Social Media or Pay-per-click?

What happens when SEO travels out of country, for a week, without Internet? Yes, he has too much work to do, making sure that nothing terrible happens when he is out of office. And yes, this is not the best time for blogging.

But Small Business SEM has driven my attention to the study by Marketing Experiments Journal, comparing social media optimization to pay-per-click campaign.

While synopsis at Small Business has raised my eyebrow a bit (1400%+ raise in ROI? What the heck?), original study forced me to come out of blogging hiatus and refute the argument.
1. Introduction. In 2004, Web 2.0 has been having all the hype. Now it is either a way of living (for startups and bloggers) or silly buzzword (for all the rest). Now, three years later, Web 2.0 far from being as cool as it was. Now they have to invent Web 3.0.
Oh my gosh.

Yeah, Web 2.0 was full of idealistic expectations, but at least it has its technological base - RSS, Ajax, XHTML, valid CSS… and just what the heck is Web 3.0?

“where there is real value content integrated with video, text, images, and personal interaction on a level that may lead to a kind of artificial intelligence”

Sorry, what? Until there is such thing as money and as long as it can be transferred by Internet, real value just won’t be the main thing on Internet. Sorry, again.
2. Background.

“What is social media? The term started with Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations in 2006.”

Absolutely, horrendously wrong. Sorry, but it was in 2004 when social media was already a term complicated enough, and I’m sure that it was first coined long before, probably in 2002 or 2003. Rest of section is composed of similar mistakes, outrageous statements, repeating the obvious and referring to the Metcalfe’s law (with picture ripped from Wikipedia; also, it was called Metcalf’s in one place).

Yuck.

3. Findings

I understand completely, that result of this case study was predetermined from the start, and I understand that it is as far from science as any ‘research’ can get (no need to point it out), but for the Christ’s sake, how could you choose four sites that are by definition best targets of search media optimization?

Why no sites selling viagra or brokering loans? Why no commercial stuff? Yeah, celebrity blog, political blog, non-profit organization and humorous blog. I can say without any case study that there is absolutely no point in promoting it through AdWords, because such sites should be promoted by means of social media only.

Also, it seems to me that results of study are obviously false. According to the study, they hired

“an employee at $10 per hour to blog, create content, and in general work to drive traffic to the sites”

and in results they’ve spent total of $3,600 to socially promote four sites in span of year. 360 hours. 15 minutes per day per site. And yet, they managed in this time to write 255 blog posts, posted them to SM sites, engaged in relevant discussion with community… even shot 44 amateur videos and posted them to YouTube.

360 hours? Either person you’ve hired (“at $10 per hour”) was deeply caffeinated for entire your, or you are seriously deflating time you’ve spent on making those sites.

Also, while we understand how they achieved SM results, no light is thrown on PPC tecnhiques. Sorry, 170 visitors per week at 60 cents per click? It seems that monkey has managed their AdWords campaign.

4. Conclusions

Guys, no one underestimates power of social media. But to make phony case studies to prove it? Bah, I’d better do something useful.

Get patient - you’re not hearing from me anytime soon.