In this 3x3 you can see...

...the competitive landscape for Social Media.

It’s a conceptual take on how Social Media is positioned relative to its competitors on two axes critical to marketers: traffic (or the ability to buy at scale) and marketing/monetization effectiveness (roughly CTR). It also shows the likely trends (arrows) for all these vehicles.


Aside from the fact that the graph lacks deep data accuracy, there are other issues with some of the generalizations made to keep it reasonably simple, but that does not change the fact that Social Media is currently lagging behind both Paid Search and Display advertising in attractiveness.

But, the graph also points out where Social Media’s opportunity lies: Once it has had its “AdWords Moment” (more on that in this post), Social Media needs to come in slightly under Search’s traffic proposition and well above Display’s effectiveness.

It should be able to do this because eventually Social Media will understand the user’s context even better than mere search (although targeting effectiveness will drop with increasing traffic as there’s probably a maximum size to conversations), while the volume of “conversations” will only increase.

Of course, this is all generalities and hand-waving. What do you think?