I can’t help but feel that we live in a very strange age.
At risk of sounding like a miserable old man, there’s a whole generation (or maybe more than one) who believe that they’re entitled to have everything they want. Whether it’s the latest gadget, the car of their dreams, their fantasy lifestyle (no work but lots of money), the house they can’t possibly afford and more.
Is it such a leap to look for a connection between this way of thinking and the current financial crisis?
I can’t help but wonder why so many people are pursuing so much for so little reason.
Every new gadget or idea is held up as the latest life-changer, and many of them are pushed as the perfect solution to a problem that didn’t exist.
Paul Dunay has an interesting and well-written blog – Buzz Marketing for Technology. Yet for such an intelligent person, Paul has put forward the incredible idea that businesses don’t need a website anymore; they can use Facebook.
“With Facebook Fan pages you can build your own website on the Facebook “Platform”. A website that is totally FREE of hosting and server costs, public and indexable on all search engines, with unique URL’s for individual landing pages that you can tune based on if they are Fans or Non Fans, where you can host all your video (so long as it is under 10mb) and upload your product catalog with detailed descriptions (and get feedback from Fans), where you can throw an event or show presentations on a Slideshare ap, run a contest or a survey, host your blog or retweet your status updates (or better yet – just use Facebook instead of Twitter). Oh don’t forget send emails to your Fans for FREE and if you want to buy targeted ads you can do that too.“
Paul is writing a book called Facebook Marketing for Dummies, so you can forgive him for being a little over-zealous. Yet even factoring in the legitimate self-publicising, I can see why the idea might be a good fit for someone who’d like their own website, but businesses?
I was going to write a list of 50 reasons why a business shouldn’t consider the idea, but I’m hoping that this is obvious enough already.
Facebook is a great idea, but it’s not a substitute for a business website.
Twitter is incredible, but it isn’t going to replace email.
And Spotify is absolutely wonderful, but will replace nothing whatsoever.
Social Media is a young, developing and thriving idea. Use and enjoy it for what it is. But keep a grip on reality.
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