“We Media”

It was the summer of 2009. During a game night with friends I happened to overhear an individual talking about the fact that Twitter and Facebook appeared to be problematic business models because they held no clear method of monetization. Of course in the months that followed we witnessed an ever expanding Facebook Advertising Offering as well as big Google and Bing investments into Twitter for the rights to search archives. Clearly, the belief in a problematic business model has not held true for these online environments/entities.

What’s really interesting here, though, is the assumption that social media (no matter myriad manifestations) is all about money. While I’m sure investors all want to know how their investments in tech. startups are growing, social media users are not widely using technology to buy and sell like fiends. Yes we are addicted to farmville and mafia wars, yes we too often trend tweet, and yes we are probably susceptible to advertising sutured into those visual and textual behaviors. However, we users do not appear to be nickel and dime-ing one another. Even older social sites like Craigslist take professional and novice spamming uber seriously. CL so much so that they have instituted new TOS in 2009 to limit posts to specific regionality…localizing buy/sell/announcements ads by socially controlling out-of-region postings. The word on the street is that this is for community protection, a request from several communities tired of the external spamming.

When technology is designed in a way to provide for and/or accelerate social interaction, the goal is for group and communal sharing of thoughts and ideas. The SOCIAL in Social Media remains superlative to the Media. To emphasize this point, author and consultant Susan Rice Lincoln digs a bit deeper in her text Mastering Web 2.0. Therein she explains that the most powerful app in the Social Media realm is People. And the internet, just as it always has been, is about people connecting.

In this vein, Media and Marketing Professionals should remember a few things:

• Social Media is about cutting edge accessibility and connectivity, not cutting edge technology.

• We’ve already moved from Mass Media, to Me Media, to We Media.

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• Practitioners should focus on community first, monetization later.

The next time I attend a game night with friends, I’ll pass along the advice that we all should be “we-minded” …unless of course I’ve the lost the first of a best-of-three Risk series.

-Curt

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