If you’re like me and commute to work on a subway in NYC, you’ve seen the Dentyne “Make Face Time” ad campaign. They recently created TV spot versions of them as well. It’s tough to miss on the E-train, where I seem to run into it on every car I enter. The gist of the campaign’s content is “disconnect and concentrate on real world interactions”.
What strikes me is not the typical media pandering to a hip trend (which seems to have annoyed other New Yorkers) but that it echoes my feelings that the value of social networks, as focused communities, is on a downward spiral of ever increasing dilution. And as is the case with humans and pollution in the real world, we ourselves are responsible for our own fate.
Social networks, as focal points of specific interests and issues, continue have great promise. Niche communities offer a wealth of expertise and insight around their focal point. The fact that there are an enormous number of diverse networks is daunting to some, from the perspective of message distribution, i.e. propagating their message or content out to a presence within these social networks. I think these folks are missing the point, though. To me social networks are about the audience, the audience being niche communities focused around a particular interest. Its’ the engagement of this audience and their mutual participation in the creation and enhancement of content around this interest that create value for me (and I suspect for the rest of the audience)
Yet folks like me, in an industry built around Web consulting and application development, are currently obsessed with the creation of tools that enable someone to blast their content indiscriminately to as many social networks as possible. I’m talking about tools like ping.fm socialthing and hellotxt – Yikes! A new communication tool or medium emerges, and we immediately corrupt it. General-purpose content blasted to multiple social networks has no value for me; I’m looking for specifics for my niche. Quality, not quantity, is important. Unless you’re shaping something for the particular audience of which I am a part, I’m not seeing the value. To me, when you do this, you’re only looking for attention; detracting from, rather than adding to, my experience. That’s wasting my time. Muhammad Saleem has an interesting discussion of this on Mashable with attendant commentary from the peanut gallery. Funny how most of those refuting the issue we both raise are content producers, rather than audience members.
Getting back to Dentyne, and my point. Dentyne encourages you to move away from the shallow, unfulfilling virtual interactions in social networks and interact on a physical, real world basis. All fine and good, but my point is that virtual is OK too, as long as we cut down on the general-purpose crapola, and get back to content meaningful to the audience.
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