Social is Dead, Long Live Social

“We were social before we were humans” — Peter Singer

The power of social is undeniable. And now in the internet’s teenage years, the power of social media is undeniable. Social can can win, lose and make a national election unpredictable. It has a love-fake relationship with the news. It leads financial markets. It regurgitates culture at breakfast.

The velocity with which social media has been changing is astonishing. From audiences, like Snapchat’s, which has been moving from younger to older Americans…. To channels, and the accelerated effort to launch new features, like WhatsApp’s Status, Instagram’s Multiple photos, Facebook Bot Updates, Snapchat Drone rumors.

The pace brands adapted to social differs as well. But social media, though — as we knew it and as it was promised to us — is now dead.

Social is dead

It promised an accessible community of fans… But we have an organic reach of 1% to 5%, with all channels going into the same direction. Well understood by now, it’s pay to play, a new type of media even if Zuck doesn’t admit.

It promised a quality and transparent dialogue… But we keep failing to scale volume of customer interactions with quality and capacity to train social professionals. And this is accelerated by the challenge to manage multi-platforms.

It promised conversion and clear ROI… But social commerce never took off as expected, at least in the occident. Transactions ended up not coming to social, but rather social going towards transactions (see Venmo). And “drive traffic” became a KPI, but a blind ROI for most brands.

It promised effective and “free” analytics tools… But the dynamics of new formats like one-to-one messaging, ephemeral content, live, stories, and the lack of clarity on what “engagement” means, especially on video views, made the industry skeptical.

The promise is still alive, but it requires different skills. The hard lesson provoked us to adapt. Social professionals are more mature and moving from a specialist to a generalist roles. Social used to be incubated as an area to be understood, now it should be everyone’s responsibility.

Long live social

These changes made us more resilient professionals and gave meaning to social by design. Today, social is not as hyped as it was, but even more important because it lives in other capabilities. Social became viral again.

Social is a behavior… We like to share our stories and experiences. Content that is worth sharing is social content, and the media or format doesn’t matter. From the traditional feed to VR, we need to design content to help people share their stories and experiences.

Social is influence… The science behind influencers kept evolving since Everett Rogers. Today, it’s not just about celebrities sharing an #ad. An influencer from a niche community is just as if not more important, helping to develop content, educating people and providing a clear “Return On Influence.”

Social is an intelligence… Data is the opium of social. And it’s getting more sophisticated. It goes beyond social media channels, can give us authentic behavioral insights, and new ways to reach people in a useful way. From awareness, to retargeting and CRM.

Social is live… From hardware to content, TV has changed so much that we cannot say that social saved it, as some discussions presume. But, if there’s one thing that keeps traditional TV and broadcasting relevant, it’s our social desire for live entertainment.

The new type of social is hard to define, we cannot measure it by channel metrics anymore, nor can it be pinpointed with a clear benchmark or analogy.

A good framework for thinking is physics, to boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy.

— Elon Musk

We were social before we were humans, and social is a fundamental truth. The ability to adapt this truth to different formats, technologies and medias is where lies the challenge for design and proves the power of social.

There are so many more social topics to be discussed and it’s impossible to cover the, all. If there’s anything you have a ❤ for, feel free to comment on this social network. Thanks for reading!

Thanks to @SilentMuzak for the proofread.