Bad economy or not, this New York Daily News headline was inevitable:  “420 Lose MySpace Jobs as Website Fights Losing Battle with Facebook”.

Next year, a similar blog will probably appear, but with a report on Facebook’s decline. Is your marketing strategy in sync with these types of rapid shifts?

Not to sound like an old fogey that is wistful for early 20th century thinking, but seriously, it used to be that a business was intended to exist for decades, if not centuries.

Now, only a fool would think that any kind of hot online company—especially a social media enterprise—can last for any considerable length of time. If it doesn’t get gobbled by a larger, heavily capitalized corporation (e.g., Google owns YouTube, Yahoo owns Flickr) or is a failed attempt to capture lightning (e.g., WalMart’s lame MySpace ripoff, The Hub), it inevitably winds out and dies.

Rather than continuing this blog’s recurring theme of how accelerated media cycles cause media outlets to cannibalize others (because it’s just a matter of time—months?—before you’ll see headlines about Facebook layoffs due to another Website’s popularity), perhaps it’s time to start thinking of hospital marketing strategies as disposable, short-lived concepts.

Best Practice: Don’t Put All of Your Eggs in One Basket

Or if you must, don’t think that you can leave them there forever.

It doesn’t require an MBA in marketing or a Master’s degree in media theory to predict that Facebook or Twitter will be on the decline within the next year or two (if they aren’t already, as illustrated with recent reports of Twitter’s minuscule growth).

That’s why a savvy marketer is one that anticipated or quickly recognized MySpace’s power shift to Facebook and not only skillfully budgeted resources to harness its potential, but is prepared to do the same for the next social media exodus.

If your online market strategy is narrowly focused on today’s hottest social media and you are budgeting the same time and money for them next year, you might want to think it through again. After all, it was a couple of years ago that MySpace was the big thing, and now look at where it is (and at whom is responsible).

Does your hospital have a trusted and reliable partner to build, manage and plan your online marketing strategies? AVID Design offers free assessments for Websites, content, strategy and more.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 9:19 am and is filed under Industry Trends, Marketing, Social Media, Things 'n' Stuff, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.