When Facebook Places, the long-awaited location-based mobile piece of the social Goliath, arrived the other week, the tech and mainstream media alike was a-buzz about the “Foursquare killer.” Only thing is Facebook had already said that Places would integrate data from the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla — executives from those services were actually at the public launch. Dave Marsey, senior vice president of media at Digitas, wisely suggested that although Facebook was bringing massive scale (the polite term for 500 million users) into the space, it wasn’t going to slay Foursquare and other networks, but lead the path ahead for mobile social.

“Places will put pressure on [location-based mobile social networks] to share more insights/data given Facebook’s 500 million user footprint and gives Facebook huge clout in setting the future strategy/direction for location based services,” he said.

Since the launch of Facebook Places, Foursquare has had nearly half a million signups, leaping from 2.6 million pre-Places to just 3 million last week. Apparently the company was expecting to hit that milestone in early September.

As the four days after the Places announcement marked Foursquare’s biggest growth spurt ever, Silicon Alley Insider makes this deduction:

“Mainstream media outlets deemed Places worthy of their attention. Virtually all of them described the service as a ‘Foursquare-killer.’ This left readers wondering: ‘what the hell is Foursquare?’ So they looked Foursquare up in Google, and many of these readers started an account.”

We digital folks world are so consumed in our world of apps and smartphones, we forget the American public isn’t always up to date with the latest marvels of technology. However, considering how much mainstream coverage Foursquare in particular has received (as well as a brutally hilarious Onion piece), I don’t think location-based mobile social networks were that much of a mystery.

At a cafe recently, I was joking with a industry guy about checking in on Foursquare (I think I’ve checked in four places total — I kinda like being at undisclosed locations.) and the barista overheard and asked if she could see the app. She’d heard about it but had never seen it in action, so I checked in and showed her the mayor of the cafe — “Oh yeah, she gets soy lattes here all the time,” the barista replied.

My guess is, like my barista, people knew about Foursquare and it’s location-based ilk, but Facebook Places legitimized it, made it safe for the masses. “I dunno about this location-based social networking — oh wait, Facebook’s got it? Well maybe it’s OK, I’ll set me up an account, hee hee hee. Check in at trendy bar… Oh wow, I got me a badge already!”

At an Ogilvy-hosted chummy panel discussion of location-based mobile social networks that included representatives from Foursquare, Buzzd, Loopt and BrightKite, I asked if it was feasible for so many moso networks to coexist — sure, the sector was in its infancy, but weren’t they going to start bumping shoulders as more mobile users checked in?

The general sentiment held that it was great how many different options mobile users had and they saw such diversity thriving in the future. In fact, as Places was still gathering speed on the rumor mill at the time, the participants were anticipating Facebook’s entry and excited about the attention it would bring the space. Seems pretty prescient now.

Interestingly, one moso guy expressed his displeasure that Facebook is akin to the Roman Empire of the online world — shouldn’t there be more competition? We can always wonder if News Corp. hadn’t bought MySpace and squeezed every dime of cheap display revenue instead of improving network functionality, would the two still be rivals? MySpace’s new layout and design changes are a bit too close to Facebook for comfort, but what if the network had made such changes years ago — when they would have been relevant?

Coulda, woulda, shoulda… MySpace’s ad revenue keeps sinking — it looks like the iceberg penetrated one hull too many. So we turn to the new challengers: Diaspora, with its ambitious approach to data privacy, and Google Me, which has piqued curiosity across the Internet.

However, on the mobile-social front, the population is already pretty mixed, and it appears the diverse ecosystem is going to survive for a while.

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I admit to having ridden the social media bandwagon from the start — mainly because I had to see how things would play out — but I’ve always been skeptical about its impact. Is anyone reading what you have to say? Do they even care? With so much information flowing, how can anything be absorbed? The same goes for social features accompanying products. Does friending and following add value to your product or is it a distraction? Value to me is measured in dollar signs — not pageviews and certainly not friend requests or follow count.

Don’t Hire Social Media People

I’m going to offend a lot of people with this statement, but I don’t think there’s a place for a “social media” person (what some people refer to as a “community manager”) in your company. Tweeting, Tumblring, Facebooking, blogging, etc., are all routine tasks that can be performed by any person out there with basic English skills and a friendly personality. The person doing this can also be the founder, a developer, a marketing person or the person that answers email. It’s just not a full-time job.

The benefits of having someone dedicated to these tasks, whatever they may be, don’t add up to a wise use of resources. As Leo Laporte wrote last week after he discovered that nobody was listening despite his tens of thousands of followers: “I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan.”

