My Social Dilemma (Part Two): It Wasn't Always This Way
Conversations around social media, especially on the heels of The Social Dilemma, center around its toxicity.
It’s easy to dunk on and point out it’s flaws.
How it has the uncanny ability to fuel rage and exacerbate polarization.
How do I personally feel about it after choosing to start my career and stake a portion of my livelihood in social?
l take a similar stand that some of the interviewees in the documentary did. It wasn’t always this toxic.
“When we were making the like button, our entire motivation was ‘can we spread positivity and love in the world?’ The idea that fast forward to today and teens would be getting depressed when they don’t have enough likes or it could be leading to political polarisation was nowhere on our radar.”
The Initial Promise of Online Communities
My first agency job was as a community manager. Literally, a marketing strategist tasked with building community around different brands. It sounds like a laughable term now but in the early days of social, this was a genuine idea. You could build a community around just about anything.
Side note: Ironically, a problem today is that is now you can still build a community….around literally anything. If you genuinely believe birds aren’t real and are actually spy devices by the government, you can find a community around that.
One of my clients at the time was a major pet nutrition brand. We were building an online community around dog lovers and making those brand pages where you came for advice, comradery and possibly even carefully curated entertainment around dog ownership. It was a lot of fun. People loved their pets…I mean loved their pets. I helped our client provide an online space (via a brand page on social) to nurture that love of animals, use that as a bonding moment with fans of their products and ultimately build more trust with our client’s customers.
I had an incredibly rewarding occupation to be able to provide a bright spot to a consumer’s day, help them potentially meet a need all while being able to serve a client at the same time. We were able to replicate positive social experiences across many brands at the agency I worked at, from Dove Ice Cream to Chick-fil-A. We built online communities focused on both the fans’ devotion to the brands’ products and the overlapping values of both parties.
Selling Out The Attention Economy
Brands continued to spend large amounts of time and resources on sharpening their social media toolkits.
Why?
Because those platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc) were fine tuning how well they captured the attention of their users. Hundreds of millions of them…BILLIONS even. Those platforms not only had a critical mass of users.
“There are only two industries that call their customers “users”: illegal drugs and software”
More importantly - they had those users’ attentions.
Attentions that were being diverted from mediums where brands had previously invested vast marketing resources. Consumers weren’t staring at the sign at the train station because they had their phone out. They were fast forwarding through commercials or using commercial breaks to skim their social media news feeds.
But was this a bad thing?
Instead of push advertising and forcing their way in front of a potential customer, brands had to pivot to focusing more on a “pull approach” to marketing. To start conversations and “build communities” around brands. Was it so bad that people were glaring at their phones instead? This focus on engagement was a healthier approach to marketing, right?
I agree it was. For a bit.
Brands have always competed in the attention economy. Social media didn’t invent that. In the new attention economy, if brands wanted to get in front of people’s eyeballs, these emerging tech platforms were (and continue to be) the way to do it.
As more money was spent on those platforms, those platforms had to consistently reinvent themselves to become more and more addictive to keep that revenue stream alive. If they weren’t dominating a user’s attention, those platforms were gathering less data and ultimately decreasing value for those who paid their bills: advertisers.
“We’re the product. Our attention is the product being sold to advertisers.”
The early days of social media were a lot of fun. Being a community manager and social media strategist seemed like the one of the coolest jobs to have in the world. In some respects, it really was.
I would say that social media largely remained a net positive during those golden days. Awareness around important social topics saw the light of day that may not have otherwise. The ability to have a larger share of voice as an individual or scrappy brand was democratized, albeit briefly. Yes, there were always trolls but I felt like they were at a minimum.
I, like the inventors of things like the Like button interviewed in The Social Dilemma, truly believed social media was the most powerful force for good.
Like them, I too was naïve. The people I was trying to engage on behalf of my client brands were the products. Brands were selling the products to consumers…but those consumers were the products themselves being sold back to the brands by social media platforms. That product (the users) were only as valuable as the attention they dedicated to their social feeds.
So how did social platforms continue to reinvent themselves to help brands under the banner of “improved user experience”? Algorithms. Algorithms that rewarded content for high engagement.
And all engagement is good engagement….right? Wrong. And I think that’s where things started taking a turn.