What is ‘social media’?

It’s tempting to imagine that our current ‘social revolution’ driven by the uptake of the Internet is changing who we are and how we behave. But like all other revolutions – political, cultural, industrial – it reconfirms just how adaptive a species we are. We continue to respond to and make the best of new environments and new opportunities just like our ancestors did. Celebrities with 50,000 ‘followers’ on Twitter, students with 500 Facebook ‘friends’, professionals with 300 LinkedIn ‘connections’ – it all sounds like a massive sea-change compared to how we socialised before the Internet. However, the simple human reality, captured in an old Portuguese saying, is unlikely to ever change:  “You only have five true friends and the rest is landscape”.

It’s also tempting to see ‘social media’ as a technological revolution that enables each and every one of us to be in control of the message and its dissemination (see the blog post ‘To blog or not to blog’) – the empowerment of the unpaid ‘amateur’. This is unprecedented and in theory sounds the death knell for all ‘industrial media’ – the ‘broadcast’ or ‘mass’ media outlets owned, run and influenced by big business and managed by the paid ‘professional’. But again, our ability to adapt does not make this so clear cut. Big business will continue to seek ownership of emerging media and develop new business models that make a profit and keep us satisfied. Several social networks in Asian markets such as India, China, Japan and Korea have reached not only a high usage but also a high level of profitability (Benjamin Joffe, ‘New business models in online communities’).

Just how especially social is ‘social media’?

A ‘medium’ is a channel of communication, information, or entertainment – in other words, cinema or theatre is a medium as much as the telephone, newspapers, books, TV or radio.  ‘Social’ defines our innate ability to commune and share with each other. It would be wrong to imagine that all ‘industrial media’ are not, and were never intended to be, social.  Any medium that does not recognise the importance of the social dimension is a medium that will fail. Radio requests and phone-ins, lonely hearts advertisements, agony aunt columns and readers’ letters, TV voting, book reviews, the shared exclamations and applause during a film or play, all demonstrate how participants influence each medium through their interactions. And something the industrial media are especially good at is feeding our vicarious interest in other people’s lives – through soap operas or celebrity magazines, for example.

What makes ‘social media’ especially social is its potential for immediacy and instant gratification.  The telephone (Skype) and instant messaging, usually one-to-one, are instantaneous. What distinguishes the online networking applications from their industrial equivalents is that they cater for asynchronous communication, usually one-to-many, where the delay in response is measured in minutes or hours, not the days or weeks associated with newspapers and magazines. This makes the sense of communing and sharing especially powerful. In practice what this means in an online social networking context (note the ‘online’ qualification – as a species social networking is hard-wired into us) is that people use the technology to stay in touch with people they already know.

Twitter ostensibly contradicts this statement – but does it? Only 5 per cent of Twitter users generate 74 per cent of all messages and of this 5 per cent, 32 per cent are generated by machine bots (Sysomos). A massive 80 per cent of all Twitter accounts have fewer than 10 followers and 30 percent have no followers at all (TechCrunch). Currently more than 60 per cent of Twitter users fail to return the following month (Nielsen). Only 4.4 per cent of Twitter visitors are younger than 18 (TechCrunch). Twitter is not for teenagers because teenagers want to hang out with their mates (preferably in places where their parents don’t go) and not attract complete strangers. In other words the social networking dynamics work best when we identify with a community – whether that’s a community of our own friends or an extended community of like-minded individuals. (Take a look at some hard facts about online social media platfoms for a background to some other social media tools.)

Social media as a channel for community

The characteristics of a community – a collection of people who are more interested in sharing than personal branding – emerge from individuals grouping themselves by topic (one of the defining social networking characteristics in China) or from individuals who have met, or could meet, face-to-face. ‘Community’ media by definition works best as hybrids between industrial and social media. At the industrial end it encompasses community-owned channels such as community radios (I’ve recently experienced the delights of hospital radio) and community TV and newspapers. A typical model is one where professionals manage and finance the channels, which are run by amateurs. At the social media end the amateur prevails but there is a need for a professional infrastructure with a professional community manager if the online community is to truly succeed and be sustainable.

So when we at SiftGroups describe ourselves as ‘The social media people’ what we really mean is that we are your potential professional partner there to help you listen and learn from the conversations you attract and then leverage the rewards of a vibrant online community that reinforces your brand and delivers lasting value both for you and your audience.

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdamexico/3594913795/