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.

Omnipresence

People can now live in an omnipresent way through micro-blogging and life-casting services. Taking a look at Twitter’s compete numbers, even if the numbers are not accurate, we see that the number of unique visitor to their organic site has almost doubled in the last 3 months.

Twitter’s simple capability of telling those who are “following” us what we are doing through web or mobile sms updates limited to 140 characters has enabled our generation to be omnipresent. This is not just a Twitter phenomena, as a host of other services are capitalizing on the insight that there is an insatiable desire to self market and to share with the world what one is doing. Furthermore, there is an equal insatiable desire to know what others are doing. I would contend that what drives most facebook users back to the site multiple times a day is to refresh their home page to get updates on what their friends are doing. Thus, although facebook has many other capabilities, it appears that the simple text based updates on what one is doing is the reason most come back to the site several times a day. Personally, I find myself refreshing my fb homepage on the web multiple times a day for this reason and on my iPhone while stuck at traffic lights while driving.

These sort of services that enable us to be omnipresent are being classified as micro-blogging or life-casting services. There is justin.tv which allows users to create channels and share with others anything that is on their mind via a webcam. There is tumblr and zannel which are a sort of multimedia twitter. I believe we are still at the infancy of the omnipresence insight and there is much room left for entrepreneurs to come up with novel ventures that will make the process of self marketing by sharing what we are doing easier and the consumption of the media we share richer.

Skimming versus Thinking

I have meant to start writing this blog for some time now. However, I never seem to have enough time to sit down and think through my thoughts and write them out. I have been asking myself how it could be that I find myself in a world where I have access to so much information, yet I don’t seem to have the time to actually sit down and analyze the information that has come my way. My good friend recently sent me a piece from the Atlantic that captures the root cause of my inability to slow down and reflect enough to write. The piece by Nicholas Carr sheds light into a generation that has moved away from deep reading to skimming. A generation that has come of age with the search engine and hyperlinks, that chooses to fly through skimming bits of information without stopping long enough to truly absorb the information that has come their way. The article points out that we are becoming like pancakes, spread wide and thin, but lacking the depth that comes with great analysis of the information we consume. The valley has become a poster child for this sort of information consumption. Personally, between the many blogs I subscribe to, the amount of emails that come my way, the number of messages on my SNSs that need responses, and the work I do in building startups, I find little time to stop and reflect.

The article asks a very good question, Is Google Making us Stupid? The simple answer is of course not, but I have to agree with the article that the way our brains think is certainly changing. In the few minutes that I have spent writing this blog post, I have also refreshed my SNSs, read my feeds, and read/answered a couple of emails. In a world of information abundance, our brains are being programmed to skim information and make connections with other pieces of information versus thinking deeply and abstractly about one thing. We are becoming a generation of system thinkers that see connections between things and pieces of information, versus deep analyzers of specific problems. The challenge we face is how to stop our addiction for more information, and instead think more thoroughly about one problem.

Economically, search engines want us to click through as many pages as possible to maximize page views and ad impressions. However, the question to ask is whether there is a better way for our brains to consume this vast amount of information. Can the information be presented in a way that makes us think versus click and skim. That is, can a new host of startups evolve the internet to once again reshape our brains into thinkers versus skimmers?

This blog will represent my white space, where I will stop in weekly to take time away from clicking and skimming to think through all the information I absorbed via meetings, blogs, conversations, etc. over the previous week and to share my perspective on some of those subjects.