Is Social Media a Fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the industrial revolution?
This is the question posed by the video:
As I watched the video I struggled with understanding the relationship between the content and the industrial revolution. So what if Facebook would be the 3rd largest county; so what if some twitter user has more followers than the population of Sweden; so what if it took 39 years for TV to reach 50 million viewers and Facebook reached 200 million in less than a year. A stream of numbers, possibly interesting, inferred to be meaningful.
So what is that meaning? It seems to be about markets. It’s about forming markets to bring together people. When you have a number of people common interests can be identified and then come products and then advertising. This looks like an advertisement for advertising on social media.
So when Facebook or Google create some place for people to congregate, they do so by attracting people by giving them something, usually for free.
As David Carr put it: “when what you are getting is for free, you’re the product.”
To generate revenue, the providers need sponsors–usually advertisers–to pay for access to the people in the market. If you’re a service like Facebook you have a lot of personal information that can be used by marketers to slice and dice down to very focused groups. This focus translates into higher hit rates and thus more sales per advertising dollar. So goes the theory.
So when I visit one of these places, I am presented with ads that correspond to some marketer’s idea of my product interests. On Facebook these manifest as the ads presented on the home page. On my home page these are often for dating services featuring pretty girls. God forbid I click on one of these ads. First the event will be on the record in perpetuity as an interest. Next, this interest will no doubt toggle some marketing flag which will only encourage more of these ads. Finally, unless I’m careful, this click will be broadcast to all my friends. How embarrassing would that be.
The flash and tempo of the video seem to be directed to attract the advertiser and to get them to look at social media or continue to support it. Certainly when comparing these virtual markets over the traditional media outlets there is a lot of opportunity. I presume the relationship to the industrial revolution is in those days markets where physical things coupled with physical limitations. Social Media have few of those.
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