Since my last post on social media, I’ve had several opportunities to speak about the medium to clients, mostly software companies. Most of them think it’s a huge waste of time—a global walkie-talkie system, crowded with noise and nonsense, expensive to populate with content, and unlikely to bring in any new business.
I’ve also recently become a huge fan of Scott Stratten, whose UnMarketing site is both hilarious and informative. (It also highlights many of the things I’m doing wrong on this blog. Thanks a lot, Scott.) He points out what my clients usually miss: social media is all about “social,” not about “media.” It’s supposed to be a two-way communication, not another channel for targeting one’s prey—I mean customers.
I’ll leave the marketing implications for another discussion. What the whole two-way vs. one-way idea raises for me are its implications for content filtering and tuning.
Obviously, qualitative feedback from a self-selecting group can build up an effective metadata set for determining personal relevance and credibility. Social media has the potential to be the ultimate content filter—as I’ve said before.
What’s even more interesting, however, is how two-way communication can directly modify our choices—or let us take on new or unfamiliar ideas. We may not know what we want from someone, or some company we “meet” online, especially if they are not already part of our circle. However, if there is genuine two-way communication in play, then we at least have the beginnings of a mutual relationship. New ideas are more likely to get through on that basis than they are in a one-way environment.
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte once posited a “Daily Me” newspaper—one that was completely user-customizable. Only information of interest to the individual would be published. A drawback to this idea is that user tastes can exclude new or unfamiliar ideas. People already tend to consume information that confirms their beliefs; creating a one-way channel, even a user-customized one, only makes it worse.
Real engagement, via true, two-way interaction, is more like a “Daily Us.” Personal preferences and choices still matter, but there is more opportunity to learn new ideas, and build up the connections that make information meaningful.
There will always be those who abuse the mutuality and openness of social media—just as there have always been sociopaths in the non-digital world. However, that is no reason to abandon social media’s potential for making information more meaningful.
–John Parsons
