Chapter 3:
Social Structure in Content Nation -
Changing Tribes, New Leaders

So far we've seen that Content Nation is big, that its power scales very rapidly and that it's influence can take on many different shapes. But who is really creating social media? How do they organize themselves and how do they manage to create structure that's meaningful using little more than wired and wireless connections to one another? In some ways social media provides certain common denominators of structure and behavior that are impacting society as a whole and providing new social structure and new leaders within that structure. In many other ways, though, social media impacts society's existing social structure and institutions and changes how they organize themselves.

Some of these changes are likely to have a very positive effect on society as a whole, but not all of them will be positive for all organizations and individuals equally. In some instances the changes that social media is stimulating are threatening, especially for those who are afraid of losing their existing power, wealth and influence. But while there is much that will be changing in society through social media, it is in reality a far less threatening force than some may imagine.

Democracy, not Marxism – Room for the Powerful and For Everyday People in Social Media

Since social media is about having influence over others via publishing it is by its very nature something that affects the structure of power in human groups. In any group there is a power structure, one or more people who have more influence over others in specific situations for specific purposes. Who controls what and how via a power structure is at the core of most conflicts, be it among humans or other animals. So it should not be surprising that social media is viewed with suspicion or even fear sometimes by those in positions of power.

Andrew Keene, a popular author who has dubbed himself "the Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley," writes in his book "The Cult of the Amateur" about how much of what has been considered valuable in modern culture is being threatened by social media, painting a picture of starving artists, scientists and bankrupt media companies brought to their knees by everyday people tapping away on social media Web sites. Rhetoric from Keene and others unsure about the ultimate impact of social media seems to parallel talk about the "Red Scare" when communism was feared by many as a force that would overtake Western nations after World War II.

Certainly social media provides a democratizing force for publishing that is already changing the balance of power in the publishing world and, as we've seen already, in ways that are changing society as a whole. Since all social systems have power structures I think that it's a myth to say that social media will result in a system in which there will be no power structure or a rule by the mob only. Some fear a fulfillment of the 19th century philosopher Karl Marx' vision of communism as a system in which all people would be equal because "the workers own the means of production." Notably nations that tried to implement this communism to its fullest extent wound up with dictatorship governments. As the British author George Orwell noted in "Animal Farm," a spoof of communism set in a community of barnyard animals, "Some animals are more equal than others."

It is not so different in social media, where the rhetoric of absolute equality does not match what actually happens. The reference Web site Wikipedia, for example, allows anyone to create and edit pages on the site, but there is a standing committee of largely volunteer administrators and others who monitor and edit these pages when there is content. Digg, a popular social bookmarking site that allows anyone to submit links to Web pages for voting and discussions, quietly implemented a network of people to monitor submissions and comments for quality and ethics violations. Inevitably social media publishing services, as with any other organized human activity, will require people who will have influence over what others do.

The question isn't whether people will have influence over what others do in social media but rather who will have that influence and how they will exert it. In most instances social media thrives when that influence is based on what participants in a social media community choose to have as influence over their participation. What this means is that most social media communities enable the community as a whole to determine who has power within the community amongst its peers - including organizations that in traditional publishing models had definitive control.

A good example of this can be found in the Facebook social networking community. The Facebook publishing platform enables individual people to set up a page that can attract friends, but it also allows people to set up a page for an organization, a brand, a product or a fan page for a person in the public eye. Facebook members can declare themselves "fans" of a particular company, product or public personality, in much the same way that they can declare themselves to be friends of everyday people who are Facebook members. Overall the mechanisms, page design and relationships between people and these other entities are equivalent: a page for an iPod, shown to the right, is about the same as a page for a Facebook members, shown just below it. Apple gains influence through Facebook but as it must build its influence in the same manner as a Facebook member its ability to influence that community from a position of authority is only as strong as its ability to have its authority accepted by other members.

So it is not that powerful organizations and people will not have power in Content Nation. It is rather that their power will have a different context and a different level of influence through different channels. When some people speak of the "democratization of content" through today's online publishing this is probably the most significant aspect of that democratization. Content Nation enables people and organizations from all perspectives to establish relationships on a collaborative peer basis. It is not about "the people" controlling the powerful, but rather the powerful recognizing that nobody can determine with whom they want relationships but people themselves. In other words, in social media influence does not mix well with coercion. It's a big world of publishers out there and people will move on to another community of publishers if they're not comfortable with the direction of a particular publishing community.

The good news for major corporations and media companies is that people seem to use social media to build relationships with brands, with colleagues and with customers in ways that are sure to help them become more profitable and effective organizations - if they adapt the right strategies for social media.

The Three Tribes of Content Nation - Personal, Media and Enterprise Publishers

From the examples that we've looked at already, you should begin to see the outlines of three specific groups of social media users, each with their own goals and each with their own tools and methods.

• Personal Publishers: People publishing via social media to meet their personal needs, either on a social or a professional basis or, very frequently, both.
• Media Publishers: People or organizations using social media tools to create marketable content and online services.
• Enterprise Publishers: Organizations working to improve their communications inside and outside their organizations for reasons related to their core mission.

All of these major groups overlap in some ways, which is a key aspect of social media's power. Modern social media tools are coming into a world already formed in large part by the economic forces that have driven both media companies and businesses through the rise of the industrial era. Each of these groups has an important role to play in Content Nation. Everyday people are the focus of much of social media, but as it changes how people engage the world economically and politically each of these three groups - tribes, if you will, sometimes cooperating and sometimes belligerent in their efforts to survive and to thrive - have to learn how to manage new and evolving boundaries as they create valuable communications through social media. Moreover, in many instances social media is changing how or whether people join one of these tribes to start with - and how they act once they join them. Inevitably all three of these tribes are changing as a result.

