Social media is booming, but is all of the activity
surrounding its growth a precursor to a dot-com-like bubble
burst? While in some ways investors may overextend
themselves on the social media trend as much as any other
social media is growing to become a trend that is based on
countless tiny bubbles rather than the huge risk-takers
that we're used to seeing in the media limelight. At is
core social media is about human communications returning
to normal levels of discourse that may have been forgotten
in the push to cash in on electronic content - and that
will require more sophisticated monetization models than
those being pursued by most media companies.
If you've ever gotten a little
contemplative while sipping down a bit of fine champagne you may
have noticed that the bubbles of gas that rise to the top of
your glass are really very tiny compared to the big burps of
gas found in your typical bottle of supermarket fizzy water.
Good champagne costs more than your average soda pop, so
perhaps we can say that tiny bubbles are a sign of refinement.
It might be thus also with social media. At the recent
Web 2.0 Expo
in San Francisco there was much talk about whether we are
experiencing a new "bubble" in online markets. Tim O'Reilly
opined in his Expo keynote that no, we were not in a Web
2.0 bubble, that Web 2.0 represented a fundamental shift in how
people interact with technology. Yet the thousands of people
crammed into the hall for this event and the desperate notes in
the rest rooms seeking out AJAX programmers seemed to argue
that on at least one level that there was a whale burp-sized
bubble that has swept up nearly every resource in Silicon
Valley that seeks out private equity.
Is there a social media bubble? Yes and no would be the
simple answer. There's no doubt that there is nearly as much
ill-counseled money chasing so-so ideas for Web content as
there was in the heyday of the dot-com boom. The difference
this time around, though, is an explosion of tiny bubbles in
online publishing courtesy of Web 2.0 technologies and the
acceptance of social media as a key publishing venue. With
standards-based technologies, many of which are made available
to people either for free for at minimal costs, the risks that
individual projects need to take on are much smaller compared
to the dot-com risks of yore that required oftentimes massive
injections of capital just to get basic functionality up and
running. For every
Brightcove sucking up tens of millions in investment there
are tens of thousands of micropublishers like
BakeSpace generating income
for themselves and others in very focused niches with hardly a
spoonful of capital.
Call it the trivialization of publishing, if you will, the
demystifying of the erstwhile black art that has allowed
individuals and institutions to create their own tiny
publishing bubbles at will. Some micropublishing plays will
come and go with hardly a whisper and others will be able to
grow into superstar status with or without help from
traditional media outlets. There will continue to be big
bubbles being burst as some big investments fail to pan out but
by and large there is a permanent system being established that
is enabling online content plays to surface organically on a
regular basis. Compare and contrast this with recent magazine
launches, which have been few and far between and increasingly
risky ventures. There is no going back any more from this
trivialization factor: the one-to-one conversations of people
in their self-designed content marketplaces have taken center
stage for good. Yes, we'll always pay attention to big media
companies to some degree, but the fundamental premise of
centrally managed and produced mass market content forming the
core of publishing is diminishing by the day.
The trivialization of publishing was on display also at
ContentNext's
EconSM conference in Los Angeles last week. There were lots
of great insights presented at this event from some of the
leading thinkers in entertainment and business media, but the
truth of the matter is that few of these people seemed to have
very compelling ideas about how they were going to monetize
social media. It was mostly back to talk of "stickiness" and
roll-in ads for video clips - very conventional fare.
Nowhere in this mix was the dirty little secret uttered: you're
going to have to have to reward audiences who create and
distribute popular social media content. So as much as these
executives were speaking volumes about how they "get" social
media they are not very close to "getting" the business models
that are going to be required to make the most of its value.
Tiny bubbles will get tiny rewards - rewards that sometimes
will grow into big rewards, but in general rewards that will
have a hard time filling the office buildings along Wilshire
Boulevard or the Avenue of the Americas with well-heeled media
executives.
This is where the talk of "farm
teams" emerging from
social media to feed major content producers stumbles somewhat.
Social media talent may fact make its way from social media
into mainstream publishing to some significant degree as
Vaudevillians used to make their way to Hollywood, but to a
larger extent we're seeing mainstream publishing talent
establishing their own social media outlets to gain independent
credibility for their skills. We're also witnessing
corporations establishing both social media and more
traditional media content via their own Web sites, obviating to
some degree the need to employ mediation to get their branding
and insights incorporated into the public's thinking. In other
words, social media is becoming the destination content of
choice, content that can be accelerated to the peak of its
market value with little or no help from traditional media
experts. Social media is folk art unbound. The next
Elvis Presley,
Johnny Cash
or Buddy
Holly may never have to stray far from their roots to
become a folk sensation. Or they may be happy just being who
they are with whatever audience comes along.
The deployment of tools such as feed readers and widgets
that accelerate user-generated content aggregation capabilities
only emphasizes this trend. Before social media major media
producers could at least feel comfortable in the knowledge that
they had some control over the venues in which content could be
found: now content can be assembled by anyone anywhere from
virtually any source. Not only do tiny bubbles reign, they also
can appear in whatever glass we choose. So if personal and
enterprise users control the production, the distribution and
the aggregation of content and infrastructure companies like
Google control the contextualization, what's left at the bottom
of the glass of bubbly for today's media companies?
