WTF is ‘Social Media’ Anyway?
The future of media is ‘social’ and it’s time to deal with it by moving on.
by Ian Schafer (with special guest Topher Burns)
The term “social media” has outgrown its usefulness. It was helpful as a transitional term, a phrase that helped us describe destinations, apps, and behaviors that we’d never seen before. But it has taken root in advertising, becoming enshrined in job titles and even defining entire agencies.
At Deep Focus, we’re looking beyond the “social” label, and engaging instead with the true drivers of the future of media.
Original artwork by Matthew Mehi.
“Social” still describes something concrete, but it isn’t really a form of media. It’s not a product, it’s a behavior. “Social” is how a person discovers, engages with, and shares content — from or with someone else. For two of advertisers’ most important generations (Y & Z), the default media is “social”. What this means is that the platforms enabling this behavior are our highest priority media channels, and shape how we think about marketing.
While “social” carries with it a connotation of fuzzy metrics, engagement-first activations, and small organic scale, platforms are now some of the biggest media channels on the planet. Platforms deliver scale, targeted reach, and efficiency. Platforms are the dominant form of media and are a big part of the future of the media business; a future where distribution of content is scarce, and time spent on websites is scarcer. That’s why we’re comfortable de-emphasizing the term “social”, and building our creative business around platforms.
Platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat have eclipsed most traditional publishers as the power players in today’s media landscape. More modern publishers (BuzzFeed, Mic, Popsugar, Vice) realize that the secret to their success lies not in time spent on their properties but the frequency of visits to their properties and the reach of their content, and how well they can monetize both. In fact, some of today’s biggest media companies aren’t the biggest because they own content (many don’t), but because they do the best job at distribution. As opposed to publishers like Condé Nast, or portals/networks like Yahoo who held top spots since the dawn of the digital age, platforms are best-suited to the current environment because they shift to consumer demands and are optimized for consumer context. They are tailored to the qualities of every consumer, each and every visit. Everybody’s Facebook feed or Twitter timeline is different and uniquely theirs.
When people talk about “content marketing” or “native advertising”, the “platformification” of media is the reason, and adoption of more social media and migration to mobile devices is the root cause. Content marketing has to exist because the platformification of modern media has behaviorally changed the people that we try to reach every day. They have become the sum of their personal and popular cultures more than ever before, as platforms become the places they not only express themselves, but discover their content. Thanks to platforms, people are increasingly able to live beyond the reach of advertising, with those very platforms limiting the amount of advertising people actually see, especially on mobile devices. That puts the pressure on us to evolve beyond just placing ads within people’s social media feeds.
Younger, more “media-enlightened” consumers continually value positive experiences with content over being sold to, yet our research indicates that they are OK if that includes the tradeoff of brand involvement. It is our collective responsibility to produce content that appeals to consumers’ interests first, and then draws an undeniable connection back to the brand. The art is in producing content that people will want to identify themselves by, while at the same time improving their perception (and other relevant metrics) of the brand. The science is now in using platforms to distribute that content efficiently, and in measuring its attribution back to building the brand (and even sales, where and when possible).
In the early stages of social media, each platform had its own way of amplifying engagements with content. Inevitably, as engagement scales, platforms curate (and therefore artificially limit) the resulting “earned media” from those engagements (some platforms more than others). This has the net effect of devaluing efforts spent on engaging on platforms for earned media’s sake. But not in all cases. We believe it is still critical to engage with audiences in social media, but it’s not the only way.
As platforms come and inevitably go, they will certainly follow successful models that preceded them. Paid discovery of interest-related content will continue to be a major way that advertisers will reach consumers over the next several years. Mobile devices also represent a significant part of the future for content discover and, as such, brands will win when they successfully strike a balance between quality content, effective distribution, and excellent user experience.
So if you’re a brand today, what are platforms good for? We believe there are three areas of note: distribution, data, and interaction. The opportunities for distribution on platforms are tremendous. Whether through publishing or paid promotion, we can get more content to more of the right people more efficiently than ever before. And the data created by those people enable us to learn more about how they engage with brands, and more importantly, each other. And finally, people still turn to social platforms when they need help from companies or each other. It’s critical that all three of these areas are paid attention to by brands and their agencies. We consistently make these an integral part of our marketing strategy, because they are integral parts of consumers’ lives.
That means that we will be placing an increasingly higher value on the quality of creative on these platforms, on the data we analyze, and on helping to structure our partner organizations to better engage with audiences in ways that build (and track) strong customer lifetime value.
As media behavior evolves, we no longer see social media as a simple construct that a simple offering can be built around. Rather, it’s become part of consumers’ natural behavior. What we do see, more tangibly, is that platforms are a gateway and springboard for the way people consume and discover content. How brands situate themselves within that content is something that’s been a core competency within Deep Focus for the last 13 years, and will continue to evolve along with technology, platforms, and consumers themselves.
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