Personal Publishers: The Heart of Content Nation

The power of social media is driven largely by individuals of all ages from all walks of life who enjoy being publishers and sharing content with one another. "Enjoy" is probably the key word to consider here. While sometimes people get compensated directly or indirectly for publishing via social media tools, most people using social media tools do so because it's something that's personally fulfilling and that is, ultimately, a natural human function. While technology has been the focus of much of publishing's power in recent centuries, social media focuses on the fundamental value of human interactions that are captured more naturally through social media technology.

The "Hole in the Wall" Experiment: We Are Publishers Who Influence and Lead By Nature

The essential nature of people to express themselves through electronic publishing was proven fundamentally by a very interesting experiment in New Delhi, India in 2000. NIIT, a company focused on using technology to promote learning, decided to see how people completely unexposed to computer technology would interact with a computer and the Web without any input from any one else. Researchers at NIIT decided to embed a PC with a high-speed Internet connection in a concrete wall of their building next to a vacant lot in the middle of a very poor New Delhi neighborhood and monitored its use via remote cameras. Without any instruction from anyone as to what this device might be or how to use it the children of this poor neighborhood would come up to the "hole in the wall" computer and start to discover how to use it to draw pictures and to browse the Web, often leading one another in learning how to use it and influencing one another by working together. It would appear from this experiment that by our very nature people want to publish, want to learn to do so collaboratively and want to find what their peers have published.

Content Nation Around the World: Social Media Has Universal Appeal

The universal appeal of communicating via social media is underscored by a 2007 study by IBM on global social media use. While the U.S. leads clearly in the use of social networking sites, with about 45 percent of respondents having used social media and 25 percent having contributed content, most surveyed nations showed relatively similar patterns in their overall use and creation of "user-generated content" such as weblogs and wikis. Although English-speaking nations have benefited more from social networking services to date than nations more focused on other forms of social media there appears to be substantial and universal interest in social media. The relatively low levels of use for user-generated content in the U.S. and Australia and the relatively high levels of use in those nations for social networking services reflects the rise of social networking tools as primary points of social media publishing. Not everyone needs to write a blog to experience success in social media.

The Generations of Content Nation: Digital Natives Lead But Are Not Alone in Creating Influence

These social media pioneers are not just young people; people of all ages have discovered its value. A 2007 Forrester Research study indicates that it is not just young people who are creating social media. While the report indicated that 37 percent of U.S. Internet users aged 18 to 21 are publishing content actively via blogs, uploads to video sharing sites, comments, ratings and reviews, the study also indicated that people aged 27 to 40 were also very active publishers of social media. Nineteen percent of U.S. Internet users in the study aged 27 to 40 were publishing to blogs and upload sites while 25 percent were posting comments, ratings and reviews. Even in the younger end of the "baby boom" generation of people aged 41 to 50 there were 12 percent who published content directly and 18 percent were adding on content via comments, ratings and reviews. Social media has a strong appeal even for the generations of people who did not grow up with the Web as a key presence in their lives when they were as young as the children in the New Delhi "hole in the wall" neighborhood.

Although adults are beginning to make strong use of social media, clearly the generations that have grown up with the Web, mobile phones and social media from their youngest days are painting the picture of how Content Nation is changing the nature of human communications. A 2007 Pew Internet & American Life study on teens using social media services found that of the 93 percent of people aged 12 to 17 in the U.S. who used the Web 64 percent of them created some form of content online. Publishing electronic content is becoming a default behavior for the generation that is preparing to enter our universities and work force.

Interestingly there are gender differences in how these so-called "Digital Natives " view themselves as publishers. While 35 percent of online teen girls in the U.S. were publishing their own weblogs, only 20 percent of teen boys were bloggers, however, 19 percent of teen boys were publishing videos online while only 10 percent of teen girls were publishing video materials. While both sexes are using social media actively, the tendency of males to focus on visual communication and females to focus on verbal communication does not seem to change in social media. 

Will the abundance of outlets for publishing in social media mean that we will see a generation of women or other specific groups of people becoming more influential in society, business and politics through social media as digital natives mature? Not necessarily: in some ways the statistics on U.S. teen girls' use of social media parallel other studies on how girls in the U.S. today are stronger readers than boys and may reflect the generally higher verbal skills of women and the generally more visual skills of men. There's no doubt that changes in society have been accelerated by other technology changes, such as the introduction of the telephone, that enabled new patterns in our political, personal and work lives. In thinking of how the telephone replaced the telegraph as a primary electronic communications method over a century ago, though, it is clear that social media is likely to have a more rapid dominance and replacement of other forms of media - possibly within one or two generations at most rather than several.

Content Nation Leads in Getting Attention: YouTube Versus Major Television Networks

A few clues as to how rapid the shift from traditional outlets to social media outlets may be for young audiences can be found in looking at who is looking at what. In Figure 3-4 you can see that in a one-year period visits to YouTube, the leading social media portal for video uploads, grew its leading position by nearly 50 percent, relatively unimpeded by the presence of major media outlets, including Hulu , a recently launched Web site providing access to full-length television shows and clips from U.S. commercial television outlets. Hulu's growth was relatively strong for about a month after its launch, but it leveled off rapidly, well below YouTube and also well below the growing traffic for NHL.com, a Web site for fans of the National Hockey League equipped with social media features to help grow its following amongst the "tribe" of ice hockey enthusiasts. This doesn't bode well for other sources of commercial content keeping pace with digital natives who are discovering one another's' voices as publishers online.

