I think most people get carried away when talking about Social Media. The problem I have seen regularly is that most online advertising planners will not go the social media route because they don’t have a metric in place to show numbers. Its good to say that ‘x’ number of users followed you this month but how can you quantify impact for the same?

Apart from this, another factor that plagues Social Media is its unpredictability. When speaking of advertising on the web, the SEM models are fairly refined now – to the point that we can predict what the outcome will be for every dollar and rupee spent. That however is not the case with Social Media. We still cant accurate predict what the overall result will be.

With all due respect to the cluetrain manifesto, while I am terribly excited about Social Media, I share a sense of ‘cautious optimism’ and tend to not go overboard about its merits. However, videos like the one below do get me excited from time to time!