Chapter 2:
What Makes Social Media Tick -
Seven Secrets of Social Media

I’ve used the term “social media” as a handle for the types of publishing that everyday people are using to be influential publishers in Content Nation. What really is social media and how does it work? Let’s take a look at what makes social media “tick” and what has really changed when people use today’s technologies to change the dynamics of how people create and find value through influential publishing.

Social Media Defined: Anything that Helps Individuals to Publish Influentially

Oftentimes the terminology used to define how individuals are using today’s publishing tools to influence other people can be quite confusing. People refer to Web 2.0, user-generated content, social networking and other terms to try to encompass the movement towards people becoming influential publishers on the Web and beyond. All of these terms and others have their place in describing useful tools for people to publish to the world.   I find, though, that the term “social media” serves as a good umbrella for encompassing all of the available technologies that will not be limited to a specific application of publishing or a particular era of publishing. As discussed earlier, social media has been with us from the first human utterances and will be with us long after the Internet has been supplanted by other forms of global communications that empower individuals to be influential publishers.

So for the purposes of Content Nation let me offer this definition of social media: Any highly scalable and accessible communications technology or technique that enables any individual to influence groups of other individuals easily.

You might find this to be a pretty simple definition. Well, it is in the sense that it describes a pretty broad range of activities and technologies. Because it is a fairly broad definition, though, it covers a lot of possible methods of communicating via publishing. The need for such a broad definition becomes more apparent when you look at some of the other terms that are used commonly to describe various aspects of social media publishing tools and techniques:

•    The term “Web 2.0” is used typically to describe technologies such as wikis, weblogs and other collaborative tools. These are certainly important tools in the history of social media that have lead to its becoming influential on a global scale through Content Nation. But there were earlier publishing technologies that also had a widespread influence based on them being scalable and accessible to fairly typical people. There are also technologies such as those found in telephone networks that may have very little to do with the Web but which provide very similar benefits to people wanting to influence others. Web 2.0 is important in that it has accelerated the growth of social media’s power as never before, but too limiting to encompass everything that Content Nation can do to generate social media.

•    The term “user-generated content” is used oftentimes to refer to a lot of the same activities as referred to by “social media.” But the term “user” implies a relationship with a computer and a role that is generally not as authoritative as someone who controls some other source of content like professionally produced news – as if they were some just some sort of secondary input channel for central computer processing. Social media is about people influencing other people in a social situation through technology: oftentimes some sort of computer is there to help that situation result in one person influencing a group of others, but social media is about what people do to influence other people at least as much as the technology that they use to do those things.

•    The term “social networking” is certainly a part of what is produced as “social media,” but it does not cover every form of social media. As more and more publishing products offer functions that enable people to keep in touch with one another and have conversations, I think that we’ll see the term “social networking” being used to address a commonly available feature in a number of different types of technologies.

By contrast I think that the suggested definition for social media fits well as an overarching term from a number of angles:

•    Social media uses highly scalable and accessible technologies. The scale and access may vary with the technology and audiences being addressed through social media, but the need for it to be scalable to whatever size audience a person needs to reach and the ease of accessing it remain constant. Thomas Paine’s pamphlets took advantage of affordable printing that was able to print thousands of copies of his pamphlet and get them out into the hands of other people. It was pretty easy to get it published and it scaled well for his then-huge audience of about a million people. Today’s Web 2.0 technologies are even more scalable – you can have a publishing service that drives an audience of a handful of people or hundreds of millions off of the same kind of publishing platform – and they are accessible, meaning that anyone can use these technologies to start their publishing very easily and affordably, oftentimes for free. Certainly other technologies will emerge that will extend the scalability and accessibility of social media even further.

•    Social media enables individual people to communicate with groups of other individuals. Social media is a peer-to-peer medium, as some people might say, meaning that the audience for social media publications tends to relate to one another as equals for the purposes of communicating and sharing information. Authorities on a topic may communicate with people who are less authoritative, but in general the authority of someone in social media is not based on their control of the communications technology or some particular position that they hold in an organization but rather on the basis of what they share being authoritative in the eyes of the peer audience.

These communications tend to be one-to-many, meaning that a person creates something that can be shared with many other people, or many-to-many, meaning that any number of people can share information with any other number of people simultaneously. The Web’s technology facilitates this, but it’s an attribute that is available even when Web technologies are not present. Social media is more about a circle of equals does with technology.

•    Social media enables influence. Because it’s delivered on highly scalable technology the exact scope of social media’s influence can be unpredictable. Like many people using social media Ghyslain’s friends who posted his “Star Wars Kid” on a file sharing service discovered that the scalability of social media can lead something that was meant for a limited audience all of a sudden influences a worldwide audience. The same can be true of any type of socially conveyed content: some stories told around a campfire in the Ice Age probably stayed around that campfire and went no further, limiting their influence, just like some weblog entries may not be read that widely or attract that many comments. But some of those Ice Age stories got shared at other campfires as well; over time, some of those shared stories became powerful legends and myths that would be handed down from generation to generation.

Social Media Secret #1: It’s all about the ability of people to scale their influence independently.