That Canadian Girl: Gaining Professional and Personal Influence and Leadership Through Blogging

Who are the leaders of this wave of personal publishers? While there are some names in social media who are generally high-profile individuals independent of social media, the stars of personal publishing in social media are noteworthy for what to many would be their un-noteworthiness. You might call "That Canadian Girl" a typical example of someone who uses social media for a variety of purposes. "That Canadian Girl" is a weblog that recounts the exploits of Véro, a French-Canadian woman living in the United Kingdom who says that she is "described as cheeky and irreverent, I write about technology, gadgets, marketing, often trying to scratch the slick surface of someone’s latest glitzy campaign like one might scratch their iPod by putting it in the same pocket as a set of keys."

Véro's weblog is a mix of analyses of online marketing, recipes, video clips that amuse her, photos of her cat - and an acknowledgment that she's one of the more influential technology bloggers in the U.K. Dozens of people comment both on her personal content and her more business-like content, interacting with her both on a social level and a business level. A "serious" marketer would have recommended mass mailing campaigns, a corporate Web site and other techniques to promote her business, and those certainly have their own place. Instead, Véro just has spent a few minutes each day for the past five years just being herself on a personal and professional level - and growing a healthy business while having fun. Two to four thousand people visit her weblog every month and it's linked to by more than a hundred other weblogs. That's a great amount of influence for just a little bit of  publishing, influence that many professionally produced publications would like to have.

Agropedia: Using Social Media to Improve Indian Farming

The leaders in social media aren't necessarily people who are well versed in online technologies. India's Jayanta Chatterjee PhD, a Professor at the Industrial and Management Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur, is leading a team developing a service called Agropedia, which provides a wide range of information on farming in India. With a tremendous variance in climates, conditions and other variables, not the least of which being India's dozens of languages and dialects used by farmers who don't have access to the Internet, creating a cohesive information resource can be difficult. Agropedia helps to address some of these concerns by enabling farmers to use the telephone to share their expertise on specific farming methods and issues - they simply have to speak their knowledge into the phone in their own language and Agropedia will organize their sharings for retrieval by other farmers with the same language, interests and needs both via the phone and via the Web. Social media doesn't have to be just for the cutting-edge leaders of technology - the technology concepts that power social media can be adapted to technologies that can be used by anyone to make even everyday family farmers influential leaders in sharing knowledge and insights with their peers.

Newsvine: Anyone Can Become a Reporter at Any Time

Leaders and influencers can come from unlikely places in the realm of journalism as well. Chris Thomas, a Virginia technology worker who goes by the online handle "Killfile," received calls and messages from his wife and friends on the campus of Virginia Tech in April, 2007 moments after a mentally deranged gunman opened up fire on people on the VT college campus. Killfile was the first to break the news of this traumatic incident on Newsvine, an online social media news community where he was the top contributor of news reports. Killfile filed 35 updated reports in his Newsvine article in the course of the day of the shootings, as well as an aftermath summary, including up-to-the moment reports from people on the scene via cell phone calls, instant messaging and police radio reports, providing in many instances key breaking details of the event that traditional news outlets took far longer to compile, using key details often from Killfile's reports. While Thomas received special recognition for his efforts as Killfile on Newsvine from its administrators and was interviewed on MSNBC, a cable television news company that eventually purchased Newsvine, he continues for the most part to be a leader and influencer in the Newsvine online community as he has all along - an amateur who loves breaking news but who lives his own life apart from the world of media as well.

Twitter: Personal Instant Messages Turn Into World-Changing Headlines

Social media also creates leaders and influencers when major catastrophic events hit a nation. Blogs, downloaded videos and quickly developed information sharing services helped people to show the world what happened and to organize in the wake of 2004's earthquake-induced tsunamis in Southeast Asia and 2005's Hurricane Katrina devastation of New Orleans and southern Mississippi, but more recently the speed of social media as a leading force for propagating news was felt even more intensely. When a massive earthquake hit China's Sichuan province in May 2008 the Twitter social media messaging service enabled people with mobile phones to spread the word globally to people following their short text messages while the tremors were still underway - including people publishing prominent blogs who were being tracked by mainstream news organizations. Twitter messages formed a global stream of breaking headlines that started major media coverage and activated responses from world organizations. Countless messages, photos and videos followed from social media services that provided the basis for both information and responses - responses which included social media enthusiasts who set up a missing persons registration bureau at a crossroads around which rural refugees had gathered in the absence of governmental support services. While major media organizations and governmental services played a key role in responding to this disaster, social media enabled everyday and largely anonymous people to be leaders and influencers in their own right.

So who are the leaders and influencers in personal publishing via social media? Anyone. Everyone. Some have extraordinary and enduring talents and passions for publishing content, others dabble for a while and then move on to other things. In some instances leadership in social media will be fairly constant, as in Killfile's consistent efforts to be at the top of Newsvine's rankings of contributors, but in most instances leadership and influence could come from anyone at any time in any place that meets the needs of the moment, just as leaders and influencers in ice age hunting parties were those most able to address the challenges of the moment with tools that were pretty much the same as any one else's. Like the farmers in India using Agropedia, leadership and influence may be very localized and specialized, affecting people in a relatively small community with their own communication methods and survival skills - or, like Véro or Killfile or the thousands of people in China's Sichuan province, the community in social media in which they have influence may be a nationwide or global network of people who appreciate them for who they are in the moment, providing structure to their efforts through the structure of how content is organized in social media services.

