I Work In Social Media. Here Are 9 Things On My Mind.

They’re all subject to change tomorrow — just like everything in social media.

1

All media is now social.

2

The challenge of working in social media used to be convincing marketers and traditional content producers that social media mattered.

Now, social is all they care about. But few of them actually understand how it works.

That’s made the job more difficult now than it was then.

Turns out it’s easier to convince people something’s a good idea than it is to convince them their idea is a bad one.

3

The days of brands having a presence on every “major” social platform are numbered.

We’re reaching a tipping point where there are too many platforms for that to remain feasible. There will come a time — soon — where brands and individuals will have to choose which platforms they care most about and invest their efforts there.

There is such a thing as too much opportunity.

4

Social media is a powerful force to instigate political and cultural change. But its influence on our upcoming Presidential campaign cycle won’t be a good one.

5

Huge businesses will be built on the libraries of archival social media content we’ve collectively created in recent years. Timehop is a start, but I have a feeling bigger and better ways to leverage that content are still to come.

6

The rate at which social platforms now adopt each other’s innovations and incorporate versions of them into their own platforms is creating an environment where every platform starts to feel the same.

Will the Meerkat/Periscope battle really be decided by features? Is anything preventing YouTube/Facebook from creating essentially the same product?

The success or failure of social platforms will soon no longer be feature-based.

7

It’s not about a platform’s number of users, it’s about who those users are.

Wall Street can obsess with user growth if it wants, but ultimately social platforms will succeed or fail based on who is using their product and who wants to reach those people.

8

The ability of social platforms to market themselves has improved more than their ability to create innovative products over the past couple years.

Is Snapchat’s success about a great product or is it about convincing the world it’s the next big thing?

9

The promise of digital media to marketers was (in part) that it could provide more transparent metrics to advertisers.

These digital platforms would finally allow them to see exactly what they would get for their ad dollars compared to the murky waters of TV commercials and print circulations.

But that’s not really happening.

Facebook has its own definition of video views, Snapchat doesn’t even reveal follower counts, Netflix doesn’t reveal how many people watch its shows, and for the most part social platforms have a “trust us” approach to sharing their audience size.

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