Demystifying Today’s Social Media Tools: Accelerating Access, Influence and Audience

Although the definition of what comprises social media is short and simple, the publishing tools that comprise today’s social media are diverse and continuing to expand at a dizzying rate. It is in some ways not unlike what happened with our Ice Age ancestors tens of thousands of years ago as the last major period of continent-covered glaciers faded away: faced with new kinds of ways to hunt and gather food in a climate changed by the receding ices, they went from having a handful of different types of stone tools to dozens of different kinds of tools, objects and designs. Today’s explosion of social media publishing tools may not last as stone axes, statues and hand tools have survived the ages but they may yet prove to be as influential.

The wide array of publishing tools used to produce social media can lead to some confusion as to what types of publishing can be considered as a part of social media. While the boundaries can be grey at times there is a solid core of types of publishing that line up with our definition of social media. The following is a list of types of publishing that can be considered social media, the goals of each type of publishing and the social aspects of each type of publishing:

•    Personal publishing – Weblogs, commonly referred to as blogs, are the most prevalent Web-based personal publishing tools today. While weblog publishing tools can enable a wide number of people to publish items to a common weblog, typically each item on that weblog is authored by a single person. Earlier electronic publishing tools such as email enable people to distribute newsletters or to copy people on messages that may not have started out as content meant to influence wide groups of people – a capability that still plays a very powerful role in personal publishing. Messaging tools such Twitter also enable personal messages to be distributed in a highly scalable form, enabling any number of people to tune into very short text messages from mobile devices or PCs.

Publishing goal: Enable one person or several individuals to tell their own story to many people.
Social aspects: Personal publishing accelerates the ability of individuals to communicate their personal point of view to others, oftentimes building up their perceived value to others based on their knowledge, their insight or their personality. 

•    Collaborative publishing – Wikis are the most common form of Web-based collaborative publishing, which enables groups of people to collaborate on common documents and to build complete Web sites over time. Wikis enables changes to a page from any contributor to be displayed to their audience immediately, with corrections being applied as needed. Wikis and similar tools can be used for any publishing purpose, including developing news. While the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is perhaps best known for its millions of articles on various long-lived topics, its current events and news pages help people to edit today’s news and headlines very effectively also. Wikipedia has also demonstrated that collaborative publishing can enable teams of authors to correct mistakes rapidly and update long-standing articles to reflect current events almost as quickly as they occur. The implications for building timely, well-edited sources of knowledge using collaborative publishing technologies is enormous.

Publishing goal: Enable multiple people to collaborate on common documents for use by themselves or for both themselves or for many other people.
Social aspects: Discussions and comments relating to common articles, building collaborative skills, usually membership-driven or private communities of authors who may share their publications with the public or a broader private community.

•    Social Network publishing – Social network publishing enables people to build and use relationships with other people – social networks – using tools that let people share information about their personal and professional needs and interests. Social network publishing is one of the fastest growing kinds of social media today, encompassing a wide array of publishing technologies. Most social network publishing services include a few key features: a self-edited personal profile, which includes facts and categories that relate to a person and other personalized content, the ability to create networks of friends and associates through designating people as members of your personal circle of contacts and the ability to communicate with personal contacts easily. Common examples of today’s social network publishing include MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Orkut and Hi5.

Publishing goal: Enable people to find other people with affinities and to share them with those people and with others through publishing.
Social aspects: Linking to profiles, sharing content and building knowledge through discussion topics and providing references to experts.

•    Feedback and Discussions – Many publishing services enable people to provide various forms of published feedback and discussions to help other people get additional insight to a topic or a product. Oftentimes these services are embedded as features in Web sites that are generally not oriented towards social media. A key example of this would be a Web site such as Amazon.com, which provides the ability for its members to write reviews and to provide ratings of books and other products that they sell. Sometimes reviews and ratings such as these may be collected initially on one Web site and licensed for other Web sites to embed in their own Web pages. So although reviews and ratings are seen oftentimes in the context of other content they are packaged sometimes as a source of social media for others to use to enhance their own Web content. Discussion publishing services appear in many different forms, including the ability to provide comments on weblog entries and online news articles, newsgroups and user groups, forums and online bulletin boards.

Publishing goal: To share information and opinions on a specific topic or item that can be exposed easily to others looking for insights and opinions, some of whom may choose to share their own insights and opinions.
Social aspects: Provide an opportunity to share insights and opinions with others, sometimes resulting in others engaging in online “conversations,” other times helping them to gain knowledge through reviewing the knowledge and experiences of peers.

•    Aggregation and filtering – Oftentimes social media enables the assembly of content aggregated from their own sources and other sources that are of interest to an individual or group. Aggregation is the process of assembling collections of content that come from a wide variety of sources. Categories and “tags” (personally defined topic words) give social media content organization that makes it easier for people to filter out what is of most interest to people in key topic areas. Social bookmarking services such as Digg and del.icio.us that enable people to build and share lists of links to Web pages and photo and video sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr are examples of popular aggregation and filtering services in social media.

Publishing goal: Enable people to aggregate collections of content from various sources that can be shared with others publicly or privately.
Social aspects: Build an appreciation of a person’s ability to provide valuable insights through choosing other people’s content.

