A fascinating session today at
Amplified 09, discussing the Future of Online Video - huge amount of stuff learned, lots to blog, but later - needs to ferment a bit in the old backbrain.
There was however one interesting end conversation about an unrelated topic, notably the shi(f)ting usage of Twitter. About a year ago we noted that Twitter shifted from being a service for social media airheads to exchange brief nothings to something that started to be quite useful - driven I think by a new cadre of joiners who used it to tell each other about interesting things they were reading, doing or thinking.
The discussion this morning was about how it was changing again, with Slebs, PR sharks and marketing drones, and (gasp)
common people increasingly trying to cancerously colonise it and play silly spam games, reducing its utility to collaborative users. Funnily enough, today
one of the funniest rants I have ever seen covered exactly this topic (hat tip Tom Morriss, who pinged us on Twitter). Here goes, in full rant-o-colour. It starts with those ex blogging A listers who become social media experts and relentlessly ply twitter like possessed zombies to try and collect as many followers as they can:
The zombies then seek each other: You’ll always notice that of the 5,000 followers that a social media expert has that all 5,000 of them are also social media “experts”. Their only form of conversation is to quote each other and live tweet conferences where they gather. Like any good Ponzi scheme the lead zombies can make a good living feeding the hopes and aspirations of the worker level drones who parrot their every blog entry.
But that’s where the problem starts with us civilians: The drone level zombies then start to stalk any innocent Twitter user they can find. They don’t care who it is or what that person is interested in because their first prize is the “auto-follow”. By finding enough folks who don’t have auto-follow turned off they artificially inflate their number of followers which inflates their “expertise” in the field. Most start out by doing this to each other, but before long they need to prey on the flesh of the living.
And of course, like any other time a new ecological niche is opened up, species start to adapt to it:
On a related note there’s also a related clan of zombies which are the SEO “experts” — these creatures are a blue collar variation of the social media experts and usually have the term “web master” in their bio. Sometimes the social media and SEO zombies can mate to produce a marketing strategy monster, but most of these are harmless as they don’t use the auto-follow technique.
Anyway, the discussion at Amplified was about where to go next if Twitter becomes Yet Another Marketing Opportunity and spoils it for the community - the view is that the videoblogging systems like Seesmic are by and large still nerfed (take too much time, still at airhead content stage, can't link easily etc etc), Facebook - well Facebook was what you did before Twitter and before it succumbed to the commercial crapola. Friendfeed - maybe, but only if there is nothing better (better being a very low hurdle) was the view.
So there you have it - early warning that the Social Media Butterflies are starting to flex wings and thinking of how to fly from Twitter unless it is possible to find some way of filtering / mediating the craposhere that seems poised to invade it.
For what its worth the Rant Thesis was that the only way to exterminate these Zombies was to invite them somewhere like a desert island and ten nuke them all. I propose a more humane treatment - invite them all to the Paris Hilton* (who could refuse a name like that) and then run it as an online reality TV show for the next 2 years and not let 'em out nor give them any access to online media. We could thus have a live Human Menagerie and sell ads against it to fund all the startups that can't get VC money, as well as ridding the planet of an entire generation of social media expert marketeers.
(*The Paris Hilton is a very nice hotel in Paris, France by the way)
