The Economist explores the world of social networking in a special issue, everything from Twitter to Yammer.

Many have argued that content aggregation is the way to go for the internet.  Some have gone so far as to claim “aggregate, or be aggregated”.  So far, no one’s disputing the inevitability of such a future.  Under the radar, WSJ owns All Things Digital, and NTY runs Blogrunner.  Both are experimenting with those ventures to hopefully work out some kind of business model.

This is done, despite venom spouted in the background that claim those aggregators tapeworms or parasite, siphoning off the hard labour of old media whose only mistake is playing by the rules.  Aggregators in the meantime, have taken off.

Digg started the trend off, by promoting a system of voter-sourced news that is real time, streaming, and democratic. A slew came on board soon after.  Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn, and many topic and industry-specific Diggs have sprung up to varying degrees of success.  In the last few years, Twitter – broadcasted in 140 characters or less, is the service that keeps on giving.  It is now becoming the tool people turn to break news, do status updates, and my favourite use: alternative social bookmarking service.

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The news media is now scrambling to find a feasible business plan that could replace its print readers, and to stop the cannibalization of its content, indexed and marketed by Google, without any monetary compensation.  Media moguls have blasted everything from Google, bloggers, to those aggregators for egregious use of their content.  The proponents have told those old guards to bugger off. Those old men retorted by threatening to cut access.

This carries about as little weight as the paper it’s printed on. People that used to make a decent living from writing and reporting, have of course, been squeezed between a rock and a hard place.  No one likes to talk to themselves. So the goal of any self-respecting reporter is to get exposure, and engage with readers.  Blogging has taken much of the prestige of reporting away. Nowadays, anyone who has the patience to sit down and write may win a sizeable audience in due course.

Reporters write to spread ideas, to inform, to shock, to educate, and to communicate.  To threaten to barricade their writings behind a paid wall does little to solve the problem, as most will sooner have their breadline cut off, than their reputation and influence diminished, to which the accessibility of their work is based upon.  The world of blogging has opened a floodgate to give voice to academics and those previously toiling behind closed doors, whose impact has been so profound that the CSM has bravely argued that without special skills, reporters are not worth the high pay that many had taken for granted.

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Having grown up in the digital age, I take the spread of the information and all that is intangible online – from downloads of every possible kind, to the free and somewhat socialist dissemination of information on the web, for granted.  For the same reason that anti-piracy campaigns have largely failed to resonate with my generation and ones that follow mine, to even suggest the idea of paying for online activities, no matter how crucial it might be (i.e. Facebook), is blasphemy. So the subscription model is pretty much out, unless you pedal the kind of information that people would be willing to pay for its timeliness and exclusivity (i.e. real time financial news).

That is, of course, where ingenuity comes in. Since the start of web 2.0, various parties have been exploring and experimenting with feasibilities of various business models.  The most popular and successful ones: the freemium models exercised by a lucky few, and the ad-supported model by the rest.

For most newspapers, the freemium model was first attempted, before most relented and opened the flood gate.  The thing with information is that its relevance and value is inversely proportional to its time on the market, and directly proportional to its reach.  The more time lapses, the less valuable the information becomes.  And the less people that reach it, the less relevance it holds.  Thus for any serious disseminator of information, it makes no sense to fence people off from the work of your talented writers.  Alternatively, they figured the advertising dollars they will get for eyeballs will eventually make up for the loss in subscription revenue.  After all, newspapers have always gotten bybased on the triangular relationship amongst the publishers, its readers, and the advertisers.

As economy soured, this heavily advertising reliant model got strenuously tested, and many will not survive. Some also doubted the long-term sustainability of a business model whose survival depends on (sometimes) highly intrusive messages that readers disdain. A new generation of advertisers have found limited results from interrupting people’s online presence. Many are now spending their dollars to establish their own online presence, instead of depending on media publications to disseminate its messages.

Now back to the idea of content aggregation and how they are supposed to save media. The idea is simple: nobody, not even the NYT, WSJ, or Washington Post, can come up with close to 5% of what one individual might want to consume in any given day.  Our taste of media must be tailored, targeted, and fitting with our individual taste and preferences.  Thus the age of RSS feeds and personalizable start pages emerged.  Everything from Netvines to Streamy to Skygrid have emerged to provide streaming, personalized information.

