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Too much buzz Social media provides huge opportunities, but will bring huge problems Dec 31st 2011 | from the print edition THE only area of business that seems to be recession-proof is social media. Industrial firms are battening down the hatches. Banks are tossing thousands of workers overboard. But Facebook is looking to raise $10 billion for a small fraction of its shares when it goes public in 2012. A recent conference in Madrid, put on by the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation, captured the enthusiasm. The assembled cyber-gurus argued that social technologies that allow people to broadcast their ideas (eg, Twitter), or form connections (eg, LinkedIn), are some of the most powerful ever devised. They can be supersized quickly, linked together easily and spread by customers. And they can be accessed from almost anywhere. Two billion people are already online. E-commerce sales are $8 trillion a year. So, the argument goes, this more social element to the internet is the next great revolution. Over-caffeinated cyber-champions talk of empowerment and transparency. But is all this as wonderful as it sounds? Or is it a new bubble in the making? The great virtue of social technologies, say their boosters, is that they break down the barriers between companies and their customers. They allow firms to gather oodles of information: big companies now obsessively monitor social media to find out what their customers really think about them. Social media also allow companies to respond to complaints more quickly: firms as different as Chrysler and Best Buy employ Twitter teams to reply to whinging tweets. | 
