Could Somebody Turn Down The Volume On Social Media Please?
Strange title on a social media blog eh? Don’t get me wrong I love social media and see the way it is changing many industries and the way we communicate right in front of our eyes but isn’t it just getting a little bit noisy? The problem that the industry as a whole faces is that there are streams of amazing information and quality content happening all over the place but most of it is just getting missed because of the noise, there is in short a lack of relevance. Here is a quote from a comment Joe Scanlon left here on a post yesterday that I think sums it up well…
I think I dived in too far at the start. Hearing about people I didn’t really know becoming mayor of or going to places I didn’t know or care about on 3 different social networks (foursquare, twitter and facebook) was wrecking my head a bit. To wake up and see people I didn’t really know (or care for) auto following my “buzz†this morning has added to my woes. Having a full time job and trying to have/get a smallish biz site up and running was taking time enough, so for me yeah a break of sorts is/was needed. I’m just tuning things to my liking for now.
I think the word that Joe uses there “tuning” is the right description of what we need to do. We all have the tools including Tweetdeck and Seesmic that can allow us follow and listen to the noise as we see fit. I follow 250 people on Twitter because it is all I can manage if I am honest. I don’t have huge amounts of time to talk to people and it is a case of tuning my network to the people I know. I have met tons of fascinating people through Twitter but I know those people from the first 6 months on the service when it was still a small community. I just can’t follow new people because I can’t keep up with what I have at the moment. Here are some of the issues that I see around social media at the moment…
The Noisy Services
This is a service that I really just don’t get. So the idea is that you add your credit card and people can see what you are up to and what you are spending. I spend my time trying to make sure that my credit card details don’t fall in to the wrong person’s hands and even though I am sure the service could not be safer the last thing I want to do is share what I am spending my money on with the entire world. This is in my opinion a classic example of the needless noise that is out there and adds very little value to communication or interaction online.
The Savvy Brands
It took brands and businesses a long time to get on to Twitter and Facebook but now that they are there they are certainly making plenty of noise. The biggest problem is that only a tiny percentage of brands are there now and many more will arrive over the coming months and years. Just look at the example below of Samsung who not only joined Google Buzz on the first day that it launched but are also trying to set the trends on the site by announcing new ways in which to use it like #BUZZwednesday which is clearly an attempt to copy Twitter’s Follow Friday. Make no mistake about it, a lot of brands are very much on top of social media already and waiting to pounce on the latest trends as they emerge which is only adding to the noise.
Fragmented
Our social profiles are all over the place at the moment. Let’s use my photos as the prime example. I currently have my personal photos on Facebook because I want to share them with my friends and family. My food photos are on my Tumblr blog and sometimes on my Twitpic account. I also have a Flickr account which I rarely use and I use Photobucket to store images that I embed in to websites and blogs. That is 5 different places that I store my photos online all serving different needs. Social media seems to feel very fragmented at the moment with content scattered all over the place in a variety of formats all of which are surrounded by noise. The problem we have is that each service performs a different task like Twitter does news and real time search well whereas Facebook is where I securely connect with my friends. At the moment I need all of the services that I use but that is not a very effective use of my time and energy.
What’s Next?
Something needs to be done about the haphazard way in which social media is evolving. To be honest I don’t know what the service or product is going to be that does that but I do know that social media as a whole needs something clean and simple to bring everything together. Google are going along the right lines with Google Buzz by trying to centralize everything we do but I am really not sure if it won’t just be another service to use and indeed make things even noisier. Some existing company or start up is out there thinking of the technology as we speak but at the moment it just doesn’t exist. There is no doubt that social media is going to be a huge force in terms of how we lead our lives in the future but at the moment the noise is getting out of control. Individuals and brands need to be able to find relevancy and find the 5% of content that really matters to them and that they consume while filtering out the 95% that is totally irrelevant and a waste of their time. It is an interesting time and will be fun to watch how and who cuts through all this noise we have.
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