•    Widgets, Mashups – Programs known as “widgets” that package content from other sources or generate new content automatically can be added easily by anyone to their Web pages in many social media products, enabling them to aggregate content from other sources for themselves and for others. Sometimes more technology-oriented people use applications programming interfaces (APIs) from suppliers such as Google and Yahoo to create new programs known as “mashups” that aggregate both social media content and content from other sources. Sometimes mashups are whole Web sites unto themselves, other times they may be delivered as widgets that can be embedded in other Web site content. While the content in a widget or mashup may not always be from individual publishers their use by individuals to aggregate content that’s of interest them or to contribute content to them extends their ability to create useful context for content through their own publishing efforts.

Publishing goal: To add value to social media through providing additional content that complements and enhances one’s own content.
Social aspects: Enables social media to provide a context for other content that enhances its value and in doing to gives people more reasons to engage them on a personal level.

•    Personal Markets and Marketing – One of the most important aspects of social media is that it enables people with something of value to reach other people who need something of value to them easily and affordably. In the instance of weblogs, the value provided is the content itself. In other instances, people are looking not just for content but to get goods and services from other people. Services like eBay and Craigslist.org enable individuals to market goods and services to other people through their Web sites without having to rely on established forms of media to moderate the process of marketing or executing a deal for what’s being offered. Almost anyone can set up a page on eBay and sell anything that they have to offer to anyone looking for those things– and many people do. Craigslist is a simpler service than eBay, focusing primarily on free classified ad listings, but it is a broader service in that it enables people to advertise jobs, events and interests in dating and other social contact.

Publishing goal: To enable anyone to discover people who have interest in something that they have to offer and to create a market for those things.
Social aspects: Markets can be created directly between any person making an offer and willing to accept an offer, instead of having to rely on intermediaries to match supplies and demand.

While the above categories of social media publishing tools represent oftentimes many distinct types of social media publishing in and of themselves, many social media services combine these capabilities to create unique services. It’s very common to find comments as a standard part of weblogs, for example, even though they’re not required and not always used frequently by people reading a particular weblog entry. The ContentNation.com Web site uses technology from Near-Time, Inc. which combines the capabilities of wikis, weblogs, widgets, aggregation and social network publishing in a single platform. It’s not so important to categorize each and every social media publishing service as one type or another as it is to appreciate that the willingness of people to participate in social media tends to make a broad array of features attractive and useful to them. To give you an idea of how these categories of tools match up with some of the more well-known social media services, the following table illustrates how any number of social media services may incorporate tools from any number of social media publishing categories:

Whatever the combination of capabilities on whatever platform, all social media publishing tools have one common goal: to increase access, influence and audience for the individuals using them. It may be through their own publications, through publications that integrate their content into others, or through publications developed collaboratively, but the end result of social media is that more people have more influence over more other people as easily as possible.

Social Media Secret #2: Technology matters in social media, but not as much as understanding what people are looking for to influence others and to be influenced by them.

Collaboration and Competition: Building Social Order in Social Media

Looking at all of these social media tools and the egalitarian content that they help to create you’d think that we were creating a new utopian society through it, as if all human conflicts will melt away and people will line up to discuss ideas and develop new content with their own concerns and objectives put to the side. Nothing could be further from the truth: unfortunately, social media does not mean that we’re headed back to the garden of Eden. Instead, as we look back at our Ice Age ancestors, we have to acknowledge that wars between tribes were fairly common and conflict a way of life that balanced and in some ways facilitated the need for collaboration. Social media does not eliminate human nature, it only gives it new ways to express human nature that may have an impact on how we can survive and thrive.

While one of the more important aspects of social media is its ability to enable people to collaborate at a peer level far more effectively, collaboration is not the same thing as putting all differences aside. When you think of the ultimate goal of social media – to have influence over others – it’s no surprise that managing conflict and conflicting interests is something that is an important part of its success. Social media enables ideas to compete with one another more effectively in venues that offer more open expression to more people than ever before. Just like the coffee houses and taverns in which Thomas Paine’s pamphlets were discussed were oftentimes lively places filled with heated discussions, conflict and confrontation is expected is expected in social media and is in fact encouraged oftentimes.

Look into the discussion section of many Wikipedia articles and you’ll see very active divisions and oftentimes daily efforts by people of opposing views to shape the collaborative content on controversial topics. There are also ongoing struggles between people who would like to have their content be the most popular content, either to further their own personal objectives or because they are trying to manipulate social media to further the economic or political goals of others. Sometimes language can be abusive as insults are traded back in comment threads. Social media may offer many benefits from lacking hierarchy and encouraging collaboration and networking, but it also exposes that left to their own devices people still need ways to enforce order and fairness.

Yet this very need for order underscores one of the key advantages of social media: order can come from people who collaborate to enforce mutually accepted standards of behavior. Many successful social media Web sites have both implied and explicit rules of behavior that are enforced by both the community as a whole and select members of that community. In Wikipedia, for example, there are volunteers who police new and changed articles and determine when there has been content added that is inaccurate, misleading or otherwise not meeting the expressed standards for publishing on Wikipedia. They act as editors in some respects and as “spam” filterers in others, but also as collaborators to help the content of an article to improve. Many social media publishing tools that enable comments also enable people to cast a positive or negative vote for comments that people have posted.

