Social's future is not community

This article argues that brands need to ditch community-based social strategies because they don't work and instead focus on the areas in which social is truly valuable: advertising, customer service and data.

Social's future is not community

Darika AhrensForrester Research

Brands need to ditch the community ideology. Then invest in the parts of social media that are working: advertising, customer service, and data.

This article is from the 50th anniversary issue of Admap, which looks ahead to the future of brand communications.All Admap articles are available exclusively on Warc.

Sometime around 2006, I drank the social media Kool-Aid. Consumers were using social technologies for all sorts of things: networking, collaborating, posting funny pictures of cats. When we tried to analyse how brands could get a piece of it,...

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