The ability of social media to provide highly scalable leadership and influence from any quarter of the globe on any issue from any perspective at any moment is the key factor that is shaping how it is influencing social structure in our world today. Other forms of mass-scalable communications can be effective as well, but the power of millions of people from any walk of life with any form of reward system in place, including altruism or just plain old fun, enables social structure to form spontaneously around any idea, concept, cause, objective, need or want that suits them at the time. For centuries societies have been developing and forming social structure based on large, fixed organizations such as national governments, corporations, financial institutions and other institutions whose power has emanated largely from their ability to communicate with the world on a scale that individuals could not achieve on their own. The emergence of social media and its enthusiastic adoption as a default method of communications by a generation now coming into adulthood challenges us to recognize that its implications for social organization are far wider than we may have thought.

Media Publishers: The Old Media Becomes the New and the New Media Becomes the Old

When does social media become just plain media? That's not an easy question to answer given the rapid scalability of social media and its ability to generate income on a par with many established media outlets through advertising and other methods of monetization. In general, though, there are some people who decided to use social media tools with the express purpose of making a living off of their publishing directly and some who make a living through established media outlets who come to use social media to expand and shift their influence and to find new sources of revenue for themselves and their operations. Whether it's those who came into publishing through the new tools of social media or those who came into publishing using older tools and discovering social media tools, there comes a point at which social media publishers are in it for their personal living more than for other social motivations.

TechCrunch: Pure Media, Pure Blog

A prominent example of a social media property that's a media property in its own right is TechCrunch, a weblog covering new products and breaking events in media and technology. Developed by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Arrington, TechCrunch has made its way to the top of the most popular weblogs and commands an online audience focused on the business of technology as large or larger than many prominent technology magazines and journals. Arrington's favorable opinions and reviews of new products are sought after by press relations specialists as avidly as those of any reporter for a major media outlet. The TechCrunch blog itself is written not only by Arrington but by several other staff writers, and is one of a series of media properties developed under the TechCrunch brand. Ads about 250mm square with a two-month run on TechCrunch can go for about $10,000 or more. In many ways there is little to distinguish TechCrunch from any other major media company's online publishing property - it's a strong ongoing publishing business that reaches over a million people visiting the Web site monthly and over 780,000 people subscribing to its email news feed. This is influential and successful mass media by any measure.

While TechCrunch carries the profile of mass media in many ways, it's also at its heart a social media product. TechCrunch started off as and remains a weblog, with features such as the ability to enter comments, the ability to subscribe to a free feed of articles posted on the blog and the ability  to create a link to an article posted on TechCrunch via social bookmarking services such as Digg , del.icio.us and Reddit. These are features than can be found on the humblest of weblogs anywhere - and yet they are used very effectively to help TechCrunch scale its publishing very cost-effectively. The content in TechCrunch, while newsworthy and written with a journalistic outlook in mind, is just as often opinionated, off-the-cuff and written with a personal tone that is not what one would expect from a typical news article. It is, in other words, a publication that uses both the technology and the outlook of social media can a leader and an influencer on a mass media scale - but still remain social media.

The Huffington Post: Building Influential News Outlets Through Social Media Curation

The Drudge Report was a relatively small Web site in the mid 1990s known for its links to key breaking news stories on the Web and its own occasional original reporting political events based on founder Matt Drudge's connections to leading political figures. The Drudge Report was thrust into the major media spotlight in 1998 when it decided to break the story of President Bill Clinton's relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky - a story developed by the Newsweek national news magazine but held from publication. The rise of politically opinionated Web news outlets such as the Drudge Report inspired political activist and news commentator Ariana Huffington to create a new mass media Web site in 2005 based on social media technology and techniques.

Like the Drudge Report the Huffington Post features links to news stories at other major news Web sites selected and headlined often for maximum political impact but unlike earlier efforts at political journalism the Huffington Post developed its own network of bloggers who would contribute to the publication their own opinions on major news and political events. Huffington herself writes the lead column at the Huffington Post, an editorial board of one shepherding a variety of opinion-makers who come and go as both regular and guest bloggers to round out the political discussions. As the Huffington Post has grown it has increased its own production of news journalism as well, enabling them to have more content engaging audiences through comments and other weblog features, while continuing to link to other Web sites directly when important news breaks elsewhere. Three years after its launch the Huffington Post now exceeds the Drudge Report in monthly audience with over two million people viewing it monthly, and is considered this year to be the top weblog site by many site measurement methods.

Is the Huffington Post really a social media Web site? Certainly it was never meant to be anything other than a Web site with a mass audience and the independently wealthy Ariana Huffington could never be mistaken for an everyday person starting up a weblog. Yet within her own domain Huffington used the same general social media techniques and technology that anyone could use to start a weblog and managed to use them to scale her operation into a major news and opinion outlet. The site is powerful not only because of its timely coverage of breaking news and the wide variety of prominent opinion-makers who contribute to its blogs but also because of the large community of everyday people who comment on its blogs and news stories. In other words, just as you don't have to be a famous and influential person to be a leader in social media you don't have to avoid being famous and influential, either.

