Last week, we of the ‘Web Strategies for Storytelling’ course were to blog a few thoughts on social media as stimulated by a couple of notable posts (haha, looks like I’m late to the party!). One was the brilliant Clay Shirky TED presentation from some weeks ago, where he uses the example of the effect of tweeting during and immediately after the Sichuan province earthquake of May 2008 to illustrate the power of social media in organizing and finding ways to supersede old media and government during major events of great social impact. The second was a c|net post about the scaling-back of the failed Microsoft video sharing site Soapbox (now just MSN Video).
So, there’s not a whole lot of connection here between the two articles, but I will do my best… Here you have Microsoft trying to beat early innovators again (aka, YouTube), and flailing, again, a la the Zune or MSN Live Search. And then you have Shirky talking about the amateur, the citizenry, empowering themselves to achieve collective goals. …. I suppose it is very difficult for large corporations to find ways to cash in on the social media phenomenon. Of course, it’s not that Microsoft was trying to become a a part of the cacophony of messages being shared on sites like YouTube with their Soapbox – they were trying to establish a service that did the same thing as YouTube, not communicate. Services come and go, but the format or the purpose which draws users to any service to begin with keeps said formats going – plus a desire to communicate. Right now we all use Twitter, but two years from now we might be micro-blogging with some other service. Point is, we will keep communicating. Microsoft should (and I think they are trying really hard) try to innovate in new areas. Develop new formats, not duplicates. It’s that ‘yet another service’ fatigue, I suppose.
So, to me, that’s what social media can provide: innovation, free, to whatever degree, of the corporation. We don’t need Microsoft to innovate. We can, as Shirky espouses, share, collaborate, and organize for collective action on our own. We can develop our own innovations. And we gravitate to the ‘firsts’, which tend to become the ‘bests’ (aka, the iPod, Google’s search engine, YouTube) and develop brand loyalty because these ‘firsts’ do what we want them to do. Why change? Microsoft should try to make the next big thing, not play catch up.
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Tags: Microsoft, shirky, social media, youtube