At Carbonmade, we just announced our fifth full-time person, Mike Minnick, who has been handling emails and what nowadays constitutes social media stuff for us during the past few months part-time. Mike is great at his job. The impact Mike has had since he started working with us has been amazing, but it primarily comes in the form of quick and thorough email responses — something measurable — rather than in numbers of new followers.

Mike is atypical. He didn’t go to college. Instead he toured the world as the lead singer of a Hardcore band called Curl Up and Die — it had a large cult following — and worked most of the past few years at a comic book store. He’s covered in tattoos, but one of the nicest guys I know with a personality so charming that everyone (man or woman) who meets him falls in love.

But Mike wasn’t hired to tweet for us. We hired him around a measurable need (responding to customers’ emails) rather than a fantasy. That’s what the concept that drives “social media” is. It’s a fantasy that having 100 or 1,000 more friends or followers will bring you more business even though social networks are nothing more than echo chambers in which nobody is listening.

Not Every Product Needs to Be Social!

There’s an obvious difference between social media and having social features on your website. The former is a marketing technique and the latter is a product feature. Social features certainly make sense on some sites, but, as with gaming mechanics, they are way overused, often incorrectly.

Carbonmade is evidence that every website doesn’t need to launch with social features to be popular and successful. We’re the largest online portfolio website with over 250,000 portfolios and counting — all without a single social feature. Madness?

We’re not Facebook. We’re not a social network and probably your company isn’t either. We don’t necessarily need or want our users talking and friending each other. Instead of spending valuable development hours on hooking in social networking features, we’d rather spend them on our unique product. You can only force-feed people the same features on every site before they’ll all revolt: “Boring! I’ve seen that before.”

Now with some products it makes sense: Foursquare, for example, because it is a social platform, with game mechanics their bread and butter. It makes sense for them because they are building toward exactly what they want to be: a social platform. They’re not just tacking social features onto a product that doesn’t require them. Please stop doing that.

On the flip side, I’m scared for Foursquare because their product really is only social, and with the launch of Facebook Places, there’s little to differentiate them. However, they’re very smart folks at Foursquare, and I’m confident they’ll survive by figuring out how to reinvent themselves.

Measuring Matters

I’m happy to see more and more companies being built around the idea of analytics. Analytics have been around for a while — mainly analytics that measure web traffic, like Google Analytics — but now we’re seeing another group of companies looking at measuring in a different way. Those companies include KISSmetrics, Chatbeart, StatsMix, Chart.io and others. I think these forms of quantifying are important.

Social media marketing can’t be measured, at least not effectively. Spending money on social media marketing reminds me of the early 2000s, when you couldn’t measure the effectiveness of banner ads. Everyone was spending on it without knowing what the outcome was. This trend ended up dying out when a more measurable and effective advertisement system came in: Google’s AdWords. Companies began to be focused on click-through ratio and conversions rather than pageviews (the modern day equivalent of pageviews being followers/friends).

If I weren’t working on Carbonmade, I’d be working on better ways to analyze and measure data effectively. Numbers don’t lie, and there’s a lot of incoming data that needs making sense of. I anticipate huge fallout for companies over the next 12 to 24 months because they were built around too many assumptions about the vitality of the social space and not enough concrete, measurable facts. Social media marketing, social features and game mechanics will prove to have been the culprits.

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We are in the middle of a social media bubble. Every company is wildly chasing after the promised rewards of social media with very few actually investing and scaling in a sustainable way. Most companies seem to be throwing a grenade of attention, time and money at social media instead of developing an objective, rational battle plan.

The early successes of first-movers in the social space has triggered a mass crusade of companies who have unreasonable targets and bloated expectations.The benefits of simply “doing” social media are showing quickly decreasing returns as the first-mover premium wears off. Innovation in social media marketing and presences is pacing well behind the rate of market saturation, which will lead to a social media space that is too crowded to provide the expected returns of these companies now making significant investments.

The social media bubble will burst when consumers get tired of companies’ inauthentic and unoriginal presences and promotions. Consumers don’t want to “like” 1000 brands on Facebook, and they don’t want read the blog of their local dry cleaners. The market will crash when consumers start ignoring bland, blatant attempts by late-comer companies who are now overloading our social networks and attention streams.

When (not if) the bubble does burst, the market will correct itself and refocus it’s potential on the companies that understand the fundamental systems and mechanisms of social media. The companies that were just attracted by the buzz of shiny success stories will bear the brunt of the crash, as they should. And those that spend the time and money in the short-term to invest in a stable, sustainable and value-adding social media presence will emerge to reap the long-term returns.

Read more at www.socialmediatoday.com