The opinions of peers are perhaps the most powerful control for managing conflict and encouraging collaboration and quality in social media. However, sometimes there needs to be a more explicit hand provided by the owners of a Web site to eliminate content that is libelous or abusive. How can this be done while still ensuring a sense of a community “owning” its own democratic authority? The answer seems to be that there needs to be an explicit commitment to people involved in a social media Web site to ethical standards.

On the Newsvine social media Web site, for example, there is a “Code of Honor,” five key points that outline acceptable content and acceptable behavior expressed through that content. People who do not abide by these standards are subject to having their content and membership in Newsvine moderated or eliminated. Newsvine also enables articles and comments to be flagged as abusive or inaccurate, controls that may trigger automatic action by the Web site’s software – collapsing the display of comments, for example, so that they can only be read by clicking on a link instead of viewing them along with other comments automatically – or the flagging may trigger action and comments by Newsvine staff monitoring the Web site.

By contrast weblogs and other personal publishing tools are much more like traditional media outlets in that each author seems to have their own standards for what is considered acceptable and unacceptable content. But the popularity of such content generally grows only when it is exposed to the comments of others, both within the comments section of a typical weblog and the more open and diverse comments that might be found when a weblog entry is discussed in another social media Web site.

Corporations, public relations specialists and political campaigns are also eager to try to exert influence as if they were individuals when in fact they are representing the interests of others on a professional basis. This is sometimes called “astroturfing,” a person pretending to be a “grass roots” person in social media just speaking for themselves. Social media communities adopt a number of strategies to deal with astroturfing, some of which we’ll discuss later.

So although anyone is free to say what they’d like in social media if people want influence they need to be able to gain the respect of a community, regardless of what tools they are using to express themselves. In social media we may start out like a lone voice in the desert, but successful social media rarely stays that way.

Social Media Secret #3: Social media is not about the law of the jungle but the law of the campfire: values matter and having people who are willing to enforce values matters.

Content in Context: Understanding the Value of Social Media

You’ve heard a lot about this thing called “content” in this book so far. What really is content, anyway? In a sense we know what content in publishing is about in a fairly intuitive way. We know that when we go to a store for food or other items that the content of a product is what we use inside its packaging. So in publishing content is “the stuff,” the thing that we use in a publication as opposed to what is used to bring it to us. Some people like to think of content as information delivered to us in the way that water is delivered to us in pipes as opposed to the plumbing of technology that delivers it to us.

But while there is certainly a distinction in content between what we use and the technology that delivers it there is another key factor that is required for something to be content: people. If there’s not a market for a product inside a package, it’s just something inside a package that will stay there forever or be thrown out eventually. In a similar way content requires an audience that values content. No audience, no content. An old philosophical brain teaser goes, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?” So it is with content: its value comes from having people who are able to use it.

An example that illustrates this point can be found in a recent breakthrough by scientists in deciphering the first known sound recording. The first sound recording was not made by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison but in fact by a Frenchman named Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1860, seventeen years before the debut of Edison’s famous invention. Scott developed a device called a phonautogram that was able to etch patterns on a piece of paper in response to sounds. Unfortunately he did not have any technology to transform these etchings into sounds, so his recordings were not seen but not heard.

Audio historian David Giovannoni examines Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograms at the French Academy of Sciences (AP photo - story )

Then in 2008 audio historian David Giovannoni worked with scientists at California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to devise a method to translate Scott de Martinville’s etchings into audible sounds. For over 140 years Scott’s etchings were merely patterns on pieces of paper: it wasn’t until the scientists in Berkeley came up with technology to make those etchings valuable in a new way that they became audible content.  From this standpoint though Scott’s invention was important ain interesting Thomas Edison is still recognized rightfully as the inventor of the first system that could both record and reproduce sounds – the first audio recordings with an audience.

So content is by its nature defined by the presence of social values, something that requires people to define and validate its value. The value that people find in content is therefore contextual – that is, its value depends on both the audience and the means by which they experience something. As Scott’s etchings sat in storage for decades they were not content with context at all, just etched paper in a container. Looking at the etchings may have allowed someone to appreciate them as designs on a piece of paper – a visual context, perhaps even an artistic context if they were to be displayed in a museum. It was not until the etchings were translated into sound that they had the potential to have an audible context as content.

With these examples in mind I would suggest that in the arena of publishing and media content is information and experiences in contexts that may provide value to audiences. Is something a scribble on a piece paper, a work of art or an audio recording? It could be all three, depending on the context in which it can provide value to an audience. Then again, someone’s piece of art could be another person’s piece of junk, or vice versa. Content may provide value to an audience – but it may not be the value that the producer of the content expected. Certainly the kids who put Ghyslain’s “Star Wars Kid” video online could not have expected the worldwide value that it attained.

This definition of content is crucial to understanding the value of social media and why it tends to perplex many people, especially people who produce and sell traditional forms of media and information. For these people content is all about selling the “water” of content inside the “pipes” of technology that deliver it. Control the technology that delivers the content and you control your ability to benefit from people receiving its value. From this perspective most publishers tend to think of themselves as the ones who control the faucet at the end of the pipe. People will come to the faucet when they need water and turn it on.