But is this a fair system?  And more importantly, is this a sustainable system? Aggregators work with the assumption that there will always be those that will produce the content available for aggregation – an assumption not altogether unrealistic in the short run. But should content providers become financially frustrated and either get out of the business of news reporting or join the aggregation party in the not so far off future, the value chain may become ever so constrained. So will we be left with the scenario of bare bone newswire services, an army of amateur and professional bloggers relying on advertising money for their livelihood, and endowments and grants for the more labour and dollar intensive investigative reports?

If and when aggregators find a feasible path to profitability, then surely, the content providers that collectively contribute to the success of such services will demand a piece of the action.  A way to fairly and equitably distribute the gains will hopefully emerge by then.

picture source: myvictoriansecret

A couple of days ago, a fellow blogger commented on this rather unfortunate Fortune article on his blog.  It is interesting for several reasons.

First, the ideas are cookie-cutter and stale.  Us Gen Yers had been told (to a certain extent) that we were on the cusp of a great demographic shift, where baby boomers’ impending departure would wreak havoc on corporate health.  True, some of us were led to believe that our contribution would be valued at a premium, which would in turn translate into lots of choices and result in us hopping through the corporate environment at break-neck speed.  In reality? Highly unlikely.  The smart ones among us always knew that good jobs are competitive, and supply almost always outstrip demand, especially at the bottom rung. But the media kept up the propaganda – to what end, I don’t know.  Every once in a while, articles like this appear.

Second, the timing is totally off.  Because of economic realities, many boomers simply can’t afford to retire.  More and more Gen Yers find themselves in a much more competitive environment than they were led to believe.  Now everybody is learning to make do with less and to compromise.  Exactly who is out pandering to those misunderstood geniuses, I’m not sure.

The somewhat hilarious prescriptions thrown around by the Fortune writer, and the kick my blogger friend got out of it, reminds me of a book I heard about recently.  In this book, the authors address the various social and consumerist constructions of the Gen Y generation.  I took some notes, here’s a broad overview of the ideas.

School: the obsession with feeling good at all cost

According to the book, the ME culture evolved over several decades, but found its decisive start within the school system.  The baby boomer generation struck out, rejected authority and tried to find its own path.  In their children, they instituted and obsessed over instilling self-esteem.  Subsequently, various forms of formal, or informal self-esteem programs were introduced in school.  They generally aim to make children feel good about themselves at all times and at all cost, with messages like: you are special, you are unique, you are fine just the way you are.

This relentless focus on the self led to some friction as children of those baby-boomers moved through the school system.  In one instance, red pen were deemed too harsh a colour to mark mistakes, so lavender was used instead.  Participation trophies in sports were introduced.

Over time, various institutions have had to deal with this cohort and adjust to its various demands.  In universities, some professors are now faced with complaints when handing out marks: some children and their parents simply would not accept bad ones. In this case, education is viewed as a business transaction, and entitlement rears its ugly head: students are customers of a product, and universities are there to provide it.  Therefore, they feel entitled to walk away with a degree, and a degree with hounours at that.

The road to hell is often paved with good intentions.  Child psychologists now recognize that instead of instilling self-confidence and self-esteem in children, this generational focus on feeling good has created quite the problematic outcome.  The languages and tools used throughout the school system has created an environment where competition is eliminated or downplayed, criticisms are removed when deemed too harsh, children are protected from failures, and as a rule, any kind of output – meaningful or not, is lavished with praise.  In hindsight, this created us: a generation hooked on constant validation and affirmation, perhaps with an unrealistic sense of our own strengths and shortcomings.

The extent to whether the above analysis is in fact accurate, is questionable.  The teachers and lecturers I encountered during my school years were for the most part, fair, constructive, and honest.  But I have noticed the emergence in a brand of bland, neutral and non-critical teachers into the classroom. With various changes taking place in the education system, and more teachers seeing themselves not as teachers but facilitators, what can we expect from the next generation?

The market feeds the beast: unique, customized, and controlled by you

Marketing shifted its focus when it comes to psychological selling.  In the past, the advertising world used to sell based on aspirations.   The marketing message then was: you are not good enough unless you buy our products.  Since nobody will ever be “good enough”, one is left to buy in perpetuity.

