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September 1, 2009

The Media Middle

Many writers of many ilks ask the question of "where" we will be going with the new social networking tools including Facebook, Twitter and the like. It makes for fun reading, with science on one end of the spectrum and fantasy on the other. Chances are that the differences in their predictions have more to do with which writers are getting paid, which have someone's attention already, and which are seeking attention or pay versus which could care less. It might be that the most reliable statements are the ones that fall into the "notes to myself" group because they are relatively unadorned or unfettered -- whether they later prove to be right or wrong. They will be the breadcrumbs on the thinking trails that can be reviewed later and learned from, as evidence of what helps analyses succeed. But, there is this problem of whether there are too many useless crumbs with no one coming by to sweep them up. On that note, welcome to the web.

And still, below, my notes to myself.

As these social networking instruments continue to power up the breadth of opportunity for participants in the "read/write web", it becomes more evident that vast social experimentation with communications will fall into a relatively few categories of general importance.

Each of these categories will be an arena where we will see development (planned change) and evolution (adopted adaptation), and eventually we will see certain types of relationships developed and evolved between the categories as well. The categories are content, community, and channels, in the midst of which sits a media user.

Content

Self-publishing is the primary driver in this category, with multi-media presentation being the most compelling target. Technicians point to "rich media" on the developer side, but this is essentially about bringing portability, seamlessness and streaming to presentations. On the evolution side, the goal is convenient compilation and tagging as a way of dynamically organizing and discovering special interests. 

In fact, discovery is the key link from here to the next category.

Communities

This area is driven mostly by communications dedicated to representing and validating common interests. On the development side, discovery tools are premium; and on the evolution side, sharing is the top priority, which as a result also makes access privileges and property rights a key issue to decide.  Social policies emerge as the main indicator of evolution here, which is why the cultural dimension of social networking is most basic in this area compared to the two other areas (content and channels). 

The key link between this area and the next is targeting.

Channels

The exponential increase in "offered information"  does not cause a similar level of increase in "attractive content", but it clearly stages the occasion to produce more content that is attractive if the information can be appropriately contained. It seems inevitable that information consumers, who are the full population of social networkers, will not spend most of their time "boiling the ocean" by speculatively exploring unfamiliar information, much of which is hardly, if at all, "packaged". Instead that they will increasingly devote their consumption time to credibly familiar information sources. Social networkers will do an entirely traditional and conventional thing: they will more and more often pick certain routes and destinations first, and those first picks will use up most of their time and, barring interventions, become somewhat habitual. This will be the case regardless of what communication instrument is in use. Typically, when innovative instruments are released, the excitement is all about convenience and this stimulates speculative use. But familiarity of results will almost inevitably take over as the ersatz "content" either delights or frustrates -- and this will make discrimination the user's priority over convenience.

To make use of that discrimination, the link between Channels and Content is, not surprisingly, promotion.

Survival Strategies

As we can see, there is not really that much new going on in the overall dynamics of communications. Instead, there is a difference in the task-level efficiency of communications efforts, which amplifies the dynamics in various ways. Depending on who the stakeholder is, some of this amplification is deemed positive and some negative.

Arguably, fatigue is the main culprit in content, as publishers find a recurring audience more or less elusive and begin to evaluate the effort to continue publishing. Whether we point at blog graveyards or a deeper excavation of sites like Facebook, it is predictable that most publishers will significantly diminish their output over time unless they can leverage discovery to refresh their audience and thereby regain incentive to publish.

In the area of community, the most obvious dynamic is that communities are, from the bird's eye view, "chaotic", with ongoing splintering being just as important as ongoing conventions. What this really means is that communities are not so much simply environments themselves but also they are organisms within a larger environment. Organic development, assuming survival, may mean compositional change, maturity change, change in range and reach, or any mix of those changes. This is continally fortified by the ever-increasing ease of communications, which presents alternative stances and boundaries to the current community. So while communities are concerned with sustainability, what actually happens is that the community is more dedicated to the survival of "a" community than it is to the retention of most of its particular members. It is predictable that a community will diminish unless it can leverage targeting to reinforce adoption of its agenda, whether by new members or old.

And with channels, the lack of regulation means that a limitless number of potential channels compete and must rely on profiling the relationship of their content to channel users -- then promoting the profile. The underlying secret success factor, however, is that the promotion must actually change the cost effectiveness of competing --favorably for one's own channel, and unfavorably for competitors. The content itself is possibly a way to do that (think historically: MTV and "reality" shows), but such cases will be few, unusual and at best famously disruptive with an uncertain timespan of reaching evolutionary equilibrium. Some get there almost immediately, but some never quite make it.

So, in the full picture:

- Content is linked by Discovery to Communities

- Community is linked by Targeting to Channels

- Channel is linked by Promotion to Content

This is certainly not always a virtuous circle or even one that can be fully traversed by any one party. But importantly, it is more like a spring coil spiralling up and away over time/distance, while the whole coil might rock to and fro in different directions, pointing at a wide range of destination points. With predictions, one needs to consider also how long the coil is and what direction it is pointing in. In that light, what causes the coil to change directions? As of this writing, one of the curiouser matters is that promotions are getting more attention as content than is nearly any other kind of content, because there is such a frenzy about how to "monetize" social networking. But if this monetizing was not such a prominent issue, other kinds of content might be more highly valued.

This model looks an awful lot like marketing. And if marketers find it appealingly credible and familiar, they risk being accused of wielding the marketing hammer and seeing all problems as "nails". Non-marketers may be much less comfortable with it all. On the other hand, few disciplines are as relentless in their study of social communications as is marketing. So, as one of my colleagues taught me to say, this is king of the hill until somebody knocks it off.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at September 1, 2009 6:45 AM

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