This “faucet” has had many different incarnations through the years: paying for a newspaper or book, turning on a television or radio with a limited number of channels, putting a CD into a playback device, purchasing a ticket at a theatre for a play or a movie, subscribing for access to a Web site. These kinds of services made sense when the limited ability of people to publish and deliver information required the most advanced services possible to make content available on a wide scale. The model still makes sense even today when the most advanced insights and technologies can distinguish a publishing service enough to provide a very high level of value to specific audiences, especially in the context of professionals trying to do their job.

The aqueduct: publishing as delivering scarce content to where it’s wanted.

The rainstorm: publishing as getting abundant content in the contexts where it’s most valuable.

But in Content Nation, a world dominated by the ability of influencers to publish almost anything to virtually anyone at any scale with ease, the “where” and the “how” of content no longer fits the faucet model neatly. Content is everywhere, like rain falling from the skies, accelerated by the enormous growth in social media. Distribution in this era of hyper-abundant content is no longer as valuable as collecting the right content in the right place at the right time for the right people. Value in publishing is produced today by getting what is easily distributed in the right contexts.

This is where the full value of social media comes into play. Social media is one of the most powerful tools today for enabling content to find its most valuable contexts. A travel Web site may list pretty much the same information on a hotel as any other travel Web site, but offering it in the context of reviews written by thousands of people who have experienced that hotel first-hand can offer insights that can influence a decision to book a reservation as much as or more than the price of the accommodation or the features that the hotel has to offer. Someone can look at news headlines on a newspaper Web site chosen by a handful of editors from a handful of news sources or click on a link to a news story from any number of possible sources on millions of social media Web sites. Someone can choose between a handful of columnists at a major newspaper for their opinions on major news events or they can choose from millions of weblogs offering their own opinions on that columnist’s opinions – and, increasingly, original and timely news coverage. Someone can hope to find a person in their home town that will buy some spare items in their home or they can post an entry on Craigslist or eBay and have the whole world looking at things available for sale in their home – and perhaps finding just the thing that they’ve been trying to find for years.

In all of these examples the key is not so much the core information or experience but the value it receives when people who can influence other people are available to provide valued context to the content. The mass distribution enabled by modern technology allowed more people than ever to access content. But when there are billions of content factories on the planet, all with near-zero distribution costs, the real advantage of social media is that it has vastly out-produced the ability of traditional publishers to create contexts for content. In Content Nation, millions of influential publishers have the attention of highly focused audiences, creating high value in millions of unique contexts.

While publishers were focusing on trying to build huge audiences for a handful of contexts social media enabled a huge number of contexts for equally huge audiences. The potential for creating value in social media is therefore ultimately much higher than in traditional publishing, though realized oftentimes in contexts that most traditional publishers aren’t equipped to manage. You might say that social media’s ability to provide more valuable contexts is like combining the power of the printing presses on which Thomas Paine’s pamphlets were produced with the power of the discussions about them held in that era’s coffee houses and taverns. Traditional publishers understood how to be editors, producers and distributors of content but they had no idea how to be tavern-keepers or a barroom orator.

Social Media Secret #4: Social media gets its value from its ability to create millions of influential and highly scalable contexts for content, far more than provided by conventional media.

Social Media and The New Aggregation: When the Product Never Leaves the Factory

Aggregating content is one of the most powerful tools for creating value in publishing. The ability to assemble content from multiple sources and to add value to it has been one of the cornerstones of publishing profits for centuries. In the traditional aggregation model, one publisher performs or acquires all the functions of content aggregation to provide an audience with a finished product based on content provided from numerous publishers, authors and other content sources, including sometimes their own unique “in-house” content. Be it a publishing company, a social media service, a newspaper, a news and journals retrieval service or an enterprise-based publishing platform, the value of aggregation services has been premised on having all the components of aggregation under its command. What is changing through Web-based social media publishing tools, though, is the fundamental model in which content is aggregated.

The traditional model for producing aggregated content is illustrated in the pyramid-like structure found in the illustration to the right, in which one content production capability provides a base for the next capability. It is similar to the model of manufacturing automobiles introduced by Henry Ford and others  when massive quantities of standardized components from internal and external suppliers were assembled in  a central facility to ensure the economies of scale, trained labor and product quality required to produce a product affordably.

When printing presses were the primary focus of the publishing industry the correlation between the factory model and the publishing and aggregation process was exact: publishers were manufacturers and distributors of content from centralized plants. In the more recent era of computers the “factory” became a computer center, with the relational database as the primary production engine, a software method for organizing content for efficient aggregation. Databases allowed for efficient content collection, normalization, indexing, storage, retrieval and access control, capabilities around which content aggregators developed commercial supplier agreements and distribution channels.

Why did this model succeed so well for so long? In large part because it had no viable competition. As illustrated in the figure to the right, the efficiency of centralized production control is based on the assumption that the producer has strong technology to produce a product and that the client for a product has comparatively weak technology to produce and consume the same product. With this technology dominance publishers could charge premium prices easily based on the real or artificial limits imposed on production and could also limit the emergence of competitive producers.