In some ways social media outlets like the Huffington Post are bringing journalism back to the early flourishing of newspapers in the 18th and 19th centuries, when newly affordable printing technologies enabled a wide variety of people to put out local journals with news and opinion. It was only in the late 20th century, when competition from electronic outlets and rising production costs forced newspapers to consolidate, that people became used to news coming from just a handful of powerful outlets. The ability of the Huffington Post to scale rapidly into a major media outlet is a reminder that any social media outlet has the potential to become an influential publication on a mass scale through the common technologies that enable the creation and distribution of social media globally.

Xu Jinglei: A Star Becomes a Blogger and Becomes a New Kind of Influential Star

Movie stars are often the subjects of mainstream media, but through social media actresses, actors and other celebrities are creating media for the masses in a new way. In 2005 the Chinese movie star Xu Jinglei began writing a weblog about her daily life, generally avoiding topics related to her career and focusing on her personal ups and downs. The blog is well written and generally unremarkable in its content, but perhaps for that very reason the relative humility of this high profile personality winds up appealing to average people in China and beyond. For a brief period in 2006, Xu Jinglei's weblog was the top blog in the world, according to the Technorati blog search and ranking service, and continues to rank amongst Technorati's top 50 blogs. Xu Jinglei's posted articles attract typically a thousand or more comments from her avid followers, creating a rich array of people contributing to the site as part of a community experience.

Different cultures express influence and leadership somewhat differently from other cultures, so it's no surprise that in a rapidly changing nation such as China, a well-known person such as Xu Jinglei inspires everyday people to express themselves so emphatically as individuals in the comments of her blog posts when they may be used to limiting themselves to more private and personal expressions of their opinions. She is among a growing number of people in China and other nations leading the development of a culture of more open discourse using social media tools. While her blog in and of itself may be fairly unremarkable, the impact of people gaining the confidence to express themselves through her blog may be an important part of people not used to such open expression beginning to view themselves as capable of being influential publishers in their own right.

Digg: Turning Social Bookmarkers into Editors of a Major Media Outlet

There are many social media Web sites that use social bookmarking features to assemble content from around the Web but none has succeeded like Digg. Social bookmarking is a feature that enables someone looking at a page on a Web site to save its address, its title, categorization information and a brief summary of its content to another Web site where this information and links can be shared with others. It's a good way to share knowledge and to build highly personalized streams of information, not unlike editing your own personal news ticker for friends and colleagues to read.

Unlike many other social bookmarking services, however, Digg was one of the first to see that social bookmarking could enable people to build a consensus as to what was the most relevant content on the Web at any given point in time. A voting system was integrated into the technology driving Digg that allowed people to drive up the popularity of a page or to "bury" it if it wasn't liked. People using Digg with a member account can comment on items that have been "dugg" by other Digg members, have their own comments voted up or down, question the accuracy of content, build a network of friends who can share bookmarks or blog about a bookmarked item on their personal weblog.

In doing these things, Digg members build influence within the Digg member community that enables their content selections to get top rankings more often through the site's programming logic. While perhaps only hundreds of members may have influence strong enough to determine what might appear on the front page of Digg it's anyone's guess as to who those people might be at a given moment in time. Certainly mainstream newspaper outlets don't have hundreds of people determining what goes onto their front pages. Peer into narrower topic areas on Digg and other people are likely to have broad topic-specific leadership and influence.

The result after several years of very careful and continual engineering and re-engineering of a fairly simple concept is a social media Web site that is one of the most influential sites for people looking for the latest news and interesting content on a wide variety of topics. With millions of members acting as enthusiastic filterers and discoverers of content worth sharing, a breaking news story or the latest video, photo or audio podcast from any source can find exposure, popularity and an instant community of people discussing it within minutes or moments of it being posted to the Web. Through Digg, any Web content, from the latest news story in a major newspaper to the latest amateur video in YouTube to the most interesting photo on Flickr or any other content, can become the center of social media through its inclusion into Digg.

While the tastes of people using Digg are likely to be as diverse as those found in any large group of people the millions of people using it and the programmed logic controlling the ranking and sorting of content - along with an occasional nudge from people monitoring the system - help Digg members to create a well-founded consensus as to what is interesting and important. In the process of filtering Digg members become both highly influential and leaders in determining what people will look at and discuss on the Web.

Editors for major newspapers used to be the elite leaders who chose almost exclusively what was important for masses of people to read and to determine what was breaking news worth people's attention. With Digg the consensus of everyday people has become one of the leading editorial powers that influences what gets people's attention. People trust and respect Digg's collaborative curating of content so much that Digg now gets consistently about fifty percent more people visiting it each month than the Web sites of The New York Times or USA Today. That's potent media for the masses assembled purely by millions of enthusiastic people and the computer programmers who build them great social media publishing tools.

Robin Good: Mastering Social Media for Profit and Passion Becomes a Publishing Career

Robin Good, the online persona of Luigi Canali De Rossi, is one of Europe's most enthusiastic proponents of all things relating to social media and personal electronic publishing. He turned his passion for his interests into the Robin Good Web site, which since 2001 has highlighted breaking news and insights from around the world into the latest online publishing tools for everyday people.

Starting out as a fairly simple ad-supported Web site with a few premium reports for sale, Robin Good has shaped his focus and his content over time into a much broader vision of how social media publishing can build into a career that generates enough income to sustain his lifestyle and his interests but small enough to be manageable by himself and a very small core of supporting staff. Robin Good "walks the talk" of social media in his use of many of the leading-edge social media technologies for blogging, video and electronic subscription services.

