Is Social Media Worthless?

I feel the same way about beer. I love beer commercials... they are usually absolutely hilarious, and I often literally LOL at them. During football season, when I'm hanging with my friends at the sports bar watching the Dolphins play, I look forward to the commercials so we can have a group laugh over the latest ads from Budweiser, Coors, Michelob, etc.

But... 2 minutes after a given ad airs, I could not tell you if it was an ad for Coors, Michelob, Budweiser or "other". Well, ok, the Keystone ones do stand out a bit in my mind. But in any case, NONE of them give me the slightest inclination to drink their respective brand of beer. I already regard all mainstream, mass-market American beers as being roughly equivalent to stale horse piss, and all the funny commercials in the world aren't going to change that.

My staple beer is Sam Adams, which I usually drink unless a given bar has a microbrew I happen to like. And I was drinking Sam before I ever remember seeing a commercial for it. How'd I find it? A bartender recommended it to me once, I tried it, liked it, and that was it.

Big companies and brands often lose sight of what social media is really about: namely, sharing things with friends. Grouping with people based on shared affinity for certain topics, things, events, etc. People are there for the friends first; all other considerations -- including content consumption -- are secondary.

It's incredibly hard to convince people to hang out on a soft drink's social page. What's the benefit? Where is the natural, social use case? If I want a Pepsi, I'll go buy one. When I don't, why the heck would I spend time reading about Pepsi, or talking with friends about Pepsi? Who actually does that? I submit that anyone who does is highly abnormal. Maybe even crazy. Regardless, they're the kind of person whose social feed I'll ignore.

As for the Pepsi Refresh campaign, they put the cart before the horse. People care about the cause first and the money second. If I want to raise money to fight breast cancer, for instance, I'll start with the people who care about breast cancer, building out from that passionate early adopter base. I don't just wave a giant paycheck around in front of a highly heterogeneous set of people, asking them to tell me where to spend it. It's a statistically irrational approach to marketing. But more important, there's no heart or soul in that. There's no grassroots need inherent to that. People don't want to vote on a cause. People have causes. Pepsi should have started with a specific cause, and then made waves by offering to match (or even triple) a crowdsourced fundraising campaign.

An example: for all its flaws, that infamous "Kony 2012" video went uberviral. The video didn't start by asking the question, "Hey, who's the most despicable African warlord we should try to depose? Vote here!" It started by informing people about a specific evildoer, educating them about him, and then asking them to do something about it.

Pepsi could have generated a lot more authentic goodwill by offering to match or exceed an existing campaign, hashtagging into it. They could have spared themselves the millions of dollars creating a page for their campaign, branding it, and acquiring fans for it.