I’ve been thinking a lot about the REAL value of social media lately.  For the last 3 years marketing experts and new-media gurus have held up social media as the new “holy grail” of business.  Services like twitter, facebook and now even foursquare are becoming mainstays in our marketing vernacular.

What are "Zuck's" real intentions?

But lately I’ve been feeling like we’re all just hoes to the social media company pimps.  We give more and more time, attention and information to these services, and I want to ask a question that most people seem afraid to:  are these services really worth the short-term gain at the risk of supplanting long term brand equity?

Put another way, for a brand (or even you as an individual) is it worth using these services in lieu of a website, app or interactive model that you’ve built and control yourself?

Yes, twitter and facebook have millions upon millions of users.  Yes, you can use these services to find people you care about all in one spot.  Yes, they’re FREE, and no they don’t require a whole lot of effort.  And with the rapid growth of facebook, it would seem a moot point to even consider NOT using it.

However, we’ve been down this road twice before.  The first time was with a little website called Friendster – a service too ahead of its time, in my opinion, yet one which built a solid userbase of young people and new media professionals.  They thought it would last forever until suddenly, a newer, sexier model came along.  This new network had more features than Friendster and EVERYONE you knew was suddenly using it!  It might be hard to remember, but myspace was once this service.  It was hip, easy, free and you could make it your own little place on the web.  Or so we thought because once again a NEWER network came along and “EVERYONE” got in facebook’s back seat, leaving myspace cold and lonely on the side of the road.

I bring this up because countless entertainment and business brands threw millions of dollars and man hours into myspace, making it their holy grail of online marketing.  Artists dropped their official website in favor of a myspace page.  Whole businesses were born off the back of myspace and there were even professionals in Nashville excited about the arrival of “myspace music charts” saying they would “probably end up replacing Billboard and radio airplay charts.”

It saddens me because that same energy, time and money could have been spent making existing websites better and more scalable.  Brands could have discovered new ways to increase traffic to their existing hubs.  (To be fair, many artists and businesses DID use myspace as a limited tool to drive traffic back to an official site or offer, but these were the exception to the rule.)

So now here we are, repeating the same mistakes with twitter and facebook.  Too many people are once again putting their lives and business hopes in the hands of proprietary networks they don’t have any control over.

I know what some of you will probably say…

“That’s the game, you just have to move where the market takes you.” You know what, I don’t buy that.  Why should you have to follow the whims of whatever company is in vogue at this moment?  Why can’t each of us build a brand and a platform that are one in the same?  The technology is there!  It’s free!  It’s open source!  There’s NO logical excuse for why this can’t be done.

So what should we do?

All of us should continue to use these services, but recognize they are supplementary tools at best.  And as tools, we should always consider how they can help drive traffic back to a hub that YOU control.

If twitter goes away tomorrow, what would you do?

If facebook started charging $30 month to use the service what would you do?

These AREN’T rhetorical questions.  Social media companies can do what they like, and in their path to monetization WILL do whatever THEY feel is in THEIR best interest….not yours.

I want leave you with Molly Wood’s recent CNET rant about facebook’s latest features (click here for that article).  It’s very worth your while, but if you’re too lazy/busy then I give you this gem of a quote:

“There’s nothing wrong with making a LOT of money. But you should not, Facebook, get to make that money by tricking me into making personal information public, by creating an increasingly baffling web of privacy-violating loopholes, and by opting me in to every new moneymaking scheme you come up with. That’s how you lose user trust, and losing user trust is how you lose users.”

Do you really want to build your business strategy around a company like this?