Where is Social Media Headed?
Posted on December 18, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
I have a very firm view that social media in its Facebook incarnation or in loose associations of people like Facebook won’t be sustainable. Here is a very personal experience. I have only ever had problems doing business with people I do not know, have no introduction to or cannot align myself with in some tangible way. And Facebook’s founding proposition was it helped students organise their social lives - people who knew each other already.
I have very wide networks and they’re spread across Linkedin, Ryze, Facebook, and Friends Reunited. With precious few exceptions these contacts kind of offer up opportunity but rarely, rarely deliver on it.
This is by way of an introduction to what I really think is happening in social media. The big blog names, the blogs that present fascinating insights and meanwhile maintain the dynamism of this area are in fact old fashioned reporters. I was looking recently at Chris Heuer’s site. Chris is a conversational media evangalist on the face of it but in reality he is doing what I did when I became a reporter, picking up on interesting bits of news and trends and spinning out a good story, responding to people’s need for novelty. I’d say it’s prettty much the same with other admirable bloggers like Steve Rubel and Giovanni Rodriguez, to name just two.
What’s fascinating is how quickly these writers have become reporters, mastering a trade that journalists can take years to get right.
Now, these voices are also working out social media projects in relation to their own professional roles as corporate advisors. That, for my money, is why the prevailing trend will always be what works for corporations in today’s changing climate, which is no bad thing but is a step in the logic of how social media will evolve.
Still, at no time since the beginning of web 2.0 has it been clearer that we are in the process of organising a new form of dialogue between business and consumers, rather than organising a new dialogue between people.
Once again, I have no objection to that. But what it means is right now the voices that come from social action/ CSR/ environmental perspectives are not the ones shaping the corporate agenda in social media. They influence it tangentially here but are probably more effective through conventional media.
This concerns me and the reason is that newspapers do a great job at coralling shades of opinion and a variety of perspectives. To date I’m not sure the blogosphere has done that principally because it began as a tech-oriented medium. Now that blogging is reaching into corporate CSR, the green movement, business ethics, consumerism etc, the time seems ripe for a Huffington Post that draws these strands together and creates a wider variety of influence.
This seems to me to be the main reason why blogging matters and other social media are marginal, unrealiseable opportunity machines. Perhaps a cruel way of putting it but I hope my point is clear.
Comments
2 Responses to “Where is Social Media Headed?”
Leave a Reply
Thanks for the mention, Haydn. While I agree that the corporate agenda is moving faster than the public-interest agenda, we shouldn’t ignore how the non-commercial world has recently adapted to the world of social media. There are many interesting experiments afoot in education, politics, and consumer advocacy. And I have been fortunate to work with some of the folks inside these worlds. Time to shine a brighter light on those worlds, perhaps.
Hi Giovanni. Very much like to see how the social media world looks if we start shining a light on the social end of it. The fascination in these changes is trying to work out what they mean for society as a whole. Maybe if you blogged in your experiences a few of us could pick up on it.