Has social media made form more important than content?

With the deluge of content that social media has provided us with (which continues to divide old and new school over whether this is a good thing), form that is to say – the format of content – is becoming more and more important. Almost to the point that it matters as much, if not more, than the content itself.

A large reason for this is of course the proliferation of formats available. Do you want to offer something in the traditional, offline format, as an app, a website, a microsite, an SMS, an email, a mobile site, all of the above? And that is to name just a few of your options. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you can take anything and dress it up in a way that will make people consume it regardless.

Spam is still spam whatever format you offer it in. But even with this example you will likely get a higher engagement rate if your spam is reliant on the Facebook wall rather than emails being forwarded. That is because we have become increasingly receptive to content being offered in different ways. Time saving, efficient or entertaining ways – to the extent that the format you offer your content in is now as important a consideration as the actual content itself.

To quote Seth Godin….

To demonstrate the point, Seth Godin (unknowingly) provides a good example. Godin is a respected individual in the marketing industry, having published multiple books on the subject of social media, as well as writing a daily blog post full of inspiration. The content is informative and useful, but it hasn’t stopped others from extending this and exploring other ways of offering Godin’s content. A popular site – Seth Said – offers neat soundbites of Godin’s quotes, gathering tweets with the hashtag #sethsaid , to present to visitors in an easily digestible format.

Though the site may not be anywhere near matching the traffic that Godin receives (if the Twitter account is anything to go by), there is nonetheless a healthy community there that prefer to receive their Godin content in this way. What they are getting is a significant distillation of what Godin said. But in this case, the format is more important than the original content.

There’s money in the format

In some cases, the format that something is offered in can mean big business, even millions of dollars. Developer Brian Greenstone had been developing games for Macs for nearly 21 years, then he decided to diversify when the app store came along, and started developing simple, entertaining iphone apps. Despite having maintained a comfortable living designing Mac games, when he started building iphone apps he found himself making upwards of $5 million dollars in revenue per year, with a small team of just a few freelancers. Indeed, he describes it himself as ‘lottery money’, going on to explain that he has made more from the retail apps they built for iPhones in 4 months, compared to all the retail sites they built over the last 21 years – combined.

Though there are certainly other factors at play here – the ease of downloading an iPhone app, the variety on offer, the revenue potential with the size of the market of iPhone owners vs Mac owners, the numbers are incredible and show that format was the game changer here. The same talent was behind the iPhone apps that was behind the games, yet the news format allowed Greenstone to run a multi million dollar company. All because of one tiny, but significant device.

The format revolution

This is not to suggest that this revolution in format is confined to the digital or social era that we find ourselves in. Indeed, throughout history (or the history of communication) format has become a key player. As new formats emerge, it can have far-reaching consequences. It just so happens that we are also in the midst of this change right now, where format is becoming increasingly important as it diversifies.

Sometimes, the effects of format can be far more wide-reaching and important than simply increased consumption. From the 1970s, escalating in the 1990s, India went through a ‘newspaper revolution’, which saw the introduction of newspapers traverse language and political barriers to significantly change communication in the country. There are a few aspects in this that are worth expanding on, to demonstrate the importance of format :

1. Accessibility. In 1976, there was the equivalent of one newspaper to every 80 citizens in India. In short, newspapers were largely inaccessible, but through revolutions in printing, by 1996 this had been reduced to around 20 citizens per edition of a newspaper (despite an increase in population of over 200 million). Communication and information had become more accessible not only through the availability of a newspaper itself, but also through changes to design and the language employed, meaning it was more accessible to lesser educated citizens who may have been put off by the longer, jargonist formats. In India, the consequences for a more open democracy were of course significant.

2. Immediacy. Before the newspaper revolution in India, if you were in a remote village not only would you have been lucky enough to access a newspaper at all, but by the time you did, it could have been days late. Therefore, the information you could access on your own country could have been significantly behind, which could have far-reaching consequences. The newspaper revolution changed this, and the immediacy of information was important here. As well as improved circulation of newspapers in remote villages, by the 1990s, these papers were often printed in these villages themselves. Not only will a change in format lead to increased consumption, but it can lead to quicker, more immediate consumption. The difference of of the 24/7 news culture plays a part here, as well as the formats it’s available in. Compare the speed of scanning an RSS reader throughout the day, vs waiting for the 9:00pm news or evening edition of a newspaper.

3. An open format. A large contributing factor to the change in newspapers in India and the newspaper revolution, was the open discourse that was developed. Collaboration online is something that us privileged few are familiar with. No longer is a news discourse one-way, but now largely participatory, as new formats allow us to comment on an article online, share it with our social communities or even publish our own version on a blog. This was also found in the India newspaper revolution. To increase the variety and sources of news, publishers began to outsource, to crowdsource their news. Networks of correspondents were established across the country, meaning the newspapers became more democratic, as well as the news agendas that drove them. An open format of content here, as we can also see today, can drastically affect the content itself. Open formats mean people have an increased interest in reading it because it is more likely to apply to them than some closed off, top-down approach.

While the newspaper revolution in India had far-reaching consequences that were incredibly important not only in the politics of the country but in the reality of people’s day to day lives (for example increased awareness of police brutality to name just one example of an incredibly complex situation), it is still something that applies today. I do not mean to suggest of course, that you can put an iPhone app in the same bracket as the newspaper revolution in India, but that we can look to this to prove the point of the importance of format and finding the right format to reach your audience. It’s not just about the content, but presenting it in the right way that people will actually read it.