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By Matthew Yorke
The torrent of news covering ever-growing uniques, time spent, influence and strategic deals continues unabated in social media. Once you get past all the hype, I believe something fundamentally powerful is happening to the Web: It’s entered a fourth phase in which I believe publishers can better prosper.
So what are the four phases where power and economic success live? Phase one was the era of the ISPs (witness AOL’s merger with Time Warner); phase two heralded the era of portals where Yahoo ruled; phase three is search, Google—do I really need to say more? Though search is still very dominant, the fourth phase is gaining momentum. It’s the era of real-time data where power is dispersed and to some extent sitting on the social platforms such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. But the power lies with the people—yes, individual Web users. So what does this mean for media companies?
Historically, publishers created appealing Web sites and determined what content appeared and when. Along came search, and people had information on demand. Search holds most of the power, as I believe most publishers are getting anywhere between 20% to 40% of their traffic from search.
However, as we move into a world of real-time data, content finds users, and that’s a dramatic shift. This happens through social graphs or networks, and the constant flow of information and links within those graphs. For all the noise on the Web, a social graph via Twitter or Facebook can filter the distractions and take a person to a most-trusted source. People follow others because there is a certain relationship. If someone you follow or a friend comments on and links to a piece of content, you are far more likely to trust that source than an e-mail from a publisher or a random search link from Google.
The search engine companies recognize this, hence the flurry of announcements at the Web 2.0 Summit in October. In the space of a few hours, we learned that Microsoft had inked a deal with Facebook and Twitter to incorporate their links/feeds into Bing's search results. No sooner had that news broken about Bing than Google announced its own agreement with Twitter (but not Facebook, curiously enough). Both Facebook and Twitter will likely make money on the arrangements (nice addition to Twitter’s $1 billion valuation). The impact of these agreements should not be underestimated. Now everyone’s opinions and comments can directly impact search results. Through links and comments, people can use their social graph to influence what we see in search results and what we think about companies, products and services.
A great example of how a publisher is successfully using this new social link economy is huffingtonpost.com. Recently, a story and interview in paidContent.org cited comScore numbers that showed HuffPost had passed washingtonpost.com, wsj.com and latimes.com in traffic. This growth was juiced when HuffPost launched social news with Facebook Connect. The impact: 15% of comments come from Facebook, and 3.5 million visits in September came from Facebook (a 500% increase from January for HuffPost).
This new dynamic offers insight for all publishers into the power of people and the socially linked economy. Since content from many sources matters, publishers have the chance to move from a world of private consumption and one-to-one communication to a world of public consumption and many-to-many communication by leveraging the passion people have for media brands and content. The passion and people power create far more opportunities than threats for risk-taking, aggressive publishers. Power to the people!
Minsider columnist Matthew Yorke is president, Strategic Marketing Services, IDG Communications.
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