When it comes to social media I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but could someone please hand me that two-by-four?

Thank you.

Last time I told you why I quit Facebook. The reasons were basically retrospective, looking back at the vile, nefarious things that Facebook has done, specifically with user data, without any thought to the glowing future of security that Mark Zuckerberg promises.

Since he brought it up, let’s go there. Let’s look at the future of marketing and the role social media might play.

An interesting confluence of recent news stories and thought pieces paint a credible picture of marketing’s future.

A real love-hate relationship

The first, from Digiday, is simply a collection of quotes from marketing folks at large companies describing their love-hate relationship with Facebook.

“Love-hate relationship” is a term that’s often misapplied to perfectly normal relationships that go through periods of something like love, something like limerence (remember that?), and something like dislike.

However, marketers sincerely either love or hate Facebook.

On the love side you have people saying things like, “Facebook is still the most effective marketing channel for brands, basically in history,” or “Facebook and Instagram are a big part of our growth story.”

On the other side are marketers – marketers that use Facebook as part of their brand strategy, don’t forget – saying that Facebook has them “between a rock and a hard place,” that it’s “a necessary evil,” or that “marketing on Facebook is like living in a state of constant paranoia.”

Okay, many marketers live in a state of constant paranoia with or without Facebook. But Facebook is certainly helping things along.

And of course Facebook is polarizing marketers, because that’s what Facebook does.

Swampy mushes of spam

The old law of social media was that every channel eventually devolves into a swampy mush of spam. However, as Kalia Colbin notes in a recent MediaPost column, that law has been superseded by a law stating that all social-media channels eventually gravitate to the extremes.

It’s true. Think of the social-media channels that started as a way for people to communicate authentically, how they were taken over by people and organizations looking to sell things and push agendas, and how all the genuine conversation got shoved out onto the street.

That happened to Twitter. Twitter used to be somewhat useful and occasionally entertaining. Now it’s a cafeteria table full of Twitternauts, challenging the ones they disagree with and reinforcing the ones who seem to think like them, in a tape loop of challenge and reaffirmation.

Twitter was just declared the most brand-safe of the social-media platforms, and I take that to mean that Twitter is totally irrelevant. If Twitter mattered it would be just as brand-toxic as YouTube.

Speaking of, YouTube is rife with child molesters and crackpots espousing every brand of conspiracy theory and quasi-Nazi worldview, and the platform can’t keep up with the flow of garbage.

While we’re at it,Tik Tok is populated by predators, Snap Stories has been overrun by spam brands, LinkedIn has a fake-profile problem, and Instagram has an issue with hate groups. Which leaves, um, Facebook.

Say this for Zuck: He’s tried to push discourse on Facebook away from the edges of the flat earth. However, that’s come at a price; as Colbin noted, Facebook is structured to reinforce your worldview, whether that’s My Little Pony or My Little Hitler.

The problem, as we’ve pointed out, is that constant reinforcement makes your world smaller. If you listen to the Beatles, Spotify recommends you listen to more Beatles, and not the Kinks or the Pretty Things or the Easybeats. And certainly not the Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

The ever-lazier consumer

Consuming is essentially a lazy process, and the modern consumer is most like a trout.

Trout are not ambitious consumers generally. They prefer to lounge in a cool eddy, waiting for the bugs to drift to them.

Social media encourages us to be like trout, just hanging out, waiting for someone else to choose the news or the products we want and feed it to us, rather than seeking it out ourselves.

After all, why do you think they call it a news “feed”?

Every major marketing development of the last decade, from social-media advertising to paid search to voice-activated ordering, has simply been a more efficient way of making consumers lazier.

The future is hypertargeted

Which leads us to the future. Burrell Associates supplies the bridge, a report that paid SEO is on its way out in favor of hypertargeted digital ads.

"Buying keywords on Google or Bing seems like old-school marketing when you consider how easy it is to reach consumers based on their GPS location, what they clicked on two days ago, or what search terms they typed in this morning,” the report says.

It adds up. All the hype about Big Data was somewhat premature and misplaced, but here’s its payoff: If a marketer knows where someone is, what they’re asking about, and how they’ve behaved in the past, how easy is it to set what they want right in front of them?

Exactly. And at that point platform almost doesn’t matter. Maybe the desired item is placed via search or social, but it’s just as likely to be delivered via voice or push notification, possibly with a geofenced component.

It could even be personally targeted digital outdoor or GPS-based skywriting, which personally has me jazzed.

All media = one medium

We’re headed in a marketing direction where an increasingly marginalized social-media landscape is irrelevant, where SEO ranking is unimportant as long as you can directly reach a target audience, where the different media are all one medium, just consumed differently.

Tactics aside, tomorrow’s marketing will boil down to aggregating the full spectrum of a customer’s data and giving them exactly the message they want, with the absolute smallest amount of effort on their part.

The only question is how marketers will acquire that data. The most promising model puts consumers in charge of their data in a data marketplace. They will decide what and how the data will be available, and they’ll be reimbursed for its use.

That too will strip social media of much of its power, but A) social media will be far out on the fringes anyway, and B) who said our data belongs to them anyway?

Social media can survive the loss of data control, and consumers will be better for it.

Actually, the Avett Brothers sang about something just like this: “When the jealousy fades away/And it’s ash and dust/For cash and lust/And it’s just hallelujah.”

Hallelujah indeed. I can’t wait.

The Future Doesn't Need Facebook