Social Media vs Social Applications
April 16, 2009 in Business Development
Terminology Matters: Why ‘Social Media’ Sucks – Advertising Age – DigitalNext
By Josh Bernoff
If you want to build an environment where consumers or other customers connect with you and each other, call it a “social application.” It could be a community, a user-generated-content site, or even adding ratings and reviews to your site. By calling these applications, you remind yourself that 1) it’s going to take some effort to build it right, and 2) people will interact with it. And you may even remind yourself that 3) it could last a long time, rather than coming and going quickly as advertising campaigns and media do.
If you’re going to participate in a big social site (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube), call it a “social-network site” (or just a “social network,” for short). And you’re often better off with a channel or a profile or an identity than an ad in such an environment.
But no matter what you do, the sooner you stop thinking of the social web as media, the better off you are.
What do you think? Bernoff also says that, “Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way.”
I disagree, to an extent. Media companies like to think that media is something that they control, unfortunately they are learning (some more quickly than others) that they simply do not. Applications are also something that companies think that they can control, and again, they are learning that this is not exactly true.
Take, for example, the “Tea Party” protests that took place on 15 April. Lots and lots of Americans got together, connected by the internet and e-mail, and staged a series of nation-wide protests (not discussing the politics here, just the facts). Fox News channel jumped on the story with both feet and covered it for most of the day – it was the big news story. The other cable news networks chose to downplay or ignore the Tea Party story, in what I can only imagine was an effort to control the narrative.
This attempt at control creates a ratings situation where Fox News has more viewers than MSNBC and CNN combined.
I suspect that both terms, “Media” and “Application”, will be replaced by something more accurate and that the name will come from the social sphere itself.
