A Social Media Success Story: Mike Arrington punks the NYT and AP
It’s telling that the New York Times and Associated Press, two companies at the top of the traditional media pyramid with unlimited resources, have erred embarrassingly in the recent AP quote policy brouhaha. This mess has cost them not only credibility but also clearly demonstrates that they don’t understand the social media phenomenon at its most fundamental level.
These two traditional media titans, recognizing they are in deep trouble, resorted to citing an “Association” that no one has ever heard of to try to lend credence to whatever crap they invented to save their hides. And in a pre-social media world they would have gotten away with it.
The difference now is that Mike Arrington is big enough to have become an insider to the traditional media’s inner circle. And Mike has the understanding of the benefits of truth and transparency that underlie social media, to let folks know what’s going on. And the balls.
Never before did the masses have immediate and widespread access to an insider looking two media titans in the face and calling “Bullshit”.
How could the NYT/AP think a “Media Bloggers Association” that didn’t already include Arrington be credible? Arrington got most of the major Presidential candidates for interviews and broke the YouTube acquisition among other journalistic successes. It would be fair to consider him the top media blogger/web journalist in the blogosphere. (Who knew coming from an unaccomplished lawyer and failed entrepreneur?) Simply put, a “Media Bloggers Association” that doesn’t include Arrington, or more specifically one that he’s never heard of, doesn’t matter.
And that makes this a great example of how social media is taking a sledgehammer to existing media practices and principles.
This is also a little analog to the “early adopter” meme and further serves to illustrate just how early we are in the adoption curve. If the NYT and AP, two large companies whose future success is directly impacted by their ability to understand and make the transition into social media can screw up this badly, just how many people really understand social media today?
DMX Will Never Use Twitter or Friendfeed
I’ve been collecting my thoughts for my eventual conclusions (and subsequent blog post) regarding whether or not I think services like Twitter and Friendfeed will ever be adopted by the other 89%. While I find both services to be continually more useful and interesting, I’ve yet to be convinced that these tools will be adopted by the mainstream in a meaningful way in their current form. (Italicized for emphasis)
As I noted in a recent post, those who are currently avid users of these services, the 1%, have some shared characteristics most of which can be traced back to some variation of “smart”. And amongst the 89%, there are a whole lot of people who are….not so smart, to put it lightly.
To that point, I saw this interview with DMX earlier today and thought to myself, “Here’s someone who will never use Twitter or Friendfeed.” While I don’t think DMX represents any majority, I don’t think Scoble represents any majority either. To further make a comparison, DMX has sold 20 million records, which represents a lot more paying customers than Scoble and Arrington have non-paying readers combined.
Additionally, I found this interview to be not only a relevant, if not sad, cultural datapoint, but also amusing in that “can’t look away from the trainwreck” kind of way. Consider the following recent interview with rapper DMX at XXL (for those with virgin ears, look away):
Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.So you’re not following the race. You can’t vote right?
Nope.
On Mixx, Plurk, Creators and the Adoption of Social Media
The A-list digerati has been all atwitter, pun intended, over a number of topics recently. And a number of them seem to be related in a roundabout way.
What these folks seem to be missing in these discussions is that the gap between social media’s “early adopters” and mainstream America is actually widening for now.
As Fred Wilson pointed out succinctly, Social media means “every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet”. And to date, about 1% of Internet users are actively creating content. Don Dodge (w/ a nod to Bradley Horowitz’ illustration) calls it the “social network 1% rule”.
Well some of that 1% are doing this…compulsively. Others among that 1% are merely doing this a lot. This has created plenty of noise in the system and there are a few very, extremely premature tools for culling the signal from the noise so far.
These hyper-active social media early adopters are the ones consuming, analyzing, processing and drawing conclusions on this content in rapidly condensing time frames. The social media echo chamber consists mostly of the intelligent and hyper-curious, but the lack of perspective being regurgitated in the echo chamber is starting to get unhealthy. The early adopters are passing judgement on social media 3.0 when a good chunk of the other 89% of folks don’t know what social media 1.0 is yet.
