Social Media - An

Inconvenient Truth?
By Kieran O’Hea

Here are some interesting facts about Facebook. The Facebook page on Facebook.com has 7,300,000 fans. The
search term “I hate Facebook” yields 1,000,000 unique results on Google. This less-than-scientific comparison
means that for every 7 Facebook fans there is 1 dissenter. I am somewhere in the middle. Why do I tend
towards dissention? I have 39 friends on Facebook and I know all of them personally. It’s about quality rather
than quantity for me.

However each of my friends has more than 200 friends on average (yes, I actually counted them). Recently I
took a break from publishing my usual approval-seeking content (such as photos, cool comments, “look at me”
etc) and published a simple message, asking all my friends how they were. “How are you?” it said, the same as
if I had met them in the street or spoken to them on the phone. Only one of my Facebook friends replied.

This made me think about our motivation for using social media and where it’s all going. You just have to look
at Twitter to see it’s exclusively modelled around the “look at me” posting. We can all be wise after the event
but I wrote the following in 1999, in a paper called Content Driving Competitiveness:

“We must recognise the social impetus that is building. Digital publishing gives every citizen the
capability not only to consume but also to produce content. As hardware prices fall and marketing
efforts accelerate, people are exposed to technology more and more and from a younger and younger
age. With this exposure comes a technical maturity and a critical eye for good content. Consumers are
becoming more sophisticated and less passive and their influence on the commercial fate of new
content services will be crucial.”

We didn’t call it social networking at the time but that’s effectively what we were talking about. We assumed
that sometime in the future, consumer technology would make the wide scale adoption of social media a
reality. It was the scale of the take up and not the nature of the content that would make it successful. And so
it has come to pass.

The expression “People Are Content” came to me around the same time. While I sought inspiration for a
conference presentation from old white papers and framework documents, my children who were aged five
and seven at the time, played behind me in my office. After twenty minutes bereft of ideas I swivelled my chair
around to find my office wall festooned with blue-tacked daisy chains made from stapled Post-It notes and
bright paper rainbows coloured with highlight pens. As a father I was enchanted but as a professional I was
ashamed. I couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Like many of my colleagues, I had articulated the future of
content based on technology and jargon, not on creativity.

It had hit me immediately: PEOPLE are content, not technology and jargon. In 1999, those of us lucky enough
to be involved in shaping European content strategy weren’t encouraged to think that way. The web had only
gained a foothold in Europe because social publishing was suppressed vigorously by the European publishing
industry, fearing the emergence of an unregulated Internet.

This behaviour was later mirrored, and continues to be mirrored today, by the music industry. So fifteen years
ago it was predicted that consumers would see unlimited creative potential in the Internet, but it was also
predicted that this interest would cause unmanageable disruption to the conventional publishing model.

Social networking may be a new term but it is not a new concept. So why wasn’t Facebook invented ten years
earlier? Who knows, I’m musing here, not looking for answers. Maybe I’ll take that up another time. What
really interests me is where Facebook is now and why I have only 39 friends. I don’t feel inadequate or that my
social skills are limited. Whoever heard of an Irishman with limited social skills?

I have 39 friends because they are mainly people I got to know while helping to shape content strategy back in
the nineties. Social media provided an easy way to stay in touch with this disparate band of articulate thought
leaders. So now that Facebook and Twitter have finally unleashed the social media channels that were denied
to us for so long, what have we been empowered to publish?

Well I haven’t written any white papers lately but I have become adept at publishing my holiday snaps, to the
extent that they are online faster than I would have got the prints from Boots in the old days. I haven’t spent
much time brainstorming online strategy trends with one of my former project partners but I know she bought
new red shoes the other day.

And then there is my ex boss at the European Commission, a profound man who inspired a lot of my thinking. I
haven’t seen him recently but I now know what he looks like in his swimming trunks, somersaulting in his
children’s paddling pool.

So how much of social media is essentially vanity publishing? To what extent does it play up community
building while dumbing down the Internet? Is the quality of the content on social networking websites good
enough to sustain them in the long term? Will the real value of social networks eventually be defined by the
quality of their content? Can we learn to generate content that contributes to the value and not just the
volume of social networks? What will the next manifestation of social media websites look like?
If we were trying to save the Internet instead of the planet, we would be campaigning for a balance between
how much content we consume and how much we create. And how much value society gets out of what we
create. Looking at most of the content on Facebook, social networking currently doesn’t measure up on this
value scale.

A lot of it is nothing more than digital pollution. Sure there is a lot of content on social networks and all of it is
put there by the consumer. So yes social networking empowers the consumer to publish. There is apparently
more content on YouTube right now than on the entire web when I wrote my conference paper in 1999.

What I predicted in that paper has come true, but only to a certain extent. I also said that the influence of the
consumer on the commercial fate of new content services would be crucial. Has this been achieved? Yes and
no. The initial value model was site popularity, which led to Facebook being valued at more than Ford.

However as long as social networks continue to consist mainly of whimsical content, the second and possibly
more sustainable value model, based on the value of the content itself, will not mature. In this case social
media will eventually eat itself as millions of users, who made it such a success in the first place, will proceed
to create so much trivial content as to make it effectively worthless in the long run.

It’s ironic how me and the other content gurus I worked with ten years ago have, by adopting social
networking so enthusiastically, become primary culprits in clogging up the digital atmosphere. To take my
“Save the Planet” analogy a step further, we need to start becoming conscious of our online footprint.

Using social media is a bit like a visit to a theme park. Once you’ve paid in, you may as well use all the
attractions. The future of social media is to become more discerning about what we use and what we publish.
This requires an evolutionary move from Social Media to Considerate Media. Then maybe the next wave of
social networking sites will be modelled on “How are you?” rather than “Look at me”.

©Kieran O’Hea 2009