Social Media and Newspapers
February 27th, 2008 | by Brad King |A friend of mine posted a blog about Social Media Marketing, a term I’m starting to hear more and more.
It’s concerning for me, not because I don’t like marketing or selling things. I like money. Money is good. It helps me eat and have clothes.
Social media, though, goes far beyond how the term is oftentimes bandied about. Facebook and Myspace are social software, surely, in that they let you keep up with your friends. But neither are Read/Write. It’s still a one-way communication. Sure, you can “friend” people (when did that become a verb) or leave comments, but that’s essentially no different than instant messenger programs that have been around for several decades.
Social media is, I think, media that enables a two-way dialog where reader becomes writer, where writer becomes reader and where new ideas bubble up. I’m not sure it can be boiled down to ONE piece of software. Or one idea.
The nearest I think we get right now is the conversations that go on behind the scenes at Wikipedia when people post information, then debates its merits and come to a conclusion while allowing everyone to see behind the curtain.
Surely, as Krista suggests, you can simply look for supernodes and invite them into the fold, but as long as a curtain exists — and with business, there will always be a curtain — social media won’t gravitate around it. It will find the path of least resistance, and rail against the walls put up in other places.
That’s the nature of Read/Write.