One of the keys to success for Robin Good is his ability to edit content appearing on his Web site to match the ability of online advertising services to deliver advertisements automatically which match up closely to key words appearing in his content. By choosing the right words for headlines and story text Robin can enable these advertising services to put ads on his Web site which will pay him more than other ads. With higher paying ads served up automatically Robin Good avoids the overhead of an ad sales department while getting more revenue than the typical blogger might have produced similar content.

Another important factor driving Robin Good's revenues is his ability to find capable people such as industry analysts who willingly volunteer blog and video content to be used on his Web site - including, at times, postings from my own weblog. Robin Good repackages these offerings into more attractive and well-packaged content optimized for search engines. The contributors of free content benefit from the attention they gain from the relatively large and well-focused audience that views Robin Good content and the improved search engine placement of their own content from links provided from Robin Good's version of their content. Robin Good benefits from having more content to drive advertising revenues with less effort and cost and the social benefits of knowing and supporting thought leaders in his area of interest. This is in some ways social media in its purest form: people collaborating to create more value in their lives through publishing. In other ways it's a much more traditional media model for a small publisher: get free or cheap talent to make more money from more content.

The other addition to Robin Good content that helps to drive his success is the inclusion of headlines from other news sources along with brief summaries - social bookmarking on a very small scale by someone very expert in his particular field. This steady supply of news from other sources enables the Robin Good Web site to have regular sources of fresh content that can engage site visitors throughout the day with minimal effort.

All of this combines to make Robin Good both a person who enjoys having turned his passion into a profession on a daily basis, often from the comfort of his home office in Rome, Italy, and a person who has a thriving publishing business that enables him to become an influential figure in his industry who can sell his thought leadership in training sessions and other face-to-facel events. While his Web site does not have the larger audience of some other media outlets, with more than 100,000 people visiting it each month Robin Good has an audience that can help him to meet his goals as a publisher working with social media tools where he pleases.

Bakespace: Turning a Traditional Passion into a Niche Social Media Publication

Cooking and baking cakes and cookies from family recipes handed down from generation to generation were always a part of the life of Babette Pepaj, a Los Angeles-based producer, writer and director of television shows who got a hankering to come up with a way to make a social media publication that centered on her passions. The result of pursuing her desires was BakeSpace, an online community of cooking and baking enthusiasts who share recipes and chatter about their lives with other recipe-swapping enthusiasts.

BakeSpace manages a community of contributors that generates most all of the content on the Web site, which in turn generates ad revenues. While the recipes, comments and forum discussions posted at BakeSpace by its members certainly form the core of its marketable content, BakeSpace also provides an online chat facility open only to BakeSpace members, enabling them to build deeper personal relationships around food the way that people often would build relationships in the slower-paced home kitchens of a simpler time and place.

BakeSpace combines the ability to build valuable and unique content with a loyal community of enthusiasts who love generating both content and relationships - a media success story built very rapidly on a relatively small scale for a minimal amount of development and marketing effort that has yielded a growing publishing business for Babette Pepaj. Like many relatively small publishers in the media business she may choose to keep the BakeSpace community going on her own or sell it to a major media company looking to augment its ability to deliver more engaging content for its own online publications covering this niche of consumer enthusiasts. Whichever her choice, BakeSpace is a good example of what happens when an entrepreneur with a passion and a talent for social media decides that they have the will and the way to be an influential leader in their domain of expertise through publishing.

The New York Times and the Houston Chronicle: Turning to Weblogs to Drive Growth and Audiences

While there are bright spots in the newspaper industry, the past several years have produced a long roster of lost profits and readership as well as many papers selling out to larger owners. The problems felt even by major newspapers were underscored in August 2007 when The New York Times decided to make news articles and key opinion columns available on their Web site without a subscription fee. The Times had decided that they just couldn't generate enough Web content to provide advertisers enough places to put their ads for the non-subscribing audience that was the largest and fastest-growing portion of their readership. At the same time going to free access enabled their content to be viewed and shared more easily by people highlighting it in social bookmarking services, such as Digg, as well as search engines.

While opening its existing pages to the public, search engines and social media services was one solution, the real problem was that, like Robin Good, the Times needed more pages in their Web site on which to place more ads and get more ad revenues. Part of the solution for The New York Times has been to expand extensively the number of weblogs on their Web site to cover a wide variety of topics and viewpoints. With more than fifty weblogs on topics that parallel all of their major newspaper sections, The New York Times weblogs are gaining viewership quickly and building content that keeps people reading more from both staff journalists and people who comment abundantly on many of the weblogs.

The Houston Chronicle had similar problems with declining print readership and sluggish online growth and decided to take a different approach to growing more content. Instead of adding weblogs just from their journalists the Chronicle enabled their readers to set up their own blogs on the Chronicle Web site. Unedited by the Chronicle staff, dozens of Houston area residents pump out their thoughts on their Chron blogs - building more pages for more ads and more comments from readers that keep them engaged on the pages of the Chronicle's Web site longer. Through its readers becoming publishers on their own Web site the Chronicle also gains a new kind of influence and leadership under its brand that enables a community to see their own friends and neighbors as part of that brand. Readership is up strongly at the Chron.com Web site over the past year, thanks in part to the growing popularity of social media content that leads the way to more a more personal approach to journalism.

When the Masses Can Be the Media, What is Mass Media?

