize trends. Riding the Facebook train is easy, it’s already there, but it’s not you. You can’t really call it ‘trendwatching’ when it’s something that’s already there. Trendwatchers who think that ‘Facebook’ is the trend spend days, weeks, months thinking about how they can use it to profit from it. By the time they do find it, there’ll be a new Facebook around. Watch the Kevin Kelley presentation again and wonder… do you really think that technology will give you the time you need to identify and utilize these hypes? By the time you find them, someone (your competitor) is already working on a new one!

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