Digital You vs. Professional Content

I read a research report from Avenue A Razorfish this past week titled 2008 Digital Outlook. Two themes that resonated with me were 1) the proliferation of the digital you, and 2) the proliferation of self promotion. These themes are completely aligned with my post last week about omnipresence.

I am amazed by the willingness of those participating in the social media phenomenon to share vivid and personal content about themselves. In this space, the lines of personal versus professional are increasingly getting blurred. I use to find myself deciding whether a relationship was a personal one or a professional one, and this decision would influence whether I would connect with an individual on facebook (personal) or Linkedin (professional). Increasingly, I find that the digital me is not something that is personal or professional, but just a digital composition of me and that I only need one platform to manage this (is Linked in trouble?). Social networks have become a vehicle to self market, and people are using such services to self promote for both personal and professional purposes.

That said, what I struggle with is whether there is a business in the proliferation of the digital you or self promotion. facebook has struggled to monetize on a platform with 120M+ users. Additionally, I read posts this past week on blogs that discussed the limited monetization of content on YouTube which is predominantly user generated content as compared to say hulu which serves professional content and is managed by NBC/Fox. While YouTube streamed close to 4B videos last month, hulu streamed only 80M but has been able to monetize those streams far more effectively than YouTube because the content engages users for a longer duration and far more actively.

The conclusion I draw is that while the digital you is fun and we will certainly scroll through and see what our friends are posting, we will not engage in the content long enough or actively enough for large scale advertising revenue to kick in. While I may watch a video on hulu for 30 minutes, my attention span on a YouTube video or my facebook feeds is in the seconds. I quickly scroll through my facebook feeds to get a quick snapshot of my friends activities and neglect any advertising that may be presented to me. Similarly, I watch maybe 30 seconds to 1 minute of YouTube videos that come my way. The quality of content is what drives user engagement and I believe it is professional content or content of quality that keeps users on a site long enough to click on advertising. While social media, the digital you, and self promotion are fun and keep us connected, they are certainly not engaging us in the same manner that professional content does. Quality versus quantity comes to mind, and although facebook's 120M users and YouTube's 4B video streams last month are impressive, the quality of the content is simply not there to drive significant magnetization. This may change, but for now, the digital you is more fun than big business.