Dear Brand,

I’m sorry to be the one to tell you: your company is going to fail at social media. I don’t mean “fail” in a massive flame-out, Moms-Hate-Motrin sort of way. You’re going to fail in the most ordinary of ways, and so subtly that you may not even notice at first. Sure, you’ll still have some Facebook fans, some Twitter followers, and maybe even some positive social mentions. But that’s the end of the ride. You won’t transform your relationship with your customers in any meaningful way, and thus you’ll be only marginally better off than if you had sat out social media in the first place.

Evolution often looks gruesome in close-up, but in the grand scheme of things, your failure is a good thing. It makes room for fitter species. Because we’re all scrapping over a very limited food supply: consumer attention.  At the current rate of social media consumption, and absent some radical shift in brand behavior, most brands will be effectively shut out of consumers’ overtaxed social attention within the next 3 years. Consider that in a 6-month period in 2009, the number of Twitter accounts followed by the average user rose 360%, while the average number of tweets per user rose nearly 400%. As consumers divide their attention between more and more tweets, will they instead multiply the attention they give to brands on Twitter?

Of course not. They’ll stop following you or learn to ignore your tweets entirely, giving their attention instead to that rival brand -- you know, the one with the reputation for over-the-top customer service? Your rival’s success in social media was as predictable as your failure, because customer engagement was in their DNA. For them, social media was a natural extension of the customer collaboration they were already doing. For you, it was a free ride that ended early.

I recently wrote a book that offered some predictive models for when brands would succeed or fail in social media; I felt like all the needed evidence could be found in mathematics – by looking at the comparative payoffs for social media participation – and in history, by looking at past successes and failures in attempts at mutual cooperation. But I’ve since found even better evidence in behavioral psychology, in the work of Professor Dan Ariely of Duke University. In his book Predictably Irrational, he argues that we behave very differently in the presence of social norms, such as visiting a relative’s house for a meal, vs. market norms, such as paying for a meal in a restaurant. Ariely and his colleagues conducted a number of experiments that brought these norms into conflict – asking strangers to help move a couch, for instance, vs. offering to pay them to move it. He found that whenever social norms were in place, even the slightest attempt to introduce market norms threatened real and lasting damage to the social relationship – like trying to persuade one’s date that the cost of theater tickets is worth a little quid-pro-quo at the end of the evening.

This is principally why so many brands that go out on dates with consumers get their faces slapped and end up sitting at home watching the end of Letterman.  They were in it for all the wrong reasons. Better behavior wasn’t in their nature, and in most cases, they weren’t ready to change their nature.  Sure, you read about Nestle getting all up in their Facebook fans’ faces, and you allow yourself a little smugness: “We’ll never be like Nestle.” Probably not. But you can easily blow it in a much less spectacular way, simply by wanting more from consumers than you’re willing to give back.

Rest assured, social media failure is not the end of the world. While your savvy competitor uses social media to drive real changes in the way they interact with customers, you’ll simply move on and find other modes of survival better suited to your nature. These will be modes governed by market norms, like paid advertising, discounting, ubiquitous clown mascots, etc.  There’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s better to learn these things about yourself early, before some starry-eyed marketer like me convinces you to make a social media bet that you can’t pay off.

I used to advise clients that it’s easy to dip your toe into social media marketing. I now think that advice is outdated. The pond is getting crowded, and consumers are quickly figuring out which brands are in for the long haul and which are trolling for cheap leads. Real social media success means being willing to mobilize your organization behind what you uncover. It means investing considerable time in conversations you can’t immediately monetize. Are you ready for that? Then disregard everything I said about your impending failure; you’re going to be just fine.

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