Content, a context for communication

Snapchat’s recent announcement that it will be offering its users content provided by a range of traditional media was the inspiration for my regular Friday column this week in Expansión, Spain’s leading financial daily. Content and context (pdf) looks at the role of the two main aspects of the social networks: communication between users (instant messaging, the wall, etc); and the opportunities the they offer to facilitate communication through such diverse means as birthday reminders or access to news and other content.

As a social network matures and evolves, the role of context becomes more important. MySpace, for example, evolved rapidly in this sense, going from being a personal communication tool to a platform for sharing audiovisual content, which led it to make the change too quickly from a horizontal all purpose site to a markedly vertical structure, failing to maintain its popularity. Orkut died largely because it had no strategy as to how to take the necessary steps to offer content as a source of communicative contexts.

So far, the best example of successfully creating a context for communication through content is Facebook, first with its applications (tiresome, admittedly, but they increased our use time and provided communication opportunities with friends that we might otherwise only have talked to once a year), and then through video and news. Today, Facebook is increasingly about getting us to consume content rather than encouraging us to communicate with friends and family.

But Snapchat’s idea is much more interesting: content specially thought out for sharing on the network, designed to appeal to young users who have largely stopped using the traditional media. Which prompts the question as to whether this initiative were to change the media map, in the same way that content is designed to be consumed on television, print, or radio, we began to see an increase in content specifically designed to be consumed on a particular social network?

My content, created by me, is designed to be consumed on this page, by readers who enter enriquedans.com, and yet it is increasingly read on more than 7,000 emails sent at 7 am the day after I write them, as well as through feeds, or sites such as Facebook and Google+, and where they often take on a life of their own, generating threads of all kinds... and we are talking about a pure personal page, a one man’s job!! Understanding and learning from this progressive redefinition of the media will be the key to success for a growing number of content creators.

Below, the text of the article in full :

Content and context

Snapchat, the social network setting trends among young people in the United States and that prompted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to rethink his ideas about privacy, has just announced an interesting initiative: it has cut a deal to distribute the content of outfits like CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central, Spotify, and others.

The company introduced advertising in October after rejecting a three billion dollar offer from Facebook. The advertising format is discreet, and aimed at appealing to young people, while the advertisements themselves are not segmented, while advertisers who want to reach Snapchat’s youthful market fragment will have to pay higher than the average.

The social networks are divided into two parts: communication between users, and content. A social network can survive for a time simply by offering users a way to communicate with each other: we enter the site to see what our friends are up to, to wish them happy birthday, or to see if they have uploaded any new photos. But over time, the social networks tend to shift their focus to providing content, which works as a way of generating contexts for communication.

These days, most people use Facebook for looking at content — from the omnipresent kitten videos to news, music, etc — and then sharing it with others, rather than talking to friends and family, as they once did. Content offers the user a context to build communication, an opportunity to comment or share things with others, and thus it becomes an inseparable part of the social network’s value proposal, becoming in the process a communication channel.

Soon, more and more content will be generated specifically for these channels. We may be about to see the media map redrawn before our very eyes.

(En español, aquí)