Social Media Is Great!

How far could social media go in 5 years? Dug out this 2005 issue of Businessweek today when I was cleaning the house. At that time, blogs were something new to watch out for; online video sites like Youtube had just been born on the web, and they did not even make the cover.

Today is Youtube’s five year anniversary, a lot of celebration is going on all over the web for this historic milestone in the social media era. It was amazing how quick the growth of social media was, and it was accelerated by the development of emerging communication technologies. And in the short time since social media has hit the mainstream, several brands have quickly established themselves as leaders in their respective categories: Facebook dominates social networking, while Youtube has been crowned the absolute destination for people to share online videos. I have also seen people commemorating this day by reviewing many “firsts” within Youtube: the first Youtube video to be uploaded, the first commenters on Youtube, and all sorts of other remarkable Youtube videos being dug out and marveled in this special day.

With what it has achieved in the past, Youtube is ambitiously transforming itself from being an incubator and host of seconds-long amateur videos, to being the hub of future web TV by trying to host more professional and also monetizable video content. I previously wrote a post about this topic when Youtube announced several months ago its new expansion plan to host more professional video content.

For a generation growing up on the web, the line between watching video content hosted on TVs and content hosted on web platforms have been quite blurred. Like most of my peers, I get my daily dose of video content, amateur or professional, online.  My professor Zach has also disabled his cable subscription after he got used to watching all his desired TV shows on Hulu. As long as Youtube can tackle copyright issues and find a way to live with professional content producers, I am positive it will have a bright future to be everyone’s new TV in coming years. Especially given that its parent company Google has ambitions and has taken action to bring the web to traditional TV boxes, Youtube will almost surely be the platform that will bridge computers and TV sets.

For example, Financial Times yesterday just reported that Google, Intel and Sony were going to work together to bring “a significant breakthrough into consumer electronics and the broadcast industry this week with the launch of a “Smart TV” platform.” On the wings of this irreversible  web invasion of the television, Youtube, while absorbing all the traditional TV content into its platform, can now build a path to the TV box and become the most popular channel there!

Youtube has been one of the most important inventions on the web in the 21st century, and the changes Youtube have brought to the web and to our lives are truly revolutionary. It smashed the distance and power hierarchy in video production, and it has turned video into a new global language that everybody could use to speak to each other. While Youtube has unleashed the power from professional storytellers to the crowd, it has brought even more opportunities to the professional storytellers for years to come.

And finally, I want to use director Jon M. Chu’s story with Youtube to end this post. Jon’s story is about how a professional storyteller took the challenges and opportunities brought by Youtube, and invited Miley Cyrus and people all