Methods for Social Media Outlet Inventory
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- Definitions of the Big Five Social Media Outlets
- Social networking outlets
- Microblogging outlets
- Social bookmarking outlets
- Video sharing outlets
- Photo sharing outlets
- A Method for Limiting the Big Five Outlets to the Best Five Options
Methods for Social Media Outlet InventoryThe number of social media outlets expands and contracts daily and in order to trace how the study participants utilize social media, we first need to limit the possibilities for observation. However, limiting the possibilities arbitrarily doesn´t make sense and so I created a method to discern which social media outlets are most influential. Presumably new enterprises would be best served to engage with these outlets since they are most influential. Additionally, the term ‘social media’ represents a broad range of concerns and so we also need to limit its definition and implementations. Specifically for this study, I follow the lead of Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger when they wrote that ‘markets are conversations’ in their groundbreaking work, The Cluetrain Manifesto. Specifically, social media recreates (remdiates) naturally occurring, face-to-face human conversation while simultaneously amplifying the possibilities for representing ideas or beliefs. At its core, social media centers on engagement, participation and collective construction of knowledge just as good conversations do. Therefore, to identify ‘what counts’ as social media, we begin with this broad understanding that social media is electronic media designed to create authentic participation, collaboration, idea sharing and meaning construction. Of course, a general, popular consensus exists about counts as social media and these categories definitely matter since the community itself has determined ‘what counts’ as social media outlets. In other words, in the spirit of conversation, the community of users itself must be engaged in defining what outlets can be considered ‘social media.’ This is fortunate because it makes the job of determining what to study easier: the community itself has already determined that these outlets are considered ‘social media’:
Although blogs fall within the realm of social media, this initial inventory doesn´t consider them (although the later study will consider domain-specific blogs). The reason is quite simple: the power of blogs resides in its particular connection to a specific community. People read blogs about what interests them and these community-specific blogs enable people to participate in dialogues about things important to them. Unfortunately the most popular blogs, as determined by readership, sponsorship, and links target very general audiences. For example, according to Technorati (itself the most influential blog about blogging), the Huffington Post is the most popular blog on the Web. The Huffington Post contains conversations on everything from serious international political and financial issues to the banal and absurd like jokes about bathroom signage. Certainly having a story appear in the Huffington Post with an associated conversation should be a goal for every organization. However, unless a general reader is specifically searching for news on a particular topic, the broad coverage of Huffington only meets the needs of those interested in broad coverage. The power of blogs, by comparison, is narrow-casting, not broad distribution like Huffington and so the most popular blogs really are not about engagement, participation, and construction of a community of ideas. Really, most of the very popular blogs remediate the ‘push’ mentality of network news and large newspapers like the New York Times, and so technically wouldn´t fall within my more narrow definition of social media. Smaller, domain-specific blogs, however, are more likely to be genuinely participatory and will be considered in analysis of specific cases. Definitions of the Big Five Social Media OutletsCertainly, the different outlets of social media bleed into one another. For example, Facebook allows video and photo sharing as well as microblogging. However, each of the five outlets listed here do have specific core purposes that allow us to differentiate among them. The distinctions below follow the lead of Tamar Weinberg´s useful classifications in The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web. Social networking outletsSocial networking sites exist for people to represent themselves to others and to connect with others who have similar interests. These sites are the most versatile of social media because they can include all other outlets, like video and photos, as a person constructs their online persona. How individuals construct their personas, then, enables them to connect with others and build networks of people who share some component of their identity (real or imagined). (Weinberg 150). Microblogging outletsBorn from the world of instant messaging and text messages, microblogs evolved as a means for one person to share ‘what they are doing’ with others in very short messages, usually 200 characters or less. While the original point was to share actions, microblogging has evolved into a powerful force of immediate opinion sharing and collaboration, where people not only share ‘what they are doing’ but genuinely dialogue with one another on topics (Weinberg 126). Social bookmarking outletsOne perennial challenge on the World Wide Web is remembering where you found an interesting website. Social bookmarking sites allow you to record where you found something interesting and share it with your friends. These sites allow users ‘to tag’ stories, store the link and share the link with the community and so the most popular websites and stories then form a genuinely community-based news or information portal. In comparison to a blog like Huffington Post, that is, the users themselves determine the content by ‘voting’ for a particular website by tagging it or bookmarking it. The more tags a story has, the more popular it becomes and the more popular it becomes, the more likely that story will appear on the main site of the particular outlet. Weinberg distinguishes between social bookmarking and social news sites, but I´ve combined them since both are about tagging stories that people feel are important creating a ´wisdom of the crowd´(Weinberg 197; 225) Video sharing outletsAs technological improvements have enabled people to produce videos easily, the desire to share them has likewise increased. People will create a short video of just about anything—their kids, their dog, their trip to Barcelona with their kids and their dog—and then because that experience was important or funny or memorable to the creator, they want to share it with others. Videos, like photos, express who we think we are and open an opportunity for sharing with others. These websites allow us to load brief snapshots of our experiences as they occurred in time (Weinberg 267). Photo sharing outletsFrom a technical media standpoint, photos and videos differ quite significantly. Video captures motion in action and photos capture things in a more framed way. That does not mean videos aren´t staged, of course, but videos do show something ‘as it is happening’ rather than a still life. In much the same way, though, as video sharing sites, photo sharing sites enable us to represent ourselves to others and share our experiences without describing them in words. What´s better, a photo of a unique building or my verbal description? Perhaps the ideal is both verbal and visual, which is why these sites allow for extensive captioning. These sites also allow people to ‘tag’ others or places, so I can see all of the photos where I appear on all my friends sites. Again, the point is sharing the experience, or perhaps re-living a shared experience from the past (Wienberg 268). Classifications always present problems. Indeed, Facebook is all of these things rolled into one—which might explain why it is so wildly popular (at least for now). Indeed, all of these outlets have one primary purpose—sharing ourselves with others in a way that initiates and sustains ongoing conversations. But these outlets also differ, mostly because they limit the media available. Whereas Facebook (or MySpace) aggregates content types AND encourages participants to generate new content AND enables extensive dialogue, these other outlets mostly focus on new content of a particular type (e.g. 140 text characters or video) while enabling dialogue. In the end, the distinctions are somewhate slippery and intuitive, but Facebook certainly is not Twitter is not Digg is not YouTube is not Flickr. If they were all the same, I wouldn´t have accounts in each one…. A Method for Limiting the Big Five Outlets to the Best Five OptionsAssuming these distinctions are relatively sound, what then are the most significant players in each of these categories? I ask the question both for pragmatic reasons both for the study and for entrepreneurs. Specifically for the study, limiting the sources of observations enables more thorough and equal treatment across the cases. We can read each of the cases in these outlets and can see how they have succeeded—or not—in participating in these media. Second, for entrepreneurs, knowing where to spend precious resources assumes great importance. The outlets uncovered according to these methods present a snapshot of the Best Five outlets at the time of the study (2010-2011). First, some general concepts that applied to all the outlets:
Assuming these general criteria, I performed the following procedures for each of the categories:
So, while this method is perhaps not perfect, it is, nonetheless transparent and repeatable with some sense of logic. The main players are not precisely a surprise, but this inventory does provide a baseline for the outlets that have the most influence in the social media space. In short, entrepreneurs should engage with some, or all of these outlets in all of the categories to fully participate in the social media revolution. Further, these outlets will be the ones used to track and follow the social media performance of the enterprises in this study. Download 20.2 Kb. Share with your friends:
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