Some great charts here – the overhype of social has been increasingly grating in recent years, a repeat of the 2003-5 excitement over blogging as the future of everything journalism, or the great SEO craze of approximately the same period, where the right combination of metadata and keywords were seen as some kind of magic bullet that could take any site to the top of the first page of Google.
Thankfully, everyone’s woken up to the limitations of both blogging and SEO. We’re now hopefully now coming to the same realisation with social, with more and more myths about clicks, engagement, sales, and all sorts being shattered left, right and centre.
But what we really need is the backlash to the backlash will hopefully follow soon after. Because although neither blogging nor SEO were quite the massive game changers they were made out to be, both have had (and continue to have) a huge positive impact on both the online world and the media as a whole. We simply now have a better understanding of their limitations as well as their strengths – which puts us in a much stronger position. Add the same rational approach to social (an approach that anyone with a Twitter addiction as bad as mine could have told you about years ago), and we should end up stronger yet again.
