Our team headed east last month to spend a week in New York and see our founders, investors, VC partners and friends. Maveron invests all over the country in the best consumer brands and we’ve been excited this year to invest in founders and companies based in Boston, Toronto, Austin, San Francisco, LA, and Seattle.
While in NYC, we hosted a happy hour to catch up with our investors, founders and collaborators, then followed it up the next morning with a private press breakfast. We gathered over 20 founders and journalists to have a conversation around the unbundling of Facebook and future of verticalized social media. Here are a few interesting takeaways that came out of that conversation:
Awareness surrounding privacy
The increase in awareness around data collection and targeting has lead to distrust by users and desire for more transparency and other platform options.
The shift from perfection to imperfection
Audiences can detect the ultra-curated, highly produced posts and instead, are craving authenticity from brands and influencers. The standout brands and celebrities in the past year have embraced more intimate, unstaged content.
Separation of friends and influencers
The increase in connectivity but decrease in intimacy can lead to unfulfilling relationships and loneliness. This paired with the idea of Dunbar’s number lead one participant to make a separate account to follow the influencers, celebrities, brands and businesses she’s interested in, rather than have them appear in the feed alongside her friends.
Potential for companies to optimize for one use case
The need for big social media companies to keep your attention leads to adding features right and left; the Swiss Army knife approach. However, the experience of each individual use case may be less than optimal and there’s still real potential for a company focusing and executing well on a single use case or action to deliver a better experience and capture that market share.
Here at Maveorn, we will continue to discuss the development of social tech and the future of our relationships and engagement with each other online. If you’re working on a company in this space, we’d love to connect with you.
