This post (and the previous post on Spam) has been on my mind after attending a bunch of Social Media events
last week
I think many people (naively) believe that Social Media will lead to a democratic Netopia, and let their guard down when dealing with it. This is not the case.
Take for example the play described in PR Blogger
here with YouTube - put media clip onto YouTube, create lots of false users, vote for clip, get it onto recommended list and wait for the explosion of interest.
And manipulation like this works...in essence a lot of people follow the lead of opinion formers rather than trust tastes of their own. Malcom Gladwell's Tipping Point is a testiment to this effect. The hot TLA these days is Social Media Optimisation, or
SMO
The gaming of Digg (the top 100 Digg users, acting in Blocs, were responsible for over 55% of frontpage stories) has been well
documented, and Google is so heavily gamed now that they have to change the search algorithms every few months to deal with it, and every time they do so hordes of small Mom n' Portal Enterprises drop off the pages and hit the wall, causing a Tsunami of protests.
Drew Benvie points to this FT article showing how brands can be
ambushed via Blogs, so being passive is not an answer.
There is also a very thoughtful article by New Scientist's Matthew Sparkes here at
The Mu Life, where he argues that a "tipping point" has been reached now (and also shows the pitfalls of being the Original Content Producer)
But if the Wisdom of Crowds is being gamed by the noisy minority (the "Chattering Classes"), what then.....does it all go "hit based" again, and we lose the democratic Long Tail benefits?. This was the basis of my question to AOL SM guru
Meg Pickard at one of the events last week, and we sort of got to a view that there will be a long tail of niches, each with (in my view probably manipulatable) hits in it.
There is also an interesting piece in
GigaOm about the Fat Belly. Essentially Robert Young argues that there is the Hit based Head and the Long Tail, but the sweet spot is the Fat Belly in between them. He dugg around in Digg and found, in the Tech section over a period that:
As expected, the distribution of the approximately 9,300 of the top stories this year charts into a power law curve. The Big Head, which I define as those articles with over 5,000 votes, accounted for a mere 32 articles. The Fat Belly (those with 1,000 to 4,999 votes) had nearly 4,000 articles. Lastly, the Long Tail (less than 1,000 votes) had the remaining 5,300 articles, predictably the largest number. (n.b. noticeable changes in the gradient along the curve served as the primary factor in my choosing the points of demarcation).
But here’s where it gets interesting. All the articles in the Big Head received about 250,000 votes in total vs. what I estimate to be around 2.5 million votes for the ones in the Long Tail. As for the Fat Belly, those stories got a whopping 10 million votes! Now that’s what I call a healthy “middle class”.
Now anyone familiar with retail Inventory Management will recognise this as the A, B and C class stock scenario, so does it show that Social Media is behaving more like a standard retail model than the Hit based models of most Media? (ie Art, Film, Music, Sport - I count popular Sports as a Media business these days - Blogs and Slebs.)
You could argue however that the Digg definitions for Hits are drawn too early, set it at 3,000 votes for example and see what happens - ie is the Fat Belly just the back end of the Hit Head?
I did a quick straw poll of Technorati blogs, and the Top 100 sites fall from 26,000 links (no 1), to c 6,000 (no 25), to c 4,500 (no 50), to 3,500 (no 75), to c 3,000 (no 100). At around Site No 7,500 there are about 800 links and around Site No 30,000 there are about 300 links. There are about 57 million blogs on Technorati in total, so clearly the tailoff starts quite early. But it is clear that a very nice business could be had from say 15 properties at say an average of 2,000 links each.
So, if the Fat Belly does exist, this has interesting implications for Social Media, as in essence if the real value is not in the Hit based medium, then it is less susceptible to PR based approaches and more so to good old Sound Operating Disciplines.
But whatever the outcome, where there is money at stake this will not be a democratic Netopia I am afraid. The 'Net is a scale free network that mirrors human communication, and in this respect it follows Ecclesiastes Law - there is nothing new under the sun (vanity, vanity......)
Let the Games begin.....
Postscript: This very interesting article by Niall Kennedy
here has more on the way and the why the gaming of social media works.
