The bad news for social media advertising and mobile advertising is that they are falling short of the desired results businesses had hoped to see. Continuing to use a blend of advertising appears to be the best way to hedge against uncertainty in the social media and mobile advertising markets. The report indicates a great deal of risk exists in utilizing these forms of digital advertising. However,

it stops short of defining any reason why social media and mobile advertising are failing to deliver the results that other forms of digital ads are delivering.

It may well be the reason they are not performing as well, is due to a general lack of credibility; due to the fact that there really has been no formal regulation regarding claims and endorsements made about products, services and opportunities which are abundant in blogs and social media.

Social media spam may contribute to the lack of delivery for social media ads, as well. We have been dealing globally with email spam for about ten years. Some measures are in place to address this type of spam; not that they have actually eradicated spam from email marketing and advertising though. However, using reputable email marketing companies and utilizing opt in lists, has allowed email marketing to still deliver decent returns with targeted audiences. Blogs, and social media are still frontiers, without any consistent regulation. I wonder if the spam and abundance of non-regulated marketing could be a significant factor in the results found in the survey?

Fail Whale says Twitter is Over Capacity

Notwithstanding there are some companies utilizing the social value of Twitter, one would have to question whether or not tweeting holds much value for smaller companies. The Harvard study seems to indicate that of all Twitter users they will tweet on average only once during their Twitter lifetime.

What do the ten percent that are responsible for 90% of the tweeting, tweet about? Although there are some tweets about news events, there are also some who simply troll for followers, by repeatedly tweeting a rotated set of keywords. However, the bulk of the tweets I have seen are MLM related, or attempting to sell their information or services. The same tweets are repeated over and over again; many of which, are too incredible to be true. Obviously, all of the people who say they are making twenty gazillion dollars per month; or who can show you how to get 50,000 followers in 90 days on autopilot, are not making the money they say, nor is it possible to build these empires on autopilot. It is, however, possible to send out thousands of tweets making these claims.

Twitter needs to figure out a way to minimize the SPAM that is flowing in the tweets; otherwise the value to businesses and to individuals will quickly diminish; and the only sustainability will be the smell of Hormel on Pareto;s plate.