To see just how insulated this early adopter set really is, one need look no farther than a FriendFeed search for “stats”. In what what reminded me of show-and-tell from when I was in the first grade, a number of early adopters added links to their “stats”, which FriendFeed provides to show “who you like” and “who likes you”. Some examples are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. A brief glance will show you very quickly that there is an unhealthy groupthink going on here, with tremendous overlap in who is interacting with whom. And some of these folks are losing their perspective.
For example, discussion about the Plurk beta made its way around the early adopters over the weekend. Plurk has an interesting visual take on microblogging and is worth a look for sure. Within hours, Robert Scoble declared it a “fail”, citing that they had better “stay up”. Never mind the fact that Plurk wasn’t even on their production server or just giving a social media application, goodness, a few days before passing judgement. What made this comment even more bizarre was the fact that Scoble is the biggest user of Twitter, a product that does the opposite of “stay up” and went so far as to blame him, its biggest user and evangelist, for their woes. (Which played out like an episode of Days of Our Lives in the early adopter scene).
Which brings me to today’s meme, Mixx’s publicity push regarding their recent traffic numbers. Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch’s headline was “The CNN.com Effect: Mixx More Than Doubles Visitors In May To Nearly One Million”. But Marshall Kirkpatrick, a very smart analyst and a good writer, came to a different conclusion.
The title of Marshall’s post was “Mixx: One Year In, Someone’s Dropping the Ball”. Matthew Ingram’s headline was “Mixx: Growing, but is it enough?”
The critical data point is that Mixx’s traffic showed a 3x increase in visitors in May, thanks to partnerships with CNN.com and other mainstream media news sites. Marshall’s point was that Mixx has a far smaller crowd than Digg, and while that’s true, it’s another example of the shortsighted outlook in the echo chamber.
Mixx is approaching 1 million users in their first year and yet that’s “dropping the ball”? Even though Digg had 800,000 users well over a year after their launch?
As an entrepreneur working on a social media application, through some early user interaction testing, I’ve found out first hand just how far behind the other 89% really is. As Reddit founder Steve Huffman said in the Washington Post’s Mixx coverage:
“The vast majority of people don’t know what social news is; they still get their news from the mainstream media. This space and this industry still have a long, long way to go.”
Most appalling to me about the coverage is the fact that Mixx has a kick-ass product and seems to be executing well. From a pure technology standpoint, their application blows each of their competitors in the social news space clear out of the water. It’s has a better design, is more functional and has a set of APIs. From a business perspective, they have deep experience and connections in both the online and offline news worlds which has translated into key partnerships (which have had a dramatic affect in a short amount of time) and they’ve done all of this with 1/3 the cash and 1/3 the employees of Digg. The Mixx team should be very happy with where they are.
Both Sarah Perez and Colin Walker posted earlier today about taking a step back from the social media echo chamber. Both of their posts noted that it’s important to step back from this giant fire hose to gain the perspective necessary to see the big picture.
So back away from the mouse, go outside and smell the roses. Entrepreneurs need to start thinking about how these tools and applications will (or won’t) be adopted by that other 89% because without their adoption, critical mass cannot be reached.
Josh Koppelman contributed a now-famous post in May of 2006 about the Techcrunch 53,651. It referred to startups whose target market included those 53,651 early adopters who were subscribed to Techcrunch’s RSS feed at that time. It’s worth pointing out that number is close to 1 million two years later, but the point remains. We are at the very beginning of social media adoption and most, if not all, judgments now are premature.
Edit: Right after I posted this, I saw that Alexander van Elsas has posted a different take on the same topic. What I call the “Social Media Echo Chamber” he calls the “Social Media Circus”, but I think we both agree on some of the underlying themes. His post is very much worth a read.