That message lost its lustre a while ago.  The message that sells now is something quite different.  Marketers tap into our sense of entailment , our vanity, our need to feel good, and our need for “self-expression” and self-validation through the idea of: you are important, you are unique, you are great the way you are. Now all you need is a product that we have to express your uniqueness.

If we think of some of the most successful products and services to emerge in the past decade, what comes to mind? Facebook, Youtube, IPod, Starbucks.  What do they have in common?  They all capture our need to exert and broadcast our presence, our importance, and our uniqueness to the world.

The trend that pander to the idea of self-expression and self-importance developed when the current Gen Yers were still in their tweens – the term has only been in existence for under two decades.  It was back then marketers first tasted the success of marketing to kids that had their own brand of shampoo.  Since then, that market had been segmented and targeted as one that has the power to make or break products.  I know a little about that.  I still remember the Tomagochi craze and the hand I had played in that hype with my baby alien.

Since then, our generation had not been without this constant bombardment of “uniqueness” marketing.  Marketers are also astute to introduce a sense of “control” back to the consumers: you know better than us, so tell us how and what you want.  Starbucks sells to that – customized coffee experience; burger and sandwich places want to sell you “your” burger or sandwich; cultish spiritual books sell on that – The Secret is to conform the world to your divine force; new condos targeting young urban yuppies – customize your living space by checking a few boxes.

Of course, the true irony of the situation is: the more we buy into the message of customization, the more we are essentially the same.  No matter what colour of IPod we choose, how obscure our coffee order is, or what kind of boxes we tick off when it comes to picking our condo tile or flooring colours, we are buying into the same message of uniqueness.

Arguably one of the most consistently powerful and seductive marketing pitch of our time is one that centres around the idea of: you deserve it.  The L’Oreal commercial and Oprah alike appeal to their audiences this way.  There’s nothing wrong with leading the best life that we can have.  But after years of the same self-congratulatory refrain, we have internalized the idea that luxury is for the masses and not only the rich.  In doing so, we have become accustomed to living the life we want, or “deserve”, rather than the life we can afford.  That sense of entitlement has us hooked on swiping those credit cards.  In one way or another, those self-affirmation and feel-good principles seeded during our school years, carefully nurtured by teachers, parents and marketers alike, came to fruition.

Now, the workplace

The problem gets a little more interesting when my generation enters the workforce.  The old guards are not used to tell us how valuable we are, or hold our hands for constant validation or feedback, or have the patience to listen to our unidirectional broadcast.

All the arguments given above is predicated on the idea that we are indeed a cohort, and this kind of attitude is prevalent in our generation.  In many cases, family influences can trump socialization.  Even so, I have to say that whether I like it or not, my generation probably embodies more Me-ness than generations past.  Whether these are attributable to our age and brashness, or some wider social forces, I cannot be certain.

But the ego-massaging activities the marketing community readily offers is beginning to seem more cynical than clever to me.  If they are indeed fostering a generation that is both insecure and vain, unable to cope with failure and assess ourselves critically and realistically, then perhaps we are better off without them.

With the collapse of Wall Street and Detroit, self-promotion is the only industry America has left. Owen Thomas [Gawker]

There are no more passionate or enterprising individuals in the world than Americans. No other people in the world have embraced the idea of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement with same level of enthusiasm, shamelessness, and let’s face it, success that even closely rivals the Americans. Over the centuries, a distinctly love/loathe relationship has formed between the public and its tireless marketers.

Ultimately, marketing is a push activity. Unless you make extraordinary products like iPod, or Maserati, or limited edition Nike shoes. In that case, you push in indiscernible ways to create demand, and then sit back and manage the pull. Or you could just make a kickass product and sell it. That’s how it used to be a couple of hundred years ago. Then marketers realized there’s money to be made by hype and mass-production. Then soon enough, everyone was doing it, because not doing it was like surrendering before the battle even starts. Advertising became the bugle that signaled the legitimacy of a product, and we accepted it as so.

After decades of marketing, spearheaded by the Madison Avenue machine and sponsored by its corporate clients, the symbiotic engine began to sputter. Consumers got tired of having products pushed to them by conglomerates. The previous marketing mix management and product line expansion gimmicks started to see cracks.

