Social Media: It’s Not Just For Early Adopters

I know the label “social media” means many things to many people. I still like Fred Wilson’s definition of it the best, but I’m not here today writing about the way the label is used.

I see a lot of people who are focused on “social media” do and say a lot of things (some of which I think are completely insane!) with regards to social media. There are a wide range of services in the sphere from FriendFeed and Twitter to Facebook and blogging. With a whole lot of Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Delicious in between.

There’s another label that means different things to different people: mainstream. Relative to the products and services referenced above, only Facebook can make a case for the mainstream. I believe MySpace and Facebook are already completely mainstream for people under 25 or so. But relative to the number of people who use a web browser, both still have tremendous room for growth. But both did scale big and scaled big in a hurry. Twitter? Decidedly not mainstream by comparison.

Digg? No way it is mainstream! Big numbers, and a real business, for sure. But still not mainstream. And I’m not saying that based on the fact I’d never use Digg and think it’s a dopey way to get news. I don’t use MySpace, but think it’s pretty mainstream. My view of Digg is based on the numbers.

I’m pretty sure if I was a tech or social media blogger or attempting to be, I’d probably wind up chasing Stumble, Digg and even TechMeme traffic. The blog I work on, TVbytheNumbers, isn’t in that space so we’ve never worried about chasing traffic that way much. The whole reason I’m doing that blog with Bill Gorman is pretty simple. In April and May 2007 for reasons I won’t get into, I was trying to chase down some TV ratings data.

Sometime around then at one of my regular lunches with my friend Bill Gorman as a complete aside I tossed out: “I can’t believe there is actually a hole in the blogsphere that hasn’t been filled yet. TV ratings!”

Bill says to me something like, “Oh come ON, you’re insane – there has to be something like Box Office Mojo for TV!” I told him there wasn’t, he went home and did some Googling and a website was born.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of TV ratings data out there – it’s just scattered all over the place. Our goal was to get as much of it as possible in the same place. We figured this was a niche, but we figured that it’s probably easier to get traffic for a niche that hadn’t quite been filled than for a big topic (say tech) that has tons and tons and tons of competition. We’ve been up about 10.5 months now and that’s pretty much been validated. There is demand for the info, and even if it’s a niche, if it’s an unfilled niche to some degree it becomes a "if you build it they will come" deal.

I bring any of that up only because it’s the primary reason we don’t spend any time chasing traffic via social news services. We figure it’s better to spend that time putting content up on the site and hoping people wind up finding it in Google. That’s largely come to pass.

But the point I really wanted to make in this is that one form of social media happens all around us. And people get involved whether they’re sixteen or sixty. People with like interests quite naturally find each other on the web. Below are the top 10 traffic referrals to our site since we launched (9/18/07) through yesterday (7/30/08):

The first three items on the list make complete sense to me. If you’re anything like me, you’d never heard of number four before. JokersUpdate is a website/forum dedicated to fans of the show Big Brother. About half of the visits (around 5,000) listed above came over a day and a half period. Due to the writer’s strike CBS ran Big Brother, typically summer fare during the winter and spring. When it first launched I wrote something about how CBS should consider pulling it. Though to be honest as the strike impact continued, I changed my tune. But that’s another story.

The bigger story for us is that even though it wasn’t particularly good traffic (it’s actually still a bit better than what we get from Digg and Stumble) something we didn’t even know existed became our fourth largest referrer. Wikipedia was not a big surprise. We’d hoped that it would happen that people editing the articles about TV shows would link to our ratings data sometimes.

Moonlightline.com and the CBS discussion board for Jericho, like Jokersupdate.com, that’s just like-minded people coming together over something they enjoy. In the case of Jericho, once they actually rallied CBS to bring the show back. Moonlight was on the ratings bubble and unfortunately for its fans – like Jericho, the bubble ultimately burst.

The hard core fans of those shows have worked hard to try to bring the shows back. And whatever you may think about where their passions lie, they’ve done some good works too. In the case of Jericho, for instance, they did some charitable deeds for our young men and women in Iraq. In the case of Moonlight (a show where the central character was a vampire) they’ve fittingly done blood drives.

Since the label “social media” gets applied to so many things, can’t we also apply it to people coming together for a cause? And it doesn’t have to just be a cause like saving a show (and even doing some good deeds in the process). The cause can simply be to have some fun. Our tenth highest TV referrer was from TVBigshot.com. TVBigShot was a fantasy league style game for wannabe television moguls run by Television Without Pity which is run by Bravo/NBC Universal.

I’d argue with the way some of the digerati try to apply the label “social media” that things like fantasy league baseball, football, etc. are all forms of social media. Sure, they’re not new and shiny and I don’t have much of an issue with the digerati and social mediati not focusing on anything that’s mainstream. I’m just bringing up that there’s a whole boatload of really cool social media happening all around us. All the time. And it’s going to keep happening in the mainstream whether any of the digerati care or not.

It’s not just for early adopters.

Openness and Transparency is Nice, But...

Steven Hodson wrote about what happens when cool trumps openness and transparency. He essentially lashes out at buzzword loving "Web 2.0" and "social media" crowd singing the praises of openness and transparency and then mostly using MacBooks, a product according to Mr. Hodson from "one of the most closed and anti-community companies around."

Captialism is about many things, but openness and transparency only play in when it will net more money! Should Apple be completely open and transparent about how many iPhones will be available for purchase on Friday July, 11? Not if such transparency would cause short-term hit to the stock price it shouldn't.

