I recently read an article traveling in American Way about a social media start-up. While that hardly sounds like news today—it was a VERY unique startup. The startup, WEB 2.0 Suicide Machine at www.suicidemarchine.org, is the antithesis of social media today. Instead of striving for more followers, friends, connections or contacts, suicidemachine.org annihilates all the data and connections in social profiles and exterminates a person’s social media presence.
Why would honest and legal citizens want to wipe out the existence they worked so hard to create and connect? The founders of WEB 2.0 Suicide Machine started the site because they thought people might be getting “fed up with maintaining all these virtual friendships.” Or, maybe it was the visibility of the person’s life with people they never knew that well, or never really liked; or, scarier still, could it be that after all the time invested in building a social community, the return on the time invested wasn’t worth the effort of maintaining the very entity they spent time creating.
In B2B, I believe we are all still struggling with the amount of power, relevance and ROI social media will deliver moving forward. My advice: keep it about the content. If companies develop great content that help prospects and customers do their jobs better, it won’t matter if you tweet, Facebook, discuss in a LinkedIn group, post in a blog or send in a direct mail (OMG PRINT!) piece—if the content is relevant, people will still listen.
-Michelle Palmer, Partner, MediaSolve
