In the old world quality was defined by mass appeal. In the new world quality is defined by individual relevance – not the production values or any other ‘qualities’ we associate with convention 30 second, ad type content. Thus you are right to say that P&Gs are competing with individuals, but the rules of the game have been chnaged to favour the individuals. The budgets and skills that a P&G has no longer give them an advantage. Or as I like to say “In Twitter, all tweets are equal”.

If I read you correctly, does this then mean that with the decline of the Gutenberg ‘system’, the former passive audience (viewers of soaps, readers of mainstream newspapers, listeners of national radio networks, etc) become not only active contributors, since they now have access to the means of creation and distribution, but also become subject, and this is the key quality, to the dictates of the market they are creating where everyone has a choice?

Put differently, do the same exacting standards that users demand of institutions in the new conditions, e.g. engaging story-value from P&G, also apply non-institutions as well?

Second, if the issue is one of vast choices of 30-second slots competing for attention, a question of quantity and not quality, does that still not leave institutions with the budgets and skills to mass produce stories at a massive advantage?

There has got to be something qualitatively distinct between the 30-second slot that an old school chum shoots of his wedding and posts on YouTube or a transient hash tag of interest on Twitter and what P&G could ever put up on any social network for even its most ‘loved’ brands.

You’ve really opened up an intriguing area for speculation and debate as you always do.

I hope you will explore the subject further and other contributors join you in the intelligent discourse.

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Despite the fact that publication space is no longer a scarce resource, the basic rules of relevance still apply. Standing on a soap-box and shouting at the world doesn’t cost money, but people will only stop and listen to you if what you have to say is interesting or relevant.

What ‘the audience’ requires is very specific information – not necessarily very lengthy information. They don’t want to read the whole book – they just want the one section or paragraph that meets their need at a particular time. This is the challenge for organisations – producing the range of content that people will find useful and will therefore feel inclined to circulate within their own networks.

It is why I say that organisations have to think about building a content warehouse – i.e. a vast store of information – but a store made up of thousands of individual bits. I also call this gravitational ‘always on’ content – i.e. information that draws people to it over a long period of time – rather than fireworks content – i.e. a spectacular burst that lots of people see but lasts only for an instant.

Essentially – in the old world you only had one 30 second slot. Now you have thousands of 30 second slots – not one thirty-thousand second slot.

Reading this, particularly your references to compression to the 30-second spot that brands excel at, I am intrigued by the contradictions we observe in that regard with social media.

How come that now that media is free, people do not use up the liberty to exhaust space? Take for instance, at the beginning of your post, you offer the excuse ‘Warning – this post is 3,000 words, you may want to get a coffee’.

One would think that in the new found land, users would be rushing to publish stories and narratives of 10,000 words and 3 hour-long clips on video sharing sites.

But that has not been the case. Twitter confounds that. At least, till now. Posts on Facebook support this trend of bite-sized updates as against extensive commentary or reporting. Curiously, even the most popular blogs written by ‘professional’ bloggers tend to keep it short. Similarly, the most popular videos on YouTube and Vimeo tend to be short shoots.

How do we square this? Is it a bit like freed slaves who refuse to leave the slave-owner’s farm after they are set free because they know no other life? Or could it be a deliberate preference for farm-life because they know what life in the city is and they want no part of it?

I would like to know your thoughts.

Please keep up your probing reviews of trends in social media.