Tagged: content

There are a lot of Cs in social media

What is it with social media and Cs.  Conversation, Collaboration, Community, Content, Context, Collective, Connection, Cooperation, Crowd-sourced.   Also Consultant – lots of them.  The prevailing climate (Climate) of opinion however seems to suggest that there should only ever be four Cs in social media (see this article by Michael Brenner and the links within it).

I, however, always prefer the number three.  Two is never enough and four is always too much.  So I say there are three Cs in social media and this is how I arrive at this conclusion.

There are actually four spaces in social media (broken the rule already):

  1. the space where people are agreeing with you
  2. the space where people are disagreeing with you
  3. the space where people are asking the question to which you are the answer
  4. the space where people are prepared to help you do it (better)

The way you Do social media is to first of all identify these four spaces.  You then have to address them.

Spaces 1 and 2 you address through participation in Conversation.

Space 3 you address by producing Content (the role of content in social media being almost exclusively about answering specific questions, remembering, as I am always fond of saying, that an ad is an answer to a question that no-one ever asked)

Space 4 you address through the creation of a Community where you can get these people together.

That’s it.  There is no-more to social media than these four spaces and these three Cs.

Actually, that is not quite true.  You need a Story.  A story allows you work out what you need to say, in your conversations, in your content and in your community.  Four spaces, three Cs and a story.  I can almost feel a movie coming on.

Rupert Murdoch: “nowhere else to go”

Rupert Murdoch’s last great battle, getting people to pay for on-line content, has been much discussed.  The general view is that he will not win.  As I have previously said, the issue is not that people won’t pay for content, it is that they won’t pay for distribution, when distribution is free.  Here is some more evidence that he is heading for a fall.

Speaking recently to the National  Press Club at the George Washington University he asserted that people will pay for content when they “have nowhere else to go” i.e. when everyone else is also charging for content.   However, this is never going to happen: not because other content providers won’t collude with Murdoch and also erect paywalls around their content, but because people already have somewhere else to go and this place is not a newspaper or other form of institutionalised news provider.  This is why newspapers are dying, not because newspapers’ content is available free in the digital space.   The institution of a newspaper is being replaced by the process of information sharing using the tools of social media.

The people who have nowhere else to go are newspaper proprietors – not consumers.