Wow! What could be more confusing than looking at all those little icons and trying to figure out which ones are really going to make it. You know the ones I’m talking about the tiny little colourful ones in the sidebar, that say things like Digg this and Tweet that, share on Facebook and subscribe to such and such a feed. YouTube, Flikr, MySpace, Orkut etc. There are 225 that I know of and probably hundreds more just bubbling up. But while the social media landscape is relatively young it has matured quickly. There are now only a handful of dominant players; ones who could command the elusive IPO or a billion dollar buyout.
And that is as it should be.
Sound like heresy to advocate consolidation? Choice after all keeps a free market free right? Well too much choice can create confusion on days when you’re in a hurry? When you go to the beer store that wall of 300 types of beer can be a little overwhelming so you go with what you know.
Actually it’s not that there is too much choice, it’s just that it isn’t well organized. Microblogging and virtual worlds have been dumped alongside, media sharing and social networks. We were left with a mess of tiny icons until along came a few who got it. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter inventor Evan Williams. They understood that there was a mess and clearly saw an opportunity for organization. It might not have been a plan for global domination but it helped clean things up a bit.
A Platform. Voila! We have a winner.
Or 3 or 4 of them at least. That’s a whole lot better than 225 tiny icons crammed beside each other. We are left with Twitter and Facebook (and YouTube and LinkedIn and, oh ya that little orange RSS thingy). I like the little Facebook ‘F’ and Twitter ‘T’ . Those who rage against Twitter or who have logged off Facebook permanently probably have other issues with technology. We won’t include them in the debate. They have chosen not to participate.But the rest of us can now see the forest for the trees. And so can the marketers. Money is being made and all is well again…
Something about these new ad execs is remarkably different from the old school though. They look nerdy. Have poor social skills, ironically, and their tools look more like spreadsheets and calculators than paint brushes and cameras. These new ad men sell ‘text’ not glossy 4 colour ads or :30 second masterpieces. They sell highly targeted, pithy messages in black and white 10 point letters. Advertising online is pure science and where mind reading used to be the mystic skill of a good creative director, it’s now more stats and accounting and less joyful expression.
Thankfully, all that creative juice did go somewhere. Nature abhors a vacuum after all. Hovering the cursor over that cold, stark hyperlink and lying just a click of a mouse away is creative Nirvana. Elegant prose punctuated by stunning photography, graphics and thought provoking videos. The brilliant creative minds didn’t fade out after all. They just became web designers.
Graham Newbigging is owner of Esyngen, web design, social media marketing, search engine optimization and mobile web apps for health and wellness organizations.
graham@esyngen.com
www.esyngen.com
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Tags: esyngen, facebook, Social Media, twitter, Web Design
