Charlie Sheen Exposes Social Media's Weakness

The Face of Winning

Charlie Sheen has quit Twitter, taking with him the mantra of #winning and concepts such as tiger blood and trolls who were out to sabotage his career. Indeed, TV’s favorite train wreck had peaked months ago, but his sudden rise and departure from the social utility highlight a key Achilles heel for the site and for most other types of social media.

Sheen joined Twitter in March 2011, at a point where his personal and professional lives were in complete and total disarray. People ate it up. By the time he decided to quit Twitter 16 months later, Sheen had amassed nearly 8 million followers, including 157,000 within the first two hours after his initial tweet. That is truly amazing!

But it also shows you just how easy it is to join and leave sites like Twitter. Sheen isn’t alone. Alec Baldwin has quit and rejoined the site. (Remember Baldwin's Words With Friends airline incident?). You can also add John Mayer, Miley Cyrus and James Franco to the list. (Franco quit after just a few weeks.) For many, 140-characters of chaos brought followers, but it also led to sudden disappearances from the online world.

These celebrities all expose the great weakness of many social media sites. Low switching costs and an inability to create the so-called sticky relationships necessary to retain customers, drive revenue and produce sustainable growth. It costs nothing to set up an account. The only cost of quitting involves finding new ways to communicate with others, which isn’t terribly difficult in this day and age.

Certainly, there are a high percentage of people who joined Twitter just to follow Sheen's late night rants about goddesses, Adonis DNA and warlocks. (Remember his social media intern promotion?) If just 5% of his followers were there just for him, then Sheen's departure could lead to the exodus of  400,000 Twitter users. I don't have data for this, though it seems in the realm of possibility.

Facebook, for now, has been able to create traction. There are games and communities that you will lose if you leave, but even the social media juggernaut has yet to provide a perfect value proposition to its users. (And the jury is still out on whether advertisers are actually benefiting from posting on the social utility.)

The FB isn’t helping its cause. The site recently scored 61 out of 100 on a satisfaction scale released Monday as part of the American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Business Report, which is produced in conjunction with ForeSee, an analytics firm. It was the largest decline of the 230 companies rated in the survey.

Such concerns make it so much easier for someone to try something new. It doesn’t take long for people to switch, triggering a downward spiral for a site’s popularity. Remember Digg? Betaworks just paid a paltry $500,000 for the site, just a few years removed from being lauded as a rising star in the tech world that was reportedly courted by Google and others.

NewsCorp can relate, selling MySpace for $35 million after paying $580 million for the site just six years earlier. Fame is fleeting. People are fickle. You have to not only bring them in, but also find ways of keeping them engaged. 

That, as Mr. Sheen might say, is the true key to winning.