Then the information revolution descended upon us. Soon enough, everyone had a voice, and everyone started talking to everyone else. Corporations realized that they were no longer in charge of their brand image, and it became increasingly difficult to hide behind PR campaigns. Many disastrous marketing campaigns and ineffective “customer outreach” programs later, businesses looked to young, hip, and mostly self-educated and self-branded social media gurus for help. Soon enough, those guys sprang up everywhere, advising dinosaurous businesses on the proper management of their “social media presence”.

When the now deified Web 2.0 first caught everyone’s imagination, it was touted as the tool that would revolutionize the way we communicate. It was supposed to be democratic, horizontal, transparent, and authentic. In other words: everything that the corporate-advertising-complex wasn’t. Gradually, businesses caught on this myth, and started blogging, facebooking and twittering – a domain of activities reserved mainly for greasy college students only a few years back.

Most businesses do not understand social media networking. Actually, most of us don’t. But we do it anyway, because that’s the way to stay current. Remember when Facebook first surfaced and sparked debates as to whether someone that pulled your hair at summer camp twenty years ago really counted as a “friend”? Well, that argument is hardly relevant anymore. Now we don’t blink twice before adding our mothers to our profiles, because that still makes way more sense than “following” hundreds or thousands of strangers on Twitter.

I shouldn’t complain: I got a job off of Twitter. But from time to time, I’m still befuddled as to how, or if I’m even close to uncovering its supposedly boundless potential. Most of the time, I feel like I’m twittering into a vacuum: a vacuum full of people with blogs, businesses, skills, and agendas to promote. I’m guilty as charged.

Twittering may make a lot of sense for business such as Zappos, Dell, and Comcast as an extension of their existing customer service platform, and businesses such as Amazon has nurtured and leveraged its community for years. But for every American Express success story, we see many more awkward deployment of hipness by old men in suits. We are embarrassed for them, not unlike the way we cover our eyes at the atrocious sights of rhythm-challenged middle-aged white guys getting jiggy with it at Christmas parties.

But is there really anything stopping those businesses from get their acts together to bring in young consultants, and buy their ways into some street cred? I think it is inevitable. Just as the advertising industry has transformed itself by shifting its expertise from print to TV advertising, and from TV advertising into more insidious product placement and guerilla marketing, they will find a way to leverage and benefit from the power of the crowd too.

It is hard not to be cynical and resigned to the ultimate triumph of marketers, when so much reverence is reserved for marketing gurus. Because even as they preach authenticity or tribes or innovation or communication, they are preaching marketing, and the kind of marketing and branding that stays two steps ahead of consumers, and ultimate make them do what the marketers would want them to do. And knowing these are the very message that businesses pay dearly for, is there really any doubt that the social media platform will become another well-fed, well-massaged, and well-deployed tentacle in the overall marketing plan?

Ultimately, putting the right products into the right hands with minimum pushy interference and annoyance is a sign of good customer service, and is something to be applauded. But the process of doing so is little different than the prevailing marketing paradigm, as long as the goal is to push, as most businesses are doing, versus building communication channels and transparency. More businesses are catching on, and this is a good sign. But too many are still at once confused and mesmerized by the possibilities of hyped-up social media marketing.

On a smaller scale, this is no more apparent than the expansion of the blogosphere, where branding is one of the most popular topics. As blogging crossed over (that tipping point already passed long ago) from part-time hobbies to legitimate careers, we see a consolidation and commoditization of media personalities as plausible brands, even those that exist solely through online niche. Managing your online persona/brand is now dealt as seriously with as any other business concerns.

In the past, many that became disillusioned with the corporate machine and machinations leave to pursue their own passion or work, hoping to get away from the excessive salesmanship of having to toot your horns at all times. Now they find little respite. What new media has effectively done is to make branding and marketing tools readily available to individuals and small businesses. Just like when advertising first started, non-participation in this brave new world of new media is not an option. Unwittingly, the fervent marketers in us steered “social” tools away from their originally conceived purposes. Instead, their primary purpose nowadays is to amplify our already unhealthy obsession with marketing and branding.

Where do you see social media networking and marketing headed in the near future? As both consumers and marketers, how do you think we can successfully utilize existing tools to improve transparency and authenticity?

picture source: ~SpringlighT