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till vivid in our minds is the burst of the dot.com bubble a decade ago. It was mostly attributed to the incorrect understanding (or use) of the Internet; the view that the Internet could change the way we saw the world and in this case, marketing taken so far to the extent that we could use the Internet for marketing and advertising purpose. People would actually be able to buy shampoo through the Internet.

This led to the “new” business model complete with its new set of measurements: Eyeballs, click-throughs, page views, etc. that were believed to be compatible with the current use of ratings, awareness or top-of-mind levels, sales and other figures basically used as key performance indicators (KPI) of marketing and advertising strategies and their implementation.

The “new” business models led to corporations investing in Internet-based companies known as dot.coms, and when eventually it was proven that this business model didn’t work (i.e. people didn’t buy shampoo through the Internet — they just walked to the nearest neighborhood outlet) the bubble burst.

Now we’re in the midst of another trend (or buzzword): social media. Everybody believes that you must be in it or your brand will be forgotten — popularly viewed as being a dinosaur. The euphoric sensation of social media in the marketing industry somehow overshadows the lurking trappings of yet another bubble waiting to burst.

The industry is so engulfed with social media that they hurriedly insert their brands into social media through “conversations” or “expert recommendations”; in advertising terms these are “buzzers” or “key opinion leaders” talking about a product/brand (whether being paid or not — mostly paid for by the advertiser) to their “communities”.

BJ Mendelson in his book Social Media is Bullshit shows that although social media is a great place for communities and conversation, it does not necessarily mean that it is a good platform for marketing or advertising.

The lure of stories of great individuals or brands making it big through social media (i.e. the big six: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Tumblr) does not mean that everybody engaging in it can succeed as well. Most success stories disregard the effect of conventional media on this success (i.e. particular social media brands/personalities became popular because they were broadcast on TV) and not because of the power of social media alone. Of course there are real cases of success, but they are rare and few and far between.

Despite the book’s off-putting title and its loosely edited copy, it does make valid claims; and to those skeptical of the overrated value of social media, they are confirmation of their suspicions.

Mendelson brings us back to the basics of good marketing: make a good product, make it easy to use and share, get good (traditional) media support for it, and finally make improvements to it based on consumer feedback. We have come back full circle in the world of advertising, from a time when a product should prove itself without advertising to a time where advertising came so close to lying, to now — that consumers have easy access and hold discussions about products thanks to the Internet — where any brand that is caught out in dishonesty will be easily discarded.

The issue of using paid buzzers already defeats the main purpose of having authentic people (or consumer) conversations in social media.

Social media is a real phenomenon, it does make the world smaller and links people and their communities together; but using it as an advertising platform per se may not be the best way to use it for marketing purposes.

The (mis)use of social media as a corporate stage to promote brands, rather than having sincere conversations, is not only ineffective (and the use of measurements of “likes”, “fans”, etc. aren’t helping) but also destructive to those who rely on digital advertising once a critical mass of advertisers realizes this ineffectiveness and pull out.

This does not mean that social media is a mere fad. It does have some merit for the marketing industry — if only it be used correctly and based on its strength i.e. its huge compilation of consumer conversations. Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier is just one of the most recent books on the gaining of information and insights through the use of huge data. The term tera-mining (which may soon be supplanted by peta- and exa-mining) has been suggested and proven to be a valuable asset in understanding people’s behavior pertinent to the marketing industry.

Popular books written by serious authors in the field have been talking about this for the last decade: Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki), Super Crunchers (Ayres), Freakonomics (Levitt & Dubner), The Long Tail (Anderson), but yet the industry’s attention is still in favor of the hyped, overrated, trendy use of social media merely for promotional, advertising purposes as they do with the traditional media.

Using crawlers (tools used to collect and sort words from the Internet, especially social media and search engines) one can analyze and turn such data into meaningful information such as trending topics, who’s talking about what or how people feel about a particular issue.

Currently there are dozens of such crawlers, some equipped with word-mapping abilities and even highly advanced ones using linguistic programming to assess the meaning of the many colloquial phrases used in daily conversations. This surely is a better way of using social media: rather than advertisers forcing their brands onto consumers using the false pretense of conversation, they could (and should) use people’s conversations to understand consumer attitudes and behavior in relation to their products to better understand consumer needs.

This kind of information is valuable as advertisers can then improve services and brands based on consumer needs, and have real sincere conversations with their consumers.

Again, social media is a valuable tool for marketing and advertising brands, but it should be done in a different fashion compared to the use of the traditional media.

It should be used as a platform for feedback and conversation rather than used as a one-way broadcasting platform for advertising (for this TV, radio and print media work much better). Using social media correctly would benefit the marketing industry and also avoid another bubble bursting.

The writer is head of strategies at Karsa Ide Karya and teaches advertising and media at the faculty of vocational studies at the University of Indonesia.