"THE INDUSTRIOUS MARKETER" BLOG

The Social Media Counter-Revolution

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Perusing the New York Times last evening, the future hit me over the head like a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica.*

• Micro-blog tool Twitter got front page coverage for its role as a beacon for Moldovan anti-Communist protestors (until the authorities cut off Internet access, routing protestors to older cell phone instant messaging technology)
  
  
• Magazines including Time and even Scholastic have defied the American Society of Magazine Editors to blur the lines between ads and articles (horrors!)
  
  
• Content arbitrageur Google, disguised as a search engine,  defends its use of newspaper headlines and story snippets as the publishers scramble to reinvent their business models —while also defending new digital library of scanned orphan books in a quarrel with university libraries who are the keepers of these out-of-print gems of cultural history

The social media technology revolution is reconfiguring how we work, how we communicate, and increasingly, how we become educated. 

Citizen journalists (a.k.a. bloggers) proliferate without limit (or standards). Editorial is increasingly promotional. Knowledge (or at least the raw materials) is be available where you happen to be, on the device you prefer to use. But what does it get you?  Can you trust it?

Yet like so many technology shifts throughout history (think telephone systems or transportation networks), the full value won't emerge until the networks reach critical mass.  The value IS the network, based on scale, flexibililty and open access. Linear connections (e.g. early party line phone systems, traditional media journalism, and conventional e-learning sites) channelled information exchange but didn't require shared engagement. Wikipedia showed us how even a small group of highly involved contributors sharing knowledge can create something real without formal process and a minimum of rules.

In the new social network models, sharing is the default standard. In fact, one must opt out to avoid the shared environment.  My Tweets have the potential to reach everyone unless I choose the direct message option.

There is both upside and downside to this.  Shared information enables greater freedom, literal and figurative.  But the noise emanating from so many fragmented channels overwhelms our capacity to make sense of it all. Which is the best source of insight on the Darfur situation in Sudan?  Encyclopedia Brittanica, Wikipedia, or an activist's blog?  All or none, depending on the context. This opens the door for new knowledge intermediaries to step in and make things simple again. As is happening with Twitter, whose users migrate to TwitterDeck and other aggregators. If only someone could tell me which posts I must read and those to ignore—to clear the channel for me, customized to my unique way of learning, so that I can (again) relax and read in the evenings. 

The history of technology is the story of revolutions. 

Innovation, resistance to change, counter-revolution, and, finally, better things emerging from the conflict.

Still, for the present, where "sharing" isn't a norm in an industry (process, resources or assets), resistance to social media trends will persist. Until one day, when the critical mass is achieved. Minds—and business opportunities—will open as social media becomes the new norm. And a huge entree for the information gatekeepers.

All that was old becomes new again. 

* One can still buy Encyclopedia Britannica in print form, as well as the newer DVD and online versions.  The company has recovered from its disasterous shift to a "media advertising revenue model" (giving content away free online, subsidized by Web-based advertising) and has successfully expanded their subscriber base across old and new technology platforms.     

NEED HELP?
If your company is struggling with how social media fits in with your business processes, marketingFOLIO can help.  If you've got customers, you need to understand how these networks operate.  We'll provide insight on how your industry is (or is not) embracing these tools, who's using them, and what strategies you can use to gain and sustain advantage. Contact us for a consultation.

REFERENCES
If you're interested in these April 2009 New York Times articles referenced, here are the links to NYTimes.com:

• Google's Plan for Out-of-Print Books is Challenged
• Google Insists It's a Friend to Newspapers
  
• Magazines Blur Line Between Ad and Article