Has the internet really helped cats?

Social media is highly overrated. At least that’s my opinion of it. Just sayin’ 

Look I’m not saying it’s of no use at all, but as a tool, for marketing and reaching new audiences, I personally haven’t seen it give good results in the campaigns I’ve been involved in. 

It’s a very good vehicle for listening to people’s thoughts and feedback, and loyalty-building, which definitely makes it very handy, but it doesn’t greatly amplify one’s voice beyond one’s organic networks or the paid reach one can afford. 

The Harlem Shake was just another example of how corporations can engineer a massive fad. It’s almost like the built-in networks possessed by major corporations and traditional media companies help memes like this (and yes Bieber and Gangnam Style too) reach the critical point that makes a video go insanely viral faster, and from that point onwards everything just snowballs. 

So now that suddenly YouTube has become the campaign platform du jour for this coming election, and along with it the terabytes of bandwidth that has been spent producing, watching, and commenting on it, I still can’t say I am completely convinced that it is an effective conversion tool for the amount of money spent on it. 

My good friend (and former employer), Dr Gomez, disagrees with me on this (and has written an article on it for Sudahlabro.com) and believes the YouTube is THE platform for this elections, but as you can read in his article, even he says that social video’s effectiveness is predicated upon interpersonal political communication that happens one-on-one, not over electronic mediums.