Social Media: How big can it get?
Wow!! Is it big enough yet?
This representation of it all is called “The Conversation Prism” — an infographic of our social media space first created in 2008 by Brian Solis.
“It’s an ongoing study in digital ethnography that tracks dominant and promising social networks and organizes them by how they’re used in everyday life.” ~ Brian Solis, digital analyst, anthropologist, futurist
It never hurts to be reminded of what something is meant to be, or what it started out to be before we changed it.
Words are nuggets of history.
“Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking , social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.” (from WhatIs.com)
Then business saw the power that could be found in all the sharing, community, interaction and collaboration, and along came …
~ data collecting from social media websites, analyzing it, and then making business decision based on the findings (aka social media analytics)
~increasing exposure and reach (aka social media marketing)
~ gaining followers and then using the growing numbers to market and network your brand (aka customer relationship marketing)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role that social media plays in our lives — in my life.
I love the first definition, but the weight of the business stuff can really taint it all. I know I should just turn a blind eye to it and write, but who among us can really completely ignore those stats?
Do I want it? And, even if I don’t, can I really walk away from it? I guess I could, but then what? If I want to write, I don’t think I have a choice anymore … unless I crawl into a hovel somewhere to write my magnum opus, and then emerge and hope that someone will publish it. True, it’s been done before, but …
Back to the prism. Once my eyes adjust to color-coded information overload, the complexity and implication of it all fascinates me.
Then I shake my head; it’s a monster so big I can’t even look at it all at once — my eyeballs have to keep going left, right, up and down.
Some other random thoughts and observations …
~ If we don’t want to do Facebook or Twitter, there is a world of alternative choices out there. First, decide what fits your needs and goals. Then do the research and find one or two websites that will help you meet those needs and goals.
~ It’s interesting how Brian Solis chose to link the center — ”YOU” — to common business functions: HR, Brand, Community, Service, Development, Marketing, Sales, Communications. Are we all little businesses or does this just depict how much business is a part of our online social lives?
~ There is a massive amount of ways to get social on the Internet and there it all is, laid out in pretty colors. But, not all methods are created equal … and it calls into question what “getting social” online really means. It’s never just about having a conversation.
~ I always think of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ as the standard social media platforms. They may have different qualities, but they are all “social networks”. Not so! Facebook and Google+ are “social networks”, but Twitter is a “social stream”, and Pinterest is “social curation”. Makes sense, when you think about it.
~ Check out what Solis categorizes as “Brand”: Facebook, Google+, blogging (including WordPress, Medium, SquareSpace, etc.). Blogging is branding — as writers, can we ever escape it? (I digress …)
~ While some things start out as being something else — like blogging, which was initially a way for writers to journal their thoughts online and share with a community of like-minded souls — they get pulled in by the gravitational force of social media, which seems to swallow everything whole.
~ Solis has an interesting category: “Quantified Self”. It looks like there’s enough social media sites for weight loss and fitness that they earned their very own category on the wheel. Hmm …
~ The “Influence” category confuses me a little. I mean, isn’t that what most social media sites offer, in one form or another? Get more followers=Gain more influence. Admittedly, I’m not familiar with the sites he groups there. Could there be super-power influencer websites we don’t know about? What if they offer influence like we’ve never seen before?
~ How did he figure out the best way to categorize everything? How did he even learn about half of this stuff?! What might he be missing?
My last thought, which results from staring at the prism until my vision grows blurry …
Something is going to come along to either replace all of it, blow it all up, or become the grand-master of it all. Change is inevitable in human culture and history — we just can’t always predict when, what or how, never mind the who and the why.
When we start organizing stuff like this — seeing the big picture — it may not be too long. The fact that it’s super-gigantic and unwieldy could also be a sign.
And then what?