In this representation of the traditional aggregation model, the production pyramid results in a “faucet” –the point of value control - at the top of the production pyramid through which the value of an aggregator’s products and services can be easily established and maintained prior to fanning it out for distribution to clients who have no choice but to accept the control that the vendor has over accessing the content product. Once the product escapes the control of the producer it is in the hands of the purchaser to use as they please.

Social media distributed via the Web and in major enterprises exacerbates the problem of profitable content production in the factory model significantly. The Web effectively eliminates distribution as a competitive barrier, a factor that reduces costs not only for traditional content “factories” but virtually any computer on the Web that can produce content for anyone in the world. As illustrated in the figure to the right, the point of strongest value control – the “faucet” – is no longer at the traditional aggregator’s “factory” but on the Web pages, PCs and mobile devices of individual publishers and the computer rooms of institutions where most content aggregation now occurs through social media and other publishing tools.  These new choke points can create their own pyramids of aggregation from content sourced from the Web and local sources and distribution pyramids locally and within the greater distribution funnel of global content.

Does this mean that aggregation is dead as a business model because of social media? Far from it: aggregation is thriving in social media. Social media enables aggregation to move away from the “all-singing, all-dancing” factory model servicing mass audiences and to provide highly focused aggregation of content for very specific audiences very effectively, selecting only those components of aggregation that are needed to serve a particular audience at a particular point in time – and who in turn can provide their own value to others via aggregation. I have termed this emerging model “The New Aggregation.” The New Aggregation focuses content product and service development on the attributes of content aggregation best suited to serve specific audiences who can themselves participate aggressively in the production, aggregation and distribution of content.

In the traditional aggregation model, content is production-centric, building a monolithic, mass-produced service similar to our earlier pyramid diagram. By contrast, as illustrated in the figure to the right, The New Aggregation topples that pyramid and turns it on its side, with individual publishers and institutions being able to select specific attributes of aggregation products and services from multiple suppliers and other agents as well as without any intermediaries via network connections. At the top of the value chain individuals and institutions may in turn feed content to others to amplify its personal and professional value and in turn gain value from one another via business or personal transactions.

Viewing individual and institutional participants in social media as key components of the aggregation model is a crucial factor in developing a services-driven aggregation model. Social media publishing tools enable them to combine sources of content in innovative ways to create content value more efficiently than traditional publishers and aggregators. For example, if a Web search engine can locate content on a social media site easily, why bother with elaborate indexing or a separate search engine? And if another publisher has stored an article on their own Web site, why go through the legal and technical trouble to be able to store it yourself if you can just provide a link to it?

In doing so traditional publishers increase the likelihood that their audiences will see their services as weaker and essentially redundant in comparison to those offered via social media. Clever marketing and implementation techniques can overcome these redundancies to some degree but they cannot eliminate the inevitable pressure on the profit margins of traditional publishers as they try to sustain their self-contained aggregation model. Traditional publishers are challenged to position themselves not only against other similar companies via aggregation but also on an attribute-by-attribute basis against social media publishers who are not wedded to the traditional model and can focus on those attributes of aggregation that offer the most influence over very specific target audiences.

The decentralized model of content aggregation also encourages content to be aggregated and disseminated before it is ready for mass distribution as a “finished product.” Insights are aggregated more rapidly and fluidly in the social media model as content is collected, indexed, given additional value, distributed and them amplified anew into new forms of aggregation by others using social media publishing tools. Instead of relying on very rigid forms of indexing content, for example, social media encourages people to develop their own indexing via tags and to enable others to add their own tags as content is aggregated and re-aggregated.

In the social media model we may never get to a definitive indexing of content – and we  may never have to: the product of social media never has to leave the factory. Its value is found in its ability to be reinvented anew again and again in the hands of people who discover content anew, make it their own and then collaborate with others to make it something new yet again. Each point in this process creates its own points of value: it’s rare that there’s a need for a “faucet.” In fact a faucet would oftentimes slow down the process of creating and aggregating content effectively in the social media model. Once you’ve entered the social media factory, via a Web site registration or some membership-based access model, you may never have to leave it to get its full value.

Social Media Secret #5: Social media has a production model, but its goal is not mass production from a handful of huge factories but mass contextualization in millions of small factories to create and aggregate content again and again in constantly renewable and useful contexts.

Social Media and Marketable Relationships: The Value of Brands, Affinity and Endorsement

If in creating and using social media we are always in the factory modifying the product then it is rare that we’ll create finished products. If this is the case, then how does social media ever make money? With social media it becomes important to take a different view as to when and how its value is transformed into something that can allow people to benefit from their participation in social media.

Going back to Ghyslain’s experience with “Star Wars Kid,” we can see that the creator and publishers of social media were not asking for money – yet somehow it came. The content was produced and published, people engaged the content, remixed it in many instances, and then eventually some unsolicited donations came in. So it is in general with social media: the benefits of publishing, no longer tied to the factory model, are free to be controlled and compensated in any number of ways, some of which can be planned and controlled, others of which cannot but can add up to an expected benefit.

A street musician: sometimes people create content for the love of it – but still get rewards.

