I know someone who has an issues-oriented Facebook page. They were plugging along with a couple of hundred followers and a few likes until they discovered how to use “memes” to be successful. For the record, “memes”, in social-media, are photographs, usually of people, with witty, often ironic captions.

Once the owner of this page started using memes, it took only a week to enjoy a 500% increase in followers and many, many more exposures via posting the meme to other relevant sites.

Commenting and overall involvement in the page skyrocketed.

It sounds like a small success story on Facebook. Facebook wants this.

Or do they?

Remember, Facebook made zero dollars on what I have described above.

It seemed at first a mystery that the ability for this page to post to other sites was suspended by Facebook for two weeks because others had reported it as “spam”. I know there was nothing mechanized nor unthinking about where the posts were put, so I know it did not fit the actual parameters of spam. I began to wonder how Facebook parses its data to figure out what is “spam” if such carefully orchestrated posting could seem that way. It is possible that some folks reported it to FB as spam but based on the content involved, I kind of doubt this.

Then came the offers from Facebook to the same suspended page-owner. “Do you want to buy ads?” was more or less their offer. In many ways, on different days, they repeated the same message: spend money with Facebook, dear “spammer”.

Does Facebook review its user base for very successful users who don’t spend money with them?

Do they then threaten them with being “spammers” until they start spending money with Facebook?

There’s no proof of course. And it’s very possible that the “watchdog” part of FB does not know what the “sales” part of FB is doing–quite conveniently!

But with mounting pressure on Facebook to make money, such abuses of their power over subscribers would hardly surprise me, should it turn out to be the case.

Recently I read an article in iMediaConnection about how social media agencies were in need of a warning about being too narrowly focused; and that social media is really very narrow a focus for any marketer.

But why are they called “agencies” in the first place? The reason the word “ad agency” became popular is because these companies made their money–after all the creative and the hoopla surrounding that–by purchasing advertising time or space, and then re-selling it to their customers. This is called being an “agent”. As in “Broadway ticket agent”: a person who buys blocks of tickets to hit shows and then scalps them–’scuse me, I meant re-sells them–to the public at a not-too-onerous markup. The traditional ad agency markup was, for a long time, around 17% and this went for everything the contracted for and re-sold.

Over the years the word “agency” took on a meaning apart from this and seemed to apply to anyone with a creative or marketing bent, a few corporate customers, and a loft-type office somewhere in the warehouse district of your local city. Agency people, over time, probably bought more from Starbucks than they bought from publications or networks. And after a while, they really weren’t “agents” much any more, but creative and marketing shops that “helped you with your marketing”.

Which is what (I believe) Social Media Agencies do. They don’t re-sell social media placement (except if you consider banners and ad-networks social media). In fact, since social media is not a “spot” to be purchased, they really cannot sell what can’t be bought. So they have to settle for influencing. And many have latched on to the words “social media” because it has been hot, hot, hot.

Except now maybe not, not, not? Are we not getting tired of saying those words? Do they really apply to the mix of marketing efforts needed for digital success these days? Are the days of so-called “social media agencies” drawing to a close?

With Facebook and Zynga and Groupon at historic lows and mobile conversion rates lurking like eels in the depths, it would seem the mighty white shark of social media has now devolved into a still large, but far less attractive, more bottom-feeding thing, perhaps a grouper or a catfish instead of a top predator.

And with this must come the recognition that social media really is just one of the legs under the chair, as business-folks love to cliche. It may even be an increasingly small part of the picture. Remember, it can’t be bought, it can’t really be controlled. It can only be influenced, and then only to a point where the influence starts to become obvious and starts to annoy.

Social media is a campaign, just like any other, and must be measured against conversion rates just like any other campaign.

Are “Social Media Agencies” due for a name change, if not a game change? Yes.

A recent article in the LA Times indicated that a startup called Limited Pressing discovered that up to 85% of their Facebook ad clickthroughs were from bots not actual people (yet FB of course charged them for each one anyway). They discovered this by a fairly well-known method. By using a log file analysis tool (I use AW Stats for this), they were able to find out from the actual log files where the visits came from. They discovered that a high percentage of the visits were from sites that had disabled Java–a much, much higher percentage than the normal one or two percent. Further investigation of those visits revealed them to be from bots that simply crawl the web and make false visits to sites.

