Most media captains are tightly focused on their business, meaning that they understandably don’t pay much attention to seemingly obscure stuff outside their silo — for example, the rampaging online social networking among online youth.
But some remember that a once-unknown IT business called Google came from nowhere to feast on their erstwhile monopoly of audience time and advertising tribute.
Those media folk who do lift their noses from the old-world industrial grindstone may have registered that the recent opening-up of Facebook to search engines effectively strengthens the power of that particular business to win more of the advertising pie. With more than 300 000 South African middle-class folk, mainly tomorrow’s yuppies, spending mega-time at this United States-based website, it must now be clear the threat is global — and the ad battle is now enjoined in the virtual backyard.
Does this mean that South African media companies should quit the costly creation of content altogether and simply set up cheap networking space to appeal to the ad-sexy future middle class?
This temptation may be there for South African media businesses — but it wouldn’t work:
- First, it’s too late. It would be impossible to woo South African online youth away from the international community of Facebook, where they are well into recording their histories and building scores of links to pals.
- Second, running social networking as a business is unfamiliar turf. Old-school media people are unskilled in monitoring and moderating, let alone open to rivals playing on one’s own platform.
- Third, becoming simply social networks would waste the central asset that media companies do in fact have: professional — and local — content capacity. This strength is distinct from the YouTubes, Flickrs and Facebooks, which can never compete with local, professional content.
On the other hand, old media can’t pretend that the explosion of user interactivity and social communication is insignificant. Their quandary is: you should not, and cannot, become them, and you also can’t ignore them.
Here’s the solution: integrate a degree of social networking with your classical content.
Old media meant informing people unidirectionally in order to build up an audience to sell on to advertisers. The new game is bi-directional communication and publishing some user-generated contributions.
But more radically, the new basis for a media business is in consciously using its professional content to spark, and host, conversation among various interest groups. That means offering an environment where people not only talk ”back” to the media, but more importantly, also talk to each other in communities of interest — and where they talk about the very content carried in the media (much of it local).
In brief, it’s about enabling users to link to, mess with and mash up your content.
That’s different to Facebook-style social networking that is driven entirely according to user-driven agendas. In contrast, the new media model will still set the talk topics, although no longer in an exclusionary, unidirectional and monologic manner.
A fine example is the United Kingdom’s Daily Telegraph, which provides readers with home pages they can customise to their content interests, and blog capabilities to comment correspondingly. And, as everyone should know, the capability for common tag terms that cut across the silos can help build relationships between different users.
A social network incorporation ought not only to happen on South African news websites. Smart publishers and broadcasters should also re-jig their traditional output to emulate the ethos. And like the M&G, News24 and the Times, they should develop a link-back publishing presence on the big social network sites themselves.
Initially, some advertisers may be wary of the cacophony, if not anarchy, within a socially networked editorial environment. But inevitably they must fish where the serious fish go frolic.
South Africa’s next generation middle class may keep their contacts on Facebook for years to come. The challenge is to get some of them to integrate their engagement there with discussion of local content that is generated by local media.
The bigger opportunity is to get them also to develop additional post-student, online networks within a media environment that offers them community exchange possibilities.
All this is nothing less than a mega-transformation of the identity of the media industry as we know it.