'Social media' still sounds good and is still a hot item in books, blogs, conferences and training courses. But how social are social media really? What is left of the idealistic web 2.0 that preceded social media?
Are sharing and collaboration still central?
What is left of the web, where sharing and collaboration were central? Judging by the recent battle between Instagram and Twitter, that seems a thing of the past. Everyone wants to protect their piece of the pie, and the hobby bakers of the pie (the users) are left behind.
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In fact, if they're unlucky, the Instagrammers of this world will run away with the content that users have created.
Of course, voices immediately sound that users have nothing to complain about. list to data After all, they do not pay for the use of the oven and are therefore actually the product themselves. The platforms must also be able to earn money from something, right? I do not dispute that, but in my opinion it is not as simple as these people put it. There is more going on and I want to highlight that with this blog post by Geert Lovink .
How 'social' and media found each other
The term 'social' in combination with information technology (and later with media) seems to be something of recent years, but it is not. In the 80s, 'social' already stood for 'groupware' and in the early 90s people already saw the opportunities for the web as a 'collaboration tool'. This view was partly denied or nullified by the dot-com investors who came in the second half of the 90s. In their eyes, the social aspect was something soft, something for hippies. They invested in nerds and in 'hard' technology.
jff photo iPhone_mens 2009
That loose online networks gradually emerged in which people, just as they had been doing offline for centuries, started to work together, was nevertheless inevitable due to a multitude of technological developments. Initially, being online was only possible at home or at work via a PC or Mac, but with the arrival of the smartphone, being online became independent of place and time. That moment is often seen as the official beginning of social media.
If you ask me, the social is not in the tools, not in the technology and not in the apps – no matter how nice they may be. Even if you know technically how to use such tools, you are not there yet. Just as CRM did not automatically lead to customer focus and good customer relations, social media does not automatically lead to social behavior and social business.
More is needed for that and that can only come from people . Not from tools and technology, not from the means that social media still are, but from a change in mentality. Not so much with the regular user (also known as customer), but with the organizations with whom those users are in contact or want to be in contact.