Is social media saturating – and what are the implications for marketing?

According to the latest data from Nielsen Research and Experian Simmons, the adoption of social media in the US has skyrocketed to 80 percent of those with online access, or over 40 percent of the overall population. Putting this in perspective, among those 35-and-younger, the adoption of social media is approaching that of US car ownership. Safe to say, it is clearly foolish to think of social media as something new or novel – it is an everyday part of most people’s lives.

Collectively, Americans now spend almost a billion hours a month exchanging news, information and gossip at social media sites. Last I checked there are still only 24 hours in a day: As you look at these stats, especially for the college-age set, the use of social media starts to look like borderline addiction. For many teens and tweens being connected online is an umbilical necessity for sustaining life. You wonder if Facebook and the rest shouldn’t carry warning labels, like cigarettes: Using Social Media Is Not A Substitute For Food, Sleep Or Reality.

More seriously, as social media adoption becomes mainstream, what are the consequences for marketing?

First, marketing pros should understand that media use overall is usually a zero-sum game: If we’re all spending more time online with social media, it usually means we’re doing less of some other media activity. There’s evidence to support this view, with online activities eating away at everything from watching television to reading. Second, we should anticipate that the use of social media is saturating. The amount of time we spend on social media is cresting, especially among those 35-and-younger.

This is a familiar scenario for marketing folks who have lived through other communications and marketing revolutions. I can remember when email marketing was a novelty, with response rates for well-targeted campaigns routinely reachig 3-5 percent (I’ve seen similarly impressive stats for the novelty-of-the-moment, QR codes). As social media saturates we should expect it to become harder and harder to create and sustain relationships between prospects and our brands. Saturation equates to clutter, attentions wane, and people become weary and guarded.

We should also remember that social media got that name for a reason – it’s a tool for staying in touch with friends and family, not primarily for finding your company, not matter how lovely it may be. Understand that social media is only one part of an integrated marketing program. Have realistic expectations - and make sure you communicate these to your management teams. As you work with social media, be true to yourself and your brand. The fundamentals of good marketing have not been re-invented: Be engaging, be credible, be trustworthy, and be unique.

What does Twitter and a Charles Dickens novel have in common?

Answer: Both have 140 characters.

2010 may well be the year remembered for marking the watershed between old and new media. After all, this is the year in which the odds-on favorite movie to win the Best Picture Oscar is about a a bunch of geeks writing social media software. It's also the year were the WSJ among others foresaw a social media bubble emerging. But whether Twitter, Facebook and the rest are really worth their extravagant evaluations is almost beside the point; it is unlikely that by the end of the next decade we will have any US daily newspapers, and the conventional information economy will have been reinvented.

But that isn't why I'm writing on New Year's Eve. This fall my eldest daughter was in the school play Oliver!, and this encouraged me to reread the book. It is a dark tale world's away from the jaunty musical, though many of the significant characters like Bumble, The Artful Dodger and Fagin are similar and true. It's a great, long novel (originally serialized in monthly installments) full of the usual Dickensian cacophony of character and plot. Over the holidays I also started Paul Murray's new and excellent Skippy Dies; at over 600 pages, it too is packed with character and plot, humor and tragedy. So my question is this: Is the sea-change in the media world ensuring the end of this kind of rich, detailed and thoughtful discourse? Nick Carr thinks so, and he's not alone; his eloquence had me convinced. And truthfully, what passes today for "news" in the new media world fills me with dread.

But I'm no longer to pessimistic. My eldest daughter is also an addicted reader, and The Hunger Games series got to her. It's on my list to read too,  but I'll be doing this on our ipod. There is a real social media bubble, and it will burst. But new media has already destroyed the conventional economic model for how mass media works, and how we get information, art, entertainment, even friends... But there is plenty of room for 140 characters, be they Bumbles and Fagins or A and Bs. Information of value, stories that sell... the content itself will likely not change much at all. McLuhan's prophecy is at best only partly true; the medium is rarely the message.