One of the keys for creating value in social media is to recognize that social media creates value through marketable relationships as much as through marketable content. On the one hand a lot of content generated by social media may look to be purely altruistic, something given up for free just for the love of it. And sometimes it is just for fun, just the way what sometimes you can hear a musician playing music on a street corner mostly for the love of it – and maybe a few tips out of kindness. But for Content Nation, the people who really use social media to influence others, altruism doesn’t have to go unrewarded.

A key example of this can be seen in how people who write popular weblogs make their living. There are certainly a growing number of weblogs created by professional writers, including many now published by journalists through their newpapers’ Web sites, that make money in a very traditional way. Writers are paid, they post articles, they have advertisements that bring in revenues. In these instances the content in the weblog is distinguished from traditional publications only in the sense that it provides aggregation of comments, links and other features that increase the engagement of an audience for that publication. This is how many media companies approach social media: they see it as a new technology that can support their usual way of doing business, with the social aspects held at arms’ length.

Robert Scoble’s weblog: No noise, just him, your comments and his book. Publishing in a tribal context can create a personal brand with marketable value. (link )

But most people who write weblogs don’t work on this model. Most write weblogs for free, or, through ads on their site, get a modest stream of revenue that rarely matches the efforts that they apply to the publication. More to the point, many of the more popular weblogs are written for free. Robert Scoble, co-author of the book Naked Conversations and a widely recognized expert on Web 2.0 technologies, has a popular weblog that has no ads or other noise – just his thoughts, your comments and a link to his book. The purpose of the weblog is not to make money but to help people around the world to get to know what he’s thinking on most any day. The weblog is ultimately his own advertisement for himself, a person who has marketable value as an expert in his field. Though altruistic in a general sense weblogs like Robert’s are more about enlightened self interest, creating awareness in much the same way that a quote in a magazine article, an appearance at a conference or a personal meeting might help a person build relationships.

In Robert’s case, as with others, those relationships can turn into discussions that result in consulting contracts speaking engagements or offers to write books. By creating and participating in social media, people build up themselves as a marketable brand in much the same way that high-profile media figures such as movie stars or recording artists build up their personal brands through personal appearances on television talk shows or personal appearances. In this case, though, the branding is highly scalable and is applied to a very specific cross-section of people who are interested in Robert’s thoughts.

Through search engines, links to his articles from weblogs and other social media outlets and from mentions in traditional press outlets Robert’s writings help him to find a powerful context within his global “tribe” of like-minded people without having to promote himself through a press agent or other traditional channels. This tribe in turn builds a sense of affinity through this and other social media outlets: we know Robert because of his weblog, but we also get to know him because of his active presence on Twitter and other social media platforms as well as through his appearances at conferences.

On Robert’s weblog, like most others, he writes about specific topics that talk about specific people, products or companies. Sometimes his comments about them will be positive, sometimes negative. When it’s a positive comment he is providing an explicit or implicit endorsement for them. This type of endorsement can be very powerful: it’s provided by something that he wrote for free, presumably, so you assume that it’s a freely given endorsement; it’s usually a very targeted endorsement for a specific person or thing at a specific point in time, so it’s highly actionable fairly immediately by very specific people who want to be influenced by it; and it can be amplified by others linking to it or writing about it, providing more free endorsement power.

Recently the Facebook social networking service tried to introduce its “SocialAds” program to match up ads for commercial services inside the content posted by Facebook members. There was a strong rejection of SocialAds at first because the ads appeared in a way that made it appear as if a member had endorsed the advertiser’s products and services when in fact they had been matched to the member’s content automatically. People understood intuitively when their power of endorsement through their own social media was being abused and objected. People will be willing to endorse people and products when they can do so willingly, but most are hesitant to apply their personal endorsement to anyone or anything haphazardly.

Multiply this power of personal endorsement millions of times across all of the social media outlets that create content every day and we’re no longer looking at world-famous personalities offering the most powerful endorsements via paid contracts but instead at worldwide tribes of people with affinities who are influenced by millions of others in Content Nation, with the most influential of these people building powerful personal brands – and for some, very lucrative careers as people well connected to others well attuned to their insights and abilities. We don’t have to have our content leave the factory of Content Nation because we can make a pretty good living staying there.

Social Media Secret #6: Social media enables individuals to create content in contexts that put them in direct contact with other people who value their insights – and in doing so give them many options as to how to translate that value into ways to survive and thrive.

Social Media and the Timing of Value: Long Tails, Long Snouts, Many Peaks

For those who are interested in making that benefit translate into money, this means that those wanting to make money directly or indirectly from social media’s value – monetizing it – must adopt a strategy notably different from many traditional publishers. and, perhaps more important, when can it

Much of the content in this book was published on the ContentNation.com Web site before it was published in book form. We did this to get feedback on the book as it developed and to attract news, articles and discussions from social media enthusiasts. We continue to add information, modify the book and to build interest in the topic via ContentNation.com even today. This is counterintuitive for most traditional book publishers, so I thank the publishers at John Wiley and Sons who went along with this.

