The Broadcast-ification of Social Media

Not that I’m happy about it, but I agree with what Jake Levine is saying in this post at the Nieman Journalism Lab about how the large social networks are becoming something much more familiar to late adopters and the brands and marketers that want to reach them.

First, Twitter needs to reach late adopters with a product that late adopters can understand. It’s much easier to bring people onboard to “a real-time feed of news links from publishers and celebrities that you’ve heard of” than it is to explain “a distributed messaging platform where you follow friends, some people you don’t know, some celebrities, and some brands…where you make lunch plans, share what you had for breakfast, and post your favorite links of the day…where sometimes it’s a chat room and sometimes it’s the nightly news.” Try explaining Twitter to your parents and see what works better. On a unique active user basis, evolving into a more traditional broadcast medium will be a boon for Twitter.

Second, brands (you know, the $$$) don’t know how to join small group conversations. They do, however, know how to shout at large groups of passive media consumers. If Twitter looks more like a broadcast product, then brands will have an easier time fitting Twitter ads into their campaigns (and budgets).

As with any piece of social software, as Twitter evolves from a space for conversation into a space for discovery — prioritizing features that support a one-to-many model at the expense of the many-to-many model — we will see its value as a conversational platform erode.

For lack of a better term, you might call this the “broadcast-ification” of the major social media platforms. I’m picking on Twitter, but it’s happening in different ways across the industry — see LinkedIn Today or Facebook’s asymmetric “Subscribe” feature. These platforms are all evolving towards a more traditional broadcast media model, because it’s more palatable to late adopters and because that’s the environment in which brands know how to communicate and, more importantly, spend.