(Note: I talk to A LOT of companies who are striving to embrace social media but don’t really grok what exactly it is and how to apply it to their businesses. This is an attempt to explain social media in simple terms.)
YouTube and MySpace were borne of the recognition that just as radio gave rise to television, the Internet is moving beyond text and links. It is becoming an amalgam of movies, pictures and sound. It is becoming interactive and mobile.
Media as we know it is being re-invented. The once finite lines between audience, network, content and advertiser are becoming blurred. For the first time, mastered “professional” content and user-generated content co-exist side by side in a still-forming universe known as social media.
Social media extends traditional media models by providing the means for users to express their interests and experiences via a user profile, connect the dots between related pieces of content and engage with “like minds” in a systematic fashion.
It heralds a shift away from very few, homogenous broadcasters with limited points of distribution and towards a surplus of rich media channels and content targeted at every niche imaginable.
Part of what drives this drives this model is the open, inherently boundary-less nature of the Internet, and the rapid commoditization of technologies and devices that ride on top of it.
Whereas once the cost of producing, distributing and marketing new content was prohibitively expensive for all but the largest enterprises, in the social media model, new concepts can be launched very rapidly and very inexpensively.
There are all sorts of interesting tools and platforms emerging that allow anyone to become a legitimate content producer, and to target and reach a very specific audience. This enables consumers and businesses of all sizes to become active participants in the creation and distribution of content.
At its most basic, anyone can rate, tag, comment or share a piece of content that they have an opinion on. It is no less amazing, however, how many millions of people have embraced social media at a deeper level by writing blogs, creating podcasts and/or uploading video clips.
I have a mantra that this medium is all about breadcrumbs and conversations. Basically, the idea behind breadcrumbs is that with social media, content is cast far and wide through viral distribution tools like widgets, RSS-based syndication and simple email sharing. Baked into these distribution tools is a “call home” function that provides a clear path for consumers to get entertained, educated and/or engage in a conversation with the content builder.
Thus, breadcrumbs enable engagement to occur in a loosely coupled, de-centralized fashion yet still achieve the benefits of an integrated community; namely, clear contexts, well-defined rules of engagement and aggregate scale.
Beyond entertainment and media applications, businesses of all sizes can benefit by embracing this model and applying it to their branding, customer relationship, communications and marketing strategies.
For example, we (i.e., my companies, Me.com and vSocial) have a number of clients that have launched or are launching word of mouth marketing campaigns that leverage this approach. In addition, we work with a major media company that is embracing this model to change the way they market DVDs.
Similarly, we have a client that has baked rich media and community building functionality so deep into their online strategy that in about a month, 6,000 of their customers, prospects and ecosystem partners have signed up to join their social network. The net effect of this is that pretty much overnight they have gone from an almost exclusively US focused company to one with a virtual global presence, something they never could have achieved prior to the advent of social media.
The audience is now an integral part of the network, and the business of media will never be the same.
