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The New You: The Next Generation of
Social Media Moves Towards Focused Products |
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22 December 2006 |
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In the midst of the social media revolution it's easy
to think that the war for profitable publishing will
continue to be fought on the grand scale of major portals
like MySpace and YouTube. Although major social media
properties are certainly important factors in this movement
the trend is already moving away from the gargantuan
victors to more focused media properties. Pick your niche
for which you think social media will succeed, listen to
the audience in that sector - and then throw out the
assumptions and limitations built into Wikis, weblogs and
other social media platforms. Tomorrow's successful social
media properties will move far beyond these simple tools to
solutions that satisfy audiences in far more sophisticated
ways. |
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The
cover of Time Magazine glistened on our kitchen table early
this week with a shiny plastic mirror reflecting back a wobbly
image of my face framed in a
YouTube-like video display. "Yes, you. You Control the
Information Age. Welcome to your World." Consider it a brief
moment of personal victory - followed by the realization that
millions of webloggers and other personal publishers were
posting or emailing or texting to tell the world that they,
too, had made the cover of Time magazine.
Or not. For as seminal as Time Magazine's recognition of
personal publishers as the movers and shakers of 2006 may be,
it's really a history lesson at this point. That this
Content Nation of personal publishers has transformed the
essential nature of media is hardly news at all. The bigger
news is that they've lit a permanent blaze under the seats of
publishing executives who now recognize that there is more
power to be gained in accelerating this revolutionary shift
than standing in its way.
This is mostly a good thing. For all of the success that the
pioneers of social media have assembled in the past few years
there are few user-generated content products that have
succeeded on the merits of great product design. Weblogs are
supported by watered-down content management packages that are
only now beginning to allow for some modest sophistication in
publishing. Trying to edit your average Wiki takes a strong
belief that others will be willing to put up with editing
languages that look like chicken scratches to build
collaborative content. For Wikipedia and many other successful
social media sites without a band of loyal contributors
providing enough content to triumph over weak product design
these early successes would have gone nowhere.
In large part, then, social media has succeeded in most
areas in spite of itself: the virtues of revolutionary tools
far outweighed a host of vices. But the aftermath of this
revolution will begin to favor focused products that go beyond
single-purpose general solutions to products that solve real
problems for specific audiences using social media techniques:
- In the instance of a site like
AllBusiness it's
about attracting experts in business processes that can
support growing businesses with online advice - a sector that
had not yet established a strong network of experts through
weblogs or other tools that could provide an effective
aggregation of user-generated content within a relatively
narrow focus.
- For NoteMesh it's
about providing a tool that allows students to share class
notes from specific courses and in the process of doing so
develop a master set of notes to help fellow students.
Registration is limited to users with a ".edu" Internet
address for their email account or for those who can identify
an institution that has a non-".edu" address.
- For Flip.com it's
about launching a social networking site using personal
pages, sharing in groups and comment streams aimed
specifically at girls and young women - using technology to
define a very specific community with specific interests to
appeal to advertisers trying to reach those demographics.
This is the "magic bullet" that many publishers will be
seeking to fire in 2007, a way to harness the benefits of
social media technologies into a form that will translate into
specific market opportunities. The move towards focused social
media solutions will parallel those efforts that we have seen
regarding "vertical search" - and with many of the same
potential pitfalls. A few things to watch out for as publishers
try to get on the social media bandwagon:
- You can't be just a smaller "YouTube". There will
be one or two "me too" efforts that may capture some
significant share of the mass markets for specific niches of
social media, but don't think that the possibilities are
endless. The key is not building a better "YouTube" or a
better "MySpace" but rather finding a better market
opportunity and putting together the right social media
elements for that audience. As seen with successful vertical
search services such as
ThomasNet there's a lot more than taking a general
content technology and applying it to a specific market
sector.
- It's not a Wiki or a weblog that matters but a great
service with great content. Some of the more successful
social media services don't try to be just a social
bookmarking service, or just a weblog, or just a Wiki. They
have a vision as to how people can create content together
for a specific purpose and they throw everything they can
into making it successful for that purpose. If you look at
services like Gather or
Newsvine or
ITtoolbox they are
each a little hard to categorize in terms of their publishing
technologies - but it's clear who they service and how. The
solution is not a specific technology but listening carefully
to what a specific audience wants to publish and how they
want to publish it.
- Consider how strong independents are already in your
niche. Some services like AllBusiness stand a chance of
doing well as a focused online community of user-publishers
because there were few sources in social media covering their
market segment. In contrast by the time
ALM began to look at
incorporating weblogs into its online offerings many lawyers
had already established popular weblogs. The solution in
their instance was to knit together an advertising network
for those weblogs that could draw traffic into their
mainstream publications. It will take a core of dedicated
contributors to make your social media service a hit. If you
can't attract that core naturally, then consider how to
romance an existing core to your side.
It's great to see mainstream media acknowledging the breadth
and depth of the social media revolution, but the second act of
a revolution is usually the most important part - the part in
which established power bases come to do business with the
winners. This year's trail of major social media acquisitions
is just the beginning of a transformation that will lead major
publishers to put users in control of more focused and valued
publications than ever before. Hopefully you'll like what
you see in the mirror.
-
John Blossom
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