考研阅读精选：太多的嗡嗡声
Too much buzzSocial media provides huge opportunities, but will bring huge problems
Dec 31st 2011 | from the print edition
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THE only area of business that seems to be recession-proof is socialmedia. Industrial firms are battening down the hatches. Banks aretossing thousands of workers overboard. But Facebook is looking to raise$10 billion for a small fraction of its shares when it goes public in2012.
A recent conference in Madrid, put on by the BankinterFoundation of Innovation, captured the enthusiasm. The assembledcyber-gurus argued that “social technologies” that allow people tobroadcast their ideas (eg, Twitter), or form connections (eg, LinkedIn),are some of the most powerful ever devised. They can be supersizedquickly, linked together easily and spread by customers. And they can beaccessed from almost anywhere. Two billion people are already online.E-commerce sales are $8 trillion a year. So, the argument goes, thismore “social” element to the internet is the next great revolution.Over-caffeinated cyber-champions talk of “empowerment” and“transparency”. But is all this as wonderful as it sounds? Or is it anew bubble in the making?
The great virtue of socialtechnologies, say their boosters, is that they break down the barriersbetween companies and their customers. They allow firms to gather oodlesof information: big companies now obsessively monitor social media tofind out what their customers really think about them. Social media alsoallow companies to respond to complaints more quickly: firms asdifferent as Chrysler and Best Buy employ “Twitter teams” to reply towhinging tweets.
More information ought to be useful, butonly if companies can interpret it. And workers are already overloaded:62% of them say that the quality of what they do is hampered becausethey cannot make sense of the data they already have, according toCapgemini, a consultancy. This will only get worse: the data deluge isexpected to grow more than 40 times by 2020.
Respondingquickly to bitter tweets sounds like a nifty way to soothe angrycustomers. But there is a risk that companies will concentrate on ahandful of activists (who tweet a lot), while neglecting averagecustomers (who don’t). They may also ignore non-customers (who are thebiggest potential source of growth) and the elderly (who seldom tweet).Many firms think that they can improve customer service by using socialmedia to respond to complaints quickly. Really? It is already virtuallyimpossible to talk to a real person on the telephone. Will it be anyeasier online?
Undaunted, cyber-enthusiasts maintain thatsocial technologies are shifting power from a few Goliaths to manyDavids. Ordinary people can easily broadcast their opinions and extendtheir networks. Big firms have to adjust to this new reality or gounder. (As the digerati put it: “All businesses will end up looking likethe internet.”) But big firms can use social data to add to theiralready formidable influence over the consumer: Ford, PepsiCo andSouthwest Airlines monitor postings on social-media sites to gauge theimpact of their marketing campaigns and then adjust their pitchaccordingly. And some of the most successful internet-savvy companies,such as Google and Microsoft, are as secretive about what they do as anyold-line company.
The “Army of Davids” argument—to borrow aphrase from Glenn Reynolds, an American blogger—is often applied topolitics. For example, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Russian Duma,argues that social media make it easier for protesters in Russia toorganise. (Russians spend more time on the internet than westernEuropeans, not least because they have no faith in state television.)This is true, but the secret police in many countries are equallyexcited about technology. New tools allow them to eavesdropretrospectively, and to trace networks of dissidents. During theEgyptian uprising the advantage was clearly on the side of thedissidents, since the Egyptian secret police were digital dullards. Butthis may not be the case in China, where the regime’s online snoops arehighly sophisticated.
Cyber-enthusiasts gush about the waysocial media help entrepreneurs. They have a point: disruptivetechnologies reconfigure old businesses and create new ones. Facebookcould let companies aim their ads more accurately. Firms are starting touse internal social-networking tools, such as Yammer and Chatter, toencourage collaboration, discover talent and cut down on pointlesse-mails. Youngsters are happy to embrace it, but older managers may beless keen. The use of social media within companies could be quitedisruptive to traditional management techniques, particularly instrongly hierarchical firms.
Dreaming up new companies is notterribly difficult: at the conference Andreas Weigend, the founder ofSocial Data Lab, came up with the idea of “another person’s hat”; aproduct that allows you to don the digital identity of, say, an Islamicfundamentalist and see what the world looks like through his eyes. Thissounds neat, but some of the new social-media technologies have aclown-suit quality to them. They are amusing the first time, but rapidlybecome tedious.
A new medium: neither rare nor well-done
Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the valueof things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet,the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The morepeople “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning suchconnections have. As communication grows ever easier, the importantthing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricaneof noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies willhave to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number ofears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need betterfilters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help themextract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.
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