When everyone is doing it, its no longer a competitive advantage.

Most commentary on social media ignores an obvious truth—that the value of things is largely determined by their rarity. The more people tweet, the less attention people will pay to any individual tweet. The more people “friend” even passing acquaintances, the less meaning such connections have. As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise. For speakers, the new world will be expensive. Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears. For listeners, it will be baffling. Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.

This passage came from an editorial piece in the Economist that I think is well worth reading. Coming on the heels of my ‘I was wrong’ post I’m going to stick my neck out and wonder if 2012 won’t be the year social media loses a little bit of its rock star status. Now, I’m in no way saying social media is going away or even that it’s going to decline in quality or importance. Only that like the telephone, television and Web it is becoming a simple fact of life, not a novelty, and that the conversations around social media are changing from ‘how do we get into it?’ to ‘now that we’re here, what do we do with it and what can we realistically expect to get from it?’

Here are some reasons I think social media will find itself facing many of the challenges of other communications media in the coming years.

1. The category is maturing.
Like prior media, at some point a shift will happen when we’ll talk less about the medium itself than about the content delivered through it. That’s starting to happen already. Just as few people outside of specialized industry circles discuss the nature of telephony, television or the Web, we’ve been moving away from social media’s dominant self-referential nature. Still, there are people tweeting such obvious thoughts as “This social media stuff is here to stay” (I literally saw this a few days ago, and by a credible social media guru type no less), which means we’ve not quite squeezed out all the juice from the novelty just yet.

2. Burnout.
There’s also the matter of fatigue. Even if you’re not a Tweeting, Tumblr-toting, Foursquare-checking, Instagram-shooting geek, many of us have dedicated quite a bit of our time to tinkering on Facebook et. al. over the last few years. We’ve delighted in the joys of reacquainting with old friends, meeting the occasional new person and voyeuristically peeking into the lives of people we’re connected to.

Operationally, though, these new technologies have a price for individuals, institutions and corporations. They further divide our time, resources, budgets and attention. And of course, as noted above, the fact that they are everywhere, in great quantity, applies downward pressure on their value – both in terms of the quality of any individual piece of content distributed and in the price points companies are willing to pay for services in the sector.

3. Higher consumer expectations.
Social technology has also successfully infiltrated other aspects of life – from seeking recommendations to validating facts to answering questions to making purchases. It can’t be overstated how much social technologies have fundamentally changed these tasks. By the same token, we humans get used to things pretty quick. Once we’re used to them, they become expectations not attractors. When they’re an expectation we don’t talk about them as much – unless they’re broken. Today including social technologies in consumer-facing business practices is becoming table stakes not a competitive advantage.

4. High expectations & Modest Results
Then there are the ridiculously high expectations of social media from an enterprise growth perspective. In addition to the starry-eyed and often nonsensical expectations of venture capitalists hungry to cash in quick; everyone from marketing agencies to operations teams have come to expect social media to be a sledgehammer against barriers to success. This is happening at exactly the same time our habits are settling in and social tools are becoming an expectation of daily life. Anything that is an everyday expectation is unlikely to be a barrier breaker for long.

Certainly businesses have seen some results, and up to now some of those results have outperformed other media by some (usually inherently favorable) measurements. It’s safe to say though that for most, social media has not been the ‘holy grail of marketing’ originally hoped for. Social is becoming but one more arrow in the marketer’s quiver with its strengths and weaknesses. Every company has learned that while they need to be using it, they can’t count on social media to replace all (or any, really) of the other stuff they’re doing. So budgets are divided yet again as the marketing ‘pie’ is sliced smaller and smaller each time popular culture latches onto the next Twitter or FourSquare or Pinterest.

In fact, its recently come to light that many of the problems marketers have always faced remain the same. As it turns out, 83% of a brand Facebook fans never see that brand’s missives - the same clutter issue facing all advertising media. We’re finding that the proportion of ‘fans’ to ‘talking about’ is also pretty modest for most brands – in the same neighborhood as email open rates and coupon redemptions. And whether you get their names from a business reply card, email signup or Facebook ‘like’ – the size of your list is only as useful as your plan to do something with it. The days of racking up 1MM ‘likes’ and claiming victory are over.

The hype cycle revisited
Anyone who lived through the dotcom boom knows that we’ve been here before. New technologies bring high expectations, lofty visions and sometimes crazy business models. Inevitably though, reality sets in. The Economist piece summarized the realization of that reality. A fundamental challenge for social media is the relation between scarcity and value. Social media works against scarcity and thereby against value creation in the traditional economic model sense.

That social media is now a fact of life means that in coming years it will have to work harder to prove itself and it will have to wrestle with the same challenges other media struggle with. Until now social media has enjoyed a near monopoly on the headlines in the media industry space. Moving forward though, share will be about more than just enabling the act of distributing content between friends. For social media it will mean maintaining share – of our time, our attention and our budgets – by proving its comparative value against other media.