English

Posts in English

No Such Thing as Social Media

There’s no such thing as social media.

There’s Facebook, which is eating up what we used to call the Open Web.

Those who speak of “social media” remind me of those who used to tell you that you could submit your site to 100 search engines. Last time I checked, 95% of the traffic I got came from that one search engine whose name replaced the verb to search.

Those who speak of “social media” seem to forget that the largest of these social media sites, currently worth a cool 340 billion USD, actually bought what is now the second or third largest of these “social media” sites for a mere 1 billion USD.

Is Instagram really much more important than what Google Images is compared to Google Search? Maybe – and just maybe, only for those in fashion or sports apparel. Is Twitter of any importance beyond tech companies? What about Pinterest?

And what should my company, a proud maker of dishwater detergent, do on Snapchat?

1 Comment

There Is No Uber Model

There is no Uber model. There is the taxi industry, which is of course a multi-billion dollar business worldwide. Getting you from A to B without using public transportation, if available at all, and without owning or renting a car (or having a friend drive you) is a real service in the real world. If you can do it better thanks to technology, you can beat an industry, the taxi industry, which often seems like it’s stuck in the Seventies.

On the other hand, pizza delivery is not a multi-billion dollar business. At most, it’s an added service available for free (and a tip to the young and poor) from your local pizza joint. In a similar vein, bringing home your fruit and veggies for you is not a business — has everybody really forgotten about Kozmo.com? And if there’s no business to start with, there is very little to “disrupt”, no matter how well-designed your app may be.

And the real news is that the NY Times seems to agree, for once.

2 Comments

Why TV Is Alive and Kicking and Newspapers Instead Are Dead

Because this is not what we mean when we say “TV”.

TV

TV

This, as the caption to this photograph says, is an old-fashioned four legged TV set.

What we really mean by “TV” is the content — you know, the black and white moving pictures of times gone by, the news, the funnies, the sitcoms, the highly polished movies or the computer-generated special effects — that is delivered via the above TV set.

Or via a newer appliance, a computer, a smartphone or an iPad. Because nobody really cares much about the appliance — unless it has a logo of an apple on it, that is.

We’re dealing with a metonymy here. Like when we say: “We drank a bottle”.

– – –

But the same is true for “newspapers”. What we really mean is: the news.

This.

Dunkirk

Dunkirk

Not these.

newspapers

Newspapers

Fair enough. But much more has changed than in the case of moving pictures.

With the move to a new delivery system on the web, newspapers lost most of the revenue they used to make from classified ads to websites that deal exclusively in classified ads.

Advertising suffered a similar downturn. With the move to the web, ads placed against the news went from being the least intrusive and often best performing format of ads available to advertisers to being ads that just don’t work (online banner ads).

Lastly, a large part of the news has moved from the written word to moving pictures.

– – –

TV, instead, is alive and kicking for two reasons: First because, while nobody (except antiquarians, perhaps) cares much about old-fashioned four legged TV sets, we always want more content that informs us, entertains us and lets us lean back and enjoy the show.

Second, because, when done properly, television commercials work. Unlike banners ads, TVCs can create awareness and demand for new products, or increase the demand and sales of products already on the market. That’s right. That’s why companies buy TV ads.

Not because they’re new or cool or they make their companies look hip and “social”.

3 Comments