Opening up the content in this book to people on the Web was done not just to be trendy but to demonstrate that social media encourages a new kind of economic cycle that is transforming both publishing and other elements of our global economy. Social media shows us that value can be gained from the ability of people to access insights from people when they want and need them on a very personal scale.

If you’re reading this in a book format reading something that was produced through a mass manufacturing business model, but much of the value that I got from writing about this topic was on my weblog and in other social media outlets long before the opportunity to write a book ever same along. People got to know me, much in the same way that Robert Scoble became known, people got to know the book, the book was produced and then the cycle started again. Content from the book is discovered anew, leads to new discussions, and, possibly, new mass-manufactured content.

At each point in this cycle there’s an opportunity to cash in on the value of content that scales to the audience available at that time. This cycle works differently for different kinds of social media models. In the instance of O'Reilly Media, Inc.’s Safari Books Online bookstore, for example, it can mean using a social media model to build up subscription revenues. Safari Books Online’s Rough Cuts program allows technology-oriented subscribers who need the very latest insights on fast-moving technology topics to get access to early drafts of technology books as they’re being written. Chapters of the book are made available as they’re being written and subscribers can comment on them and help to shape the materials as these books progress. The book then is finalized, published in printed form, and then passes into the Safari Online Books online service that allows people to access entire libraries of published books online for a subscription fee.

In each of these three phases – pre-print electronic version, printed version, post-print electronic version – the same content provided value, but in a different form at a different time and quite possibly with different audiences. In the pre-release form the book’s content attracts the leading thinkers and designers who needed the book’s content and the community of people commenting on it to stay at the very forefront of technology. It was more like a piece of customized training in this mode than a traditional book. The printed version drew people who were more likely middle-of-the-pack technologists who needed to keep up with new trends but who didn’t have to be on the very leading edge of knowledge in a subject. The post-print online version helps people who are in most instances trying to address specific problems with specific pieces of content from the book, much as they would any other piece of content on the Web.

In other words, while social media lives largely inside the content factory, it’s okay to let things out of the factory now and again if there’s a reason to produce a mass media product. But unlike typical mass media products, the products that escape from social media into mass production and then back into evolving social media forms use mass media more as a transient form than as a final goal. If there’s a mass market for something, then fine, build it. But over time more value is released from social media in its pre- and post- mass media forms than in its brief life as a “hit” for mass audiences. Mass production and distribution becomes the exception rather than the rule while highly focused audiences create and consume content on an ongoing basis for highly scalable audiences.

In 2004 Chris Anderson, then Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, wrote an article on a phenomenon he called “The Long Tail.” He noted in the article and in a subsequent book by the same name that through the power of Web search engines people were able to find things to buy such as books and music CDs that were not big hits just as easily as the latest big hits. His premise was that there was at least as much money to be made in selling the “long tail” of less popular items through millions of small markets for them on the Web than there was to be had in focusing on selling millions of a small number of items to the mass market for a short period of time.

Chris Anderson’s idea was rather a hit itself, but it focused largely on things that were mass-manufactured in the first place. In social media, where oftentimes finished products never leave the factory but instead gain value through people finding them and interacting with them the question is rarely “how do I sell more of less” but moreso “how do I realize the most value out of anything at any time?” From this perspective social media does not focus so much on the “long tail” of opportunities to realize its value long after something’s been published for a mass audience, or even the tall peaks of momentary high value in mass markets. Instead social media tends to focus on what people at O’Reilly Media call “the long snout” of content value that can be realized prior to its ever being ready for use in a mass market. When content does reach a peak value in this environment it tends to be for very brief moments of intense value for very specific audiences.

From this perspective the value of social media is not too unlike what I used to experience in my days with financial content vendors such as Reuters Group PLC. Powerful banks and investment firms would invest countless millions in the most advanced computer and communications technology to get information on stock markets and other traded investments to take advantage of fleeting moments when they could have better insights into the financial marketplace than other people making trades. Be it on a trading floor in a major investment bank, a major exchange or countless other locations financial markets created what was in many ways the first electronic social media, though only for a handful of elite financial traders.

Oftentimes traders at these institutions would execute their trades over large banks of interconnected telephone lines or computer-based messaging systems, communicating directly with the potential buyers and sellers of financial securities and executing trades as soon as they saw from their available information that conditions were right. As trades were executed over time this information would make it into more public channels – first on electronic displays, then on television and radio networks and eventually in daily newspapers and in electronic databases used for analyzing historical trends to initiate new trading opportunities. So it is with social media in many ways: content from social media outlets may be valuable only to a few people at a time but it can have great impact before most other people even know that it exists. You have to be in the factory – or in this instance, in the trading room – to be in on its most valuable opportunities.

Social Media Secret #7: Social media’s influence may be broad or narrow, long or short, but its value almost always benefits from people who want to be ahead of other people than from those who are trying to catch up with others.

So the secrets of social media lead us to an interesting place in our story. If you look at our key examples of social media successes so far it turns out that lots of different types of people – people in the traditional media business, people who work in their own businesses and in major enterprises as well as people who make social media just for themselves – are able to create value through the highly scalable and accessible communications of social media. Who are these people? How does social media help them to survive and thrive? And, most importantly, who’s winning and who’s losing as social media gains influential strength?