Of course, the paradox of trust is that while its given to others because of a perceived long term benefit, it is particularly vulnerable to being abused for immediate gain. The world of social media, moreover, is no exception. As Joseph Thornley repines:

Unfortunately, some marketers seem intent on using the new medium for old tricks. I am distressed at how often I hear conference presentations or read blog posts where it seems the primary intent is to use social media to achieve a short-term increase in conversions for online commerce.

Even worse are those who coach others to mine the information we enter in social networks to generate marketing databases (”cause they know that the information will be used when they volunteer to enter it”) or post corporate marketing videos under the guise of consumer generated media (”they’ll find out eventually.”)

Now, this kind of information mining on social networks is precisely why Facebook has the potential to be the next big brother. More to the point, however, the real reason why online marketers leverage social media for short term gain probably has something to do with the suspicion (that I think we all share) that any given social media has a limited shelf-life. For example, as far as social networks go, first there was Friendster and LiveJournal, then came MySpace, and now we're in the era of Facebook. This makes it easy to regard a lot of social media as a fad and, therefore, nothing more than a short-term tool.

The thing is that these so-called communities exist independently of any social media. Basically, they are simply groups of individuals who have developed relationships with each other because of shared interests.

These communities interest us as marketers because there tends to be a high correlation between the common interests community members and certain consumption preferences. In other words, these "interests" are nothing more than "demographics," and these "communities" are what we have traditionally called "markets." When a "market" is characterized by "demographics" that complement the products/services that we peddle, they become "target markets."

Where the common interests between community members stop, however, the community ends. Similarly, where the demographics no longer correlate between all members, the market ends. Insofar, then, as the user/consumer is aware that we're trying to sell them something (and its a rule of social media to not try to hide that), the relationships we form with them go only as far as we can appeal to the (self-)interest of community members. On an intuitive level, most marketers seem to understand this.

Take Flickr, for example. They offer both photo-sharing and printing services. The printing services, however, are ancillary. There is the occasional user who comes across a photo at random, and decides to order a print of it. However, the real trust relationship that Flickr has formed with its user-base is that of photo-sharing network. It therefore makes little sense for, say, Kodak to establish a partnership with Flickr to convince photographers to use Kodak paper. Photographers trust Flickr because of how it lets them interact with those who share their interests; not because they are an authority on photography.

When online marketers leverage social media only toward short-term gains, then, it probably has something to do with how experience and precedent shows that in the online world, any given technology has a limited shelf-life. Consequently, investing the requisite resources into developing a long-term relationship with the users of any given social operating system seems rather reckless and rash.

Basically, these "communities" we market to are still going to exist in a few years, but only in the sense that target markets exists because of shared demographics and consumption preferences. In terms of social media, Web 3.0 is expected to fundamentally alter the way that information is aggregated and filtered in the foreseeable future.

Granted, as a result long-term relationships are expected to become easier to establish and maintain, and therefore more important than ever. However, they will subsist on technology entirely different from what we currently know. In a word, the relationships that we're developing with communities today will become obsolete before they have a chance to mature. That means that they're full potential ROI will be never be realized.

Essentially, a long-term relationship has, by definition, a longer life-expectancy than any of the current manifestation of social media have breath left in them. In other words, expecting a relationship built on that media to be long-term is asinine.

None of this, of course, means that marketers should abandon ideas of long-term relationships. What it does mean is that they shouldn't be investing resources into building relationships through current media that will last longer than the media itself will. Rather, they should keep campaigns within an appropriate scope, and chalk-up this transition time as practice for when online portals become less like destinations and more like broadcasting channels.

Because of how Web 3.0 is expected to manifest, enjoying the trust of future communities is going to be about being being part of and investing in a community (much like its members do). "Interact with it" or "reaching out to it" are what current social marketers do. This is how they mine our information. But you can't really blame them.