Sunday, November 04, 2007

I am getting bored with social networking


I have already written about Saga making a formal launch of Sagazone (yawn). In response to Saga's announcement the UK press has produced a deluge of nonsense about “silver surfers” and online networking.

Amusingly, a few of the articles took an aggrieved tone along the lines – “how dare these oldies gate crashing the world of youth….”. This article in the Telegraph is one of the better ones.

As usual the general media is 6 months behind the pace, since anybody with any interest in this area has known that social networking is intrinsically age-neutral. It is a bit like the time mobile phones were seen as some sort of symbol of youthfulness and texting was a magic reserved for sub-18 year olds.

Another social networking site has been launched in the UK – mychumsclub.com. This one is bit different in that it charges you £50 to join and will cap the membership (i.e. going for the exclusivity angle). In the same week it has been announced/rumoured that Friendsreunited (arguably one of the first social networking sites) is dropping its subscription fee of £5. Weird or what!

OK, social networking was an interesting topic. It is here, it will morph into lots of other things, but there are a lot more interesting things on the horizon of 50-plus marketing – Web video for one. Dick Stroud

2 comments:

Chuck Nyren said...

While I don't know this for a fact - I'll go out on a limb and say that you, Mr. Stroud, are NOT getting bored with social networking. That's because I bet that you don't hang out on social networking sites in order to make friends and dilly-dally - so how could you be bored with something you don't do?

My guess is that you have more important things to do - as do most people our age.

Neuromarketing said...

I think a bigger factor than social network boredom is social network overload. There are too many possible communities, networks, etc. for us to participate in, and one can only devote so much time to the activity. Ultimately, it becomes a zero-sum game. One network's gain is another's loss.

Roger