Darryl Adams,  government worker and internet tragic, argues that social media is just another tube – and ‘social media experts’ merging it with advertising are getting it wrong.

Senator Ted Stevens (R Alaska) was lampooned for his infamous “The Internet is a series of tubes” speech.

He may have been onto something.

One thing that many people on twitter do is promote social media, and their “skill” in navigating it professionally. They heap praise on companies and high profile people who “get it” (that is, use it in a way they feel is appropriate) and lampoon people and companies who “don’t get it”.

For me, social media is just another channel available on the internet, another tube you will.

Look at Twitter as an example. You send 140 characters at a time to every user. Other members of the twitter community can chose to focus on your “tweets” by “following” your profile or by filtering via search teams or “hash tags”.

Is it hard system to learn? Not really; it is Simple Message Service (SMS) on steroids. You’re sending an SMS out to the wild. The effort is for other people finding your messages and focusing on it (again by following or searching).

So Twitter is a data pipe. To make it useful, the users tune it by adding and removing users based on the content or belief systems. Users are filtering the content to suit individual taste.

Facebook is the same. You select people you want to follow and groups you wish to get information on. The people you follow have an option to allow or disallow access to their data, and you have the same control (leaving aside the distressing tendencies of Facebook violating privacy for profit).

Now if you’re supplying content, the skills needed to get your content consumed is the same as most over media. The good news that there is demand for any type of content, from serious political and social debate to fart jokes. The bad news is that you need to make your content appealing in Social Media so that people can actually find it. There is a whole industry that specialises in doing just that: the Advertising Industry.

And for me, that is the issue. Social Media experts are not promoting the technology, or teaching people the skills to develop their self filtering skills. They are trying to merge advertising with social media. By selling social media as another advertising outlet they seek to tap into the large amount of cash the industry commands. By charging for advice on how to promote your content, they seek to expand the people viewing it. This to me is the wrong way. User count is a broken metric, as I would prefer 6 engaged followers than 6000 passive followers. Using number of followers looks impressive, but follower count is meaningless if the content in not what they are after. Too many followers and your content get swamped again, this time with a high noise to signal ratio, buried under a plethora of messages. If I want to produce content, the users who gain value from my content are the people I want following me.

Social Media is just another delivery system of content. It is a progression from email, IRC and websites that create networks of people, with an added bonus of having an outlet that is totally unfiltered. And companies like Google and Microsoft realise what the unfiltered content of social media is worth. These are the companies who will use the data in search, in advertising delivery, in focusing and fine tuning on user needs and desires.

There is no good or bad way to use Social Media. Social Media is a pipe. The value for users is to filter to suite their tastes, and the value for companies is to aggregate and analyse.

But the internet is not a truck. Wise words, Senator Stevens.

Darryl Adams is a government worker and internet tragic. A former IT worker, he still pines for the days of IBM keyboards that go CRUNCH and the glow of green screens.
He can be found on on Twitter, blogging here or on Facebook.

N.B. The views expressed here do not reflect the views of his employer, the ATO.