Although mass media still has many of the same traits and business goals as ever, the arrival of social media as a major force in electronic publishing is changing the social structure that determines how major media outlets are started, grow and influence their audiences. Like Michael Arrington, anyone with a few good industry connections can start a fairly successful commercial blog overnight. Like Ariana Huffington, anyone with some visibility in their field and a bit of cash can start a highly influential news organization with little more than a list of influential contacts who know how to write a bit. Like Xu Jinglei, a well-known person can become their own media outlet, showing the world who they are in real life rather than relying on media organizations to shape the image of their lives. Like Kevin Rose and the other founders of Digg, any good programmer and a few associates can come up with an idea to empower people through social media good enough to build an audience larger than a traditional major media outlet. Like Robin Good or Babette Pepaj, anyone can make a fulfilling independent living out of pursuing their passions through using social media tools to make a successful online publishing business that scales to a niche audience. Like The New York Times and the Houston Chronicle, any existing mass media outlet can change the long-term prospects for the value of their publishing brand  by empowering people to use social media through their Web sites.

If all of these publishers and more can service mass markets through social media with efforts relatively miniscule compared to those required to build the media empires of past generations, and so many people are doing so regularly around the world, then it's fair to say that the social structures required to create mass media have shifted fundamentally. We are at a point in the development of human communications at which having a social structure that empowers any and all people to be leaders and influencers through publishing on a potentially massive scale is now more effective and more important to our future than relying on social structure that empower a tiny group of central leaders and influencers to succeed through publishing to the masses. Large traditional media companies will continue to have success, of course, because of the resources at their disposal and the strength of their brands and the availability of unique channels for their content, but in a world in which mass media is now more about enabling the masses to create media for everyone or just the right people, traditional mass media companies are no longer driving the fundamental social structure of publishing.

Enterprise Publishers: Productivity and Public Relations Through Personal Publishing

While the use of modern social media publishing tools in the work lives of people is only beginning to receive broad attention, it should be no surprise that today's social media publishing tools are becoming highly popular in many of today's enterprises, and that they are becoming a key factor in helping to shape today's workplace. Long before computers began to become household appliances, they were helping people in major businesses, governments and academic institutions to solve problems and to improve communications. Unlike earlier generations of technology used in enterprises, the Web-enabled technologies of social media have been adopted by people in their personal lives often before they were adopted. Through their use of home PCs and laptop PCs, mobile phones and other electronic devices that serve a role in both work and personal environments the enthusiasm for social media is working its way into the workplace rapidly.

Social Media: Helping Enterprise Workers to Cut Through Information Clutter

As with earlier generations of technology, concerns abounded that some social media technologies would hamper productivity. In most instances, though, enterprises are learning rapidly that social media can provide a great boost to productivity, often far more than the boost received from traditional workplace information technologies.

A recent study done by researchers at the University of Ohio and the University of California underscores the productivity benefits of social media in the workplace. In the study, entitled "IM = Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace", researchers asked both people who used instant messaging services and those who did not to say how much they had to deal with interruptions in the workplace. The study found that those who used instant messaging to communicate with their peers thought that they were able stay on task without interruptions far more so than peers not using instant messaging.

The Ohio University study underscores one of the key advantages that social media technologies offer people in the workplace over traditional information technologies: an enhanced ability to collaborate with the right people at the right time with the right information with as little interference from others as possible. The need for this improved productivity in today's enterprises is striking. A 2005 study by Outsell, Inc. found that professionals were spending 53 percent of their time seeking out information. Importantly, the same study found that 67 percent of professionals were using the open Web as a source of information required to perform their jobs. In spite of decades of corporate investment in information technologies the information resources inside today's enterprises have failed to become the obvious choice for people seeking information more than two thirds of the time.

Content Nation as a Promise and a Threat to Enterprise Structure

Just as mass media publishers held back in embracing social media because of the threat that it represented to their way of doing business, so have information technology managers been slow to bring the productivity benefits of social media into the enterprise. Though social media technologies that can help productivity inside the enterprise are beginning to be more prevalent they are still far from universal. A 2008 poll by CIO Magazine of more than 300 information technology decision makers found that only 30 percent offered wikis as a corporate application, 23 percent offered blogs and only 10 percent of respondents brought social networks from the Web into the enterprise. Social network services on the Web are key to the lives of younger workers, so much so that a recent survey of workers found 39 percent of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving their job if they could not access social networking services, such as Facebook, to communicate with their peers.

The social structure of many enterprises seems to be in conflict with the emerging social structure that social media helps to accelerate in both people's personal and professional lives. Today's younger worker in many countries using Web-based technologies is someone who has learned how to blend the tools that help them with their personal life with the tools that help them with their professional life. Portable PCs, mobile devices that help people read and send emails and text messages, the wide availability of wireless Internet connections in popular locations and increasingly everywhere - all of these and more are the underpinnings of a movement towards individual publishing as a part of a lifestyle that supports both personal and professional needs. 

Michael Idinopulos, Vice-President of Professional Services at Socialtext, a leading supplier of wikis and other social media software for enterprises, touches on one of the key reasons behind the conflict between enterprise technology specialists and people used to personal publishing: a struggle for the means by which enterprises succeed. Michael Idinopulos notes that social media technologies like Socialtext's wikis are a type of technology that may not fit in well with the motivations and goals of most information technology managers, who are interested in the standardization of information through their established infrastructure in a way that will scale effectively. This is not too different from the general goals of many major corporations: increase the efficiency of producing lots of standardized products and services so as to maximize revenues.

Interestingly, though, social media tools are reaping large benefits in many instances that do improve standardization and efficiency. A case study of Socialtext's installation at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein demonstrated that Socialtext's wiki services were being used by more of that institution's 6000-plus employees than any other internal electronic information service - though it took the efforts of a few pioneers to get the project started. Michael Idinopulos notes that in many instances social media technologies in use in enterprises have come into place initially outside of the efforts of information technology managers, often at a localized level within an organization - and often initially outside of an information technology manager's budgets.

