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Sunday 11th March 2012

• Social Media Is a Bubble and SXSW Is a Fad

  by Alyson Shontell, Curtis Hougland, Josh Levine, Lauren Bruksch and Robert Chafitz

  As the entrepreneur Prince sang, “So, tonite I’m gonna party like its nineteen ninety-nine.”
  Social media is a means to end.
  Social media is also increasingly horizontal in its application across the marketing funnel.
  And it is a bubble.
  As in 1999, this bubble is marked by four attributes:
  Escalating valuations: Our panel will prove how Groupon cannot sustain growth, and the valuations of current social marketing stocks are not sustainable

  Inflated salaries: How the scarcity of social marketing experts overinflated the salaries of the very people attending SXSW. This escalation came in part of a misguided panic in not understanding how to channel consumer behavior. This is why so many people are at SXSW with expense reports.
  Dizzying competition: The world does not need more than 40 photo sharing services. We are at the end of the beginning, which will include a winnowing of services and consultants.
  Tremendous hype: The number of publishers versus voyeurs is actually shrinking. This inversion of word-of-mouth to buzz is what bit Snakes on a Plane in 2006. Whenever there is a sustained inversion of buzz and word-of-mouth, the situation conflates.
  SXSW is ground zero of this hype. The event elevates the channel over the objective, and the buzz over the results. It is a cultural event, but does not focus on analytics, results, and research, the cornerstones of social media. What happens at SXSW has little affect on the consumer unlike CES or E3.

  • Bubble
  • Investment
  • Marketing
  • Social Media

  At 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Sunday 11th March

  In Longhorn, Omni Downtown