The technical part of this is really easy to understand: the log files reveal nonhuman, non-browser traffic. Tagged pages hit by bots will never appear in analytics reports but unfortunately they will appear on your bill from Facebook (or other ad serving outifts–it isn’t just Facebook doing this).

The same article cited another startup company complaining of a similar ratio.

In a separate but related note, a recent peek at the Facebook page for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews’ Hardball show reveals a fair amount of scathing comments that just don’t seem to be much help to the brand. And maybe that’s because the page is poorly managed, or maybe because they are honest and don’t keep people from saying what they want.

Let me make it clear I have long been a Facebook skeptic and believe moreover that its stock price, even as it tanks, is still overvalued.

Let me also say that Facebook is a great venue for big brands with hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers where they can learn likes and dislikes and do very low cost product research using the big ‘Book.

But does that mean your business benefits from it?

No, it does not.

With evidence that much of the traffic is sham traffic, that likes are not sales, that mobile conversions are poor, and that Facebook is a company not a platform (whereas the Internet is a platform), it seems like Facebook is only a moderate, occasional win for certain kinds of businesses.

Lets try to remember why this is.

Facebook’s DNA is akin to that of a college yearbook. It is for people (people) to share pictures and thoughts about themselves. It’s free and people love to share their lives with others and some would say a billion users can’t be wrong. And they’re not.

But they are also not generating revenue for Facebook, at least not by performing all the core activities Facebook offers. And they are also, with rare exception at the very top of the food chain, not generating anything like an ROI for businesses. Because they are not clicking on enough ads.

Can Facebook help you understand your demographic? Yes. Listen to your customers? Of course. Should you shut down your Facebook page? Well, maybe Hardball should but you can only know this for yourself. Do you spend a great deal of time and money managing it? If so, why?

Should you buy advertising on Facebook?

The answer is not clear. But what is clear is that you should monitor it very carefully. And you should not pay for robot clickthroughs. And then you should evaluate whether its really the right venue for your business. My take on it is that it’s far from an automatic “yes”.

It would be easy enough to talk about deeper dives into data than are possible now, and about how yet-more-granular information will yield yet more targeted advertising and somehow a better return on the digital advertising dollar.

Instead, I find myself questioning how much data is really needed, how much can readily be put to use, and how much “unfilled potential” or “upside” is really just vendor hyperbole. Not only that, I take a look at the growing gap between what tool vendors and even some consultants say is not only possible but worthwhile, and what type of analytics are bought and paid for on the ground and how they are really put to use and for whom. Seeing that, I begin to feel like we are roller-blading down a hill without kneepads nor helmet on very expensive skates.

Of course I believe digital analytics unlocks the value of the web; and that without understanding your users and their patterns of behavior, you cannot hope to make a success of your site. And I also know that good analytics requires hard work and there are many success stories.

What I do not subscribe to is that we are actually falling farther behind the curve of what is useful. I think instead we are falling victim to a form of hucksterism that smacks of share-value manipulation, now apparently more in failure mode than bubble mode.

Here is what I believe is wishful thinking for most organizations:

-mobile, geo-sensitive advertising will drive sales (because tiny, targeted ads are both annoying and hard-to-see)

-social media activity will translate directly into dollars (because the “advertising model” for social is unnatural)

-content can be targeted much more successfully than current if only we knew far more about the user (because you really can’t know people that well even when you know them very well and especially if they are not logged-in)

Here is what I believe is wise for the digital marketer to consider (assuming the product itself is of real value):

-pay attention to SEO because people do search and search and search

-make sure your offer is outstanding

-make sure your landing page gets users to the conversion content

-make sure your conversion content (website) is compelling

-don’t get distracted by the prospect of realizing potential in new programs when you still have unrealized potential in existing programs.

It comes back to basic, stick-to-your-knitting analytics. Define your conversion scenarios and optimize them based on careful, accurate measurement, testing and incremental improvement. This is a method that works.

The rest (social and big data especially) will sort itself out at some point and then it may make sense to spend more time on it. But I think the smart money may be getting a sense that such a time has not yet arrived nor is it really visible on the horizon.