You might say that in some instances social media is a citizen's revolt against centralized technology within today's enterprises by people using social media services that are often totally free, relatively inexpensive, simple to deploy or readily available on the Internet. With these publishing services many workers in today's enterprises are able to assemble and share information that's crucial to their success as professionals - without having to wait for others in a central role to dictate when and how to do it. When almost anyone in an organization can establish a successful information service new leaders and influencers are bound to emerge.

Jigsaw: Content Nation Creating Enterprise-Class Business Information Outside of the Enterprise

Social media also encourages enterprise workers to create more content that's available to people outside of their enterprise which can help them with their business goals. One of the more interesting examples of this is a service called Jigsaw , the brainchild of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jim Fowler. People use Jigsaw to publish and to receive contact information on people in businesses - the sort of information that people collect from the business cards that they get from people they meet. People pay to get access to individual contact information on Jigsaw generally, but for each complete set of a person's contact information that someone provides on Jigsaw the contributor gets points towards downloading contact information for free. Other Jigsaw members can challenge the quality of the information that someone has contributed and take back some of those awarded points towards their own free downloads of contact information. Jigsaw allows people to download the company name and address information that they collect through this process for free, a valuable service that encourages people to contribute to Jigsaw, which in turn improves the frequency of updates to their information. With over 8 million contacts from more than a million companies in their database - many of them people who aren't normally found through other business information services - Jigsaw has created a highly valuable, enterprise-class business information service driven by individuals collaborating to build quality information. Jigsaw sells its contact information in bulk to enterprises, as well, so that they can update their internally maintained contact information. This puts Jigsaw sometimes in direct competition with other business information services that collect information through more standard data collections methods. Not only can individuals as publishers enable more value for enterprises when they publish outside the enterprise but they can challenge the suppliers to enterprises to perform more effectively. The information that everyday people in business collect and share can help to influence the ability of people everywhere to do business effectively - and in the process of doing so create new leaders and influencers in business information services.

Executive Blogs: Talking With Your Markets...Whenever

Social media also enables enterprises to be publishers to the world at large,  most especially to their existing and prospective customers. Just as in the world of mass media, social media doesn't always empower just everyday people; when enterprises want to speak to the world through social media, social media can often put a major enterprise's own executives out in front of the world. Executives publishing weblogs are very common now among CEOs of major technology companies but they are also increasingly common outlets for companies of all kinds. Auto and truck manufacturer General Motors has put their Vice Chairman Bob Lutz to very good use as a key contributor to their FastLane Blog. Well known in the auto industry for his enthusiasm for innovative and fun-to-drive vehicles, Bob Lutz' contributions draw many comments from consumers passionate about cars and trucks themselves - and in doing so creates a dialogue with the marketplace that GM serves. That's industry leadership and influence that a corporation cannot attain easily through normal media channels.

ITtoolbox: Building Expertise and Knowledge Through Online Publishing

It's certainly not just CEOs and leading executives who are helping their enterprises through social media publishing on the Web. In social media sites like ITtoolbox , an online community for technology professionals, people in enterprises that use and sell computer technologies write blogs, maintain reference information in a wiki, post downloadable reports on how to solve technology problems, share ideas through comments and online forum discussions and build relationships through a social networking community built into the ITtoolbox Web site.

Instead of waiting for a major publisher to write a book or an article on a critical technical topic that affects people on the front lines of enterprises - and having to wait for your enteprise to purchase it - ITtoolbox allows anyone from any enterprise to share their knowledge with one another in an environment dedicated to their profession. At the same time the companies that sell technology services get to participate in the ITtoolbox community and build relationships with their customers and prospective customers. Not only do everyday people working in enterprises get to become leaders and influencers with their peers around the globe, their suppliers also get an opportunity to be leaders and influencers through their ability to participate effectively in the ITtoolbox community as a problem solver and a good communicator.

Although in some ways enterprises are late to the new dance of social media, as many were late to recognize and adapt to the Web itself, they are also becoming some of its brightest stars, leveraging its ability to build a new generation of publishing-savvy leadership and to influence thinking and productivity inside and outside of their organizations using a new set of tools that are highly cost-effective alternatives to many of the computer technology solutions that they've used to date. Publishing technologies such as email, telephones, databases and printed documents remain an important part of life in today's enterprises, but increasingly Content Nation's entry into the workplace is changing fundamentally in many ways how people earn their livings.

How we make a living is a large part of what social media is all about one way or another. Be it someone who publishes on a personal basis, someone who turns to independent publishing as career or someone who publishes inside and outside their enterprise to help their organization succeed, we are all trying to survive and thrive in the world somehow. In the age of centralized publishing many came to rely on large organizations to help them get the resources they needed to live well, a factor which determined in many instances who would be our leaders and how people would influence one another. Now with the advent of global social media, Content Nation challenges people of all nations and all walks of life to reconsider how it is that they are going to form new tribes and find new leaders to help them work together and to live together effectively. In doing so many fundamental aspects of our lives are going to change far more than we may be able to imagine.

Let's try to imagine. Let's take a look now in more detail at where some of these fundamental changes created by social media are already impacting how people create value in marketplaces, how they manage their workplaces and how they manage their personal and public lives - and how these changes are taking us to a far, far different kind of society from what many of us experience today.