For the last few years what Apple has been in a lot of ways, is a company that sells the best MP3 player that just happened to sell computers and other stuff. For a lot of reasons, including Apple’s impressive retail strategy, that’s actually helped Apple greatly in terms of selling more computers to home users, and I expect that will continue for years to come.



I’ve been a hardcore Windows guy since the late 1980s, and initially stayed away from Apple due to price and because new software wasn’t usually developed for Apple computers nearly as soon as it was for Windows-based PCs. That’s starting to level out and I’m pretty sure my next desktop purchase will be an iMac.



Apple’s products are impressively designed and built and perhaps even more importantly, very impressively marketed. Overall, at least right now, the notion that Apple is only for the cool kids is not bad for Apple (or its shareholders) at all.

Openness and transparency may have their virtues, but if you have a crappy product or business model no amount of openness and transparency on the Internet will make a real difference. When you get right down to it, great product design and great marketing trump Web 2.0 and social media in spades. If you’re a start-up company or someone like Gary Vaynerchuk, I think “social media” to build your brand makes a ton of sense.

But if you’re Apple, already having spent a gazillion dollars on product design and marketing, openness and transparency aren't you're priority. While Web 2.0 has been all the rage on the nets, not participating on Twitter or FriendFeed hasn’t hurt Apple’s topline revenue, earnings or stock price at all. The stock has risen from $57.56 on June 16, 2006 to $180.81 on June 11, 2008.

Social Media: What Do You Want To Share?

My friend Fred Wilson “shared” part of an e-mail I’d sent to him asking what his vision for Social Media was in a post on his blog. I’d written him largely because some of what I see tossed around as “social media” winds up frustrating me in some ways and so I was pretty sure I was missing out on the big picture. I was. Fred’s vision is simple enough to get on a t-shirt:

“Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet. That's it in a nutshell,” Fred Wilson in an AVC blog post.

Fred goes on to say that many will think he’s crazy, but I don’t. In fact, I can get behind that fairly enthusiastically. There’s not even a single buzzword in that vision. It got me thinking about how I share and the notion that I’m going about it all wrong sometimes. There is good sharing and bad sharing.

Good Sharing

Sending Fred an e-mail and getting him to think is good sharing. Sharing thoughts, ideas or anything that people might find interesting (pictures, music, news stories, video clips, whatever) is a good thing to do. I like making people think, but haven’t always adapted that process to a style that’s productive and constructive. I think the best shining example of this that I’ve seen lately, and via FriendFeed of someone who is a really good sharer is Thomas Hawk. Thomas has a lot to share and does so in a style that works well.

There’s a quote that goes something like “Make people think they’re thinking and they’ll love you, make them really think and they’ll want to kill you.” Which leads me to:

Bad Sharing

Here’s an example of bad sharing, while I was definitely sharing my off the top of the head thinking, and it did inspire Louis Gray to think, it did not do so in a way that would probably inspire a lot of people to want to share with me. Louis thought about it so much that he wound up writing a whole post about it. While I’m happy to have inspired him to think, there are some potential downsides. Let’s say I was being considered for a job where Louis worked and they asked him for his opinion. His opinion might be, “He makes me think, but one of the things he makes me think is that I don’t want to work with him.”

Bad sharing. Bad branding. Bad.

It’s Good To Have Goals

Complacency can be a cruel bitch. The first time I ever connected to the online world, now over 25 years ago, I could see the possibilities. Computing power sucked. Bandwidth sucked (300bps!). The experience sucked with text/command line interfaces. But even through the crappy experience you could see the possibilities. Most of my expectations were met or exceeded. I’ve had good broadband for 5 years now. Computing power is much better. Things aren’t perfect but they work pretty well. I’d argue that I’m complacent for the best of all possible reasons: I’m pretty happy about how things have worked out.

Still, I don’t feel that my complacency is anything to be defended. The truth is computers still don’t work well enough, still aren’t easy enough to use, still aren’t cheap enough and broadband isn’t available or cheap enough either. Add that all up and you have a lot of obstacles to achieving Fred’s simple, but grand vision.

The progress over the last 25 years has been massive. But it’s no excuse for resting on laurels or being complacent. Fred has set goals around what he’d like to see happen. It’s a good thing to do and I need to spend some time thinking about how I’d like to see it evolve before I spend any more time critiquing how it is actually evolving.

It’s good to have goals in general as my friend Ted Leonsis has pointed out to me either directly or indirectly. One goal is to figure out what it is I want to share an how best to share it.

There Are Some Really Great People Out There

Social media may have a long way to go, but there are a lot of great people already “sharing” on the internet. My advice is to find them, enjoy them, and learn from them.

After largely “disconnecting” from the connected world from 2000-2007, I reengaged last year. Two of the people I’ve reestablished communications with are Fred and Ted.

I met Ted and Fred the same way I met Bill Gorman, a long-time friend and my partner in crime with TVbytheNumbers. I wrote a newsletter, they read it and would sometimes write to tell how wrong I was.

I’ve had the great fortune of learning from all three of them (and more). While I regularly lunch with Bill my communications with Ted and Fred have been almost exclusively online. And almost all of what I have learned from them I have learned as a result of their blogs.

Considering the lives they lead and just how busy they are, I find it both amazing and inspirational how they go about sharing their thinking. I know the online world is a huge passion for both, but they’ve made “sharing” a high priority and that is by design, not happenstance. There’s not a lick of complacency in either of them, and it makes me both very proud of them and very ashamed of myself at the same time.

One thing I’m sure of, I’m going to make it a high priority to share more and share better.