All the marketing pundits are starting to weigh in on the problems businesses are having in converting social media eyeballs into cold, hard dollars and cents.  In his article on the “Inconvenient Truth about Social Media Marketing,” marketing pro Aaron Wall says:

“There’s just one — major — problem with spending so much time and effort on capturing the eyeballs of social media users. Social media is easy to hype because there is a lot of traffic on social media sites. But if you try to do anything with social media traffic to convert it to revenue, you will be hard-pressed — unless you are selling CPM-based advertising.”

But that may, in fact, be just the problem.

Conventional online marketing wisdom says that site traffic like that on MySpace, Facebook and the rest provides too good an opportunity to allow to pass by untapped.  But for all of the millions of eyeballs, the results for pay-per-click advertising has been disappointing, to-date.  The results have been pronouncements about the “problems” associated with social networking sites.

Marketers are trying to find ways to tie their brands to interactive elements - widgets, games, etc. - to try and wedge their way into the minds of users.  But what’s the value of tying your brand to a silly game or social application?  What are the implied traits or values related to your brand that stays after the game has ended?

Marketers are getting frustrated.  And the cracks are starting to show.

Google now appears to be losing (or is it giving up) the pole position in the display advertising sweepstakes on MySpace.  Other social media sites, like StumbleUpon have had to discount their CPM’s tremendously - a reflection of lower-than-expected click-through rates.  Call it one of the perils of living in a “pay-for-performance” business model.

But I think the issue at hand has less to do with the apparent inability of conventional, online advertising to work on social media sites.  No one seems to be asking “why” ads that work on more “traditional” web sites don’t seem to work at all on the community sites.

I propose the problem is not with the advertising but with the marketers who seem to ignore the fact that web surfers aren’t interacting the same way at social media sites that they do at traditional web sites.  When a surfer hits a traditional web site, they’re looking for information, drilling down to what they want by clicking on links and getting more information in the process.

A surfer hitting a social media site, however, is there for a different reason.  They’re there to meet with friends.  In other words, they’re there to do something other than click on links.  They want to interact.

They want to do something.

I have the firm belief that marketers who want to attract and engage users of social media sites need to find a way to combine the information-sharing aspect of the online network with the social interaction that comes with real people getting together. In the real world.

Could it be that the “killer app” of Web 2.0 is face-to-face interaction between humans?  I think it might be and can only see one possible drawback …

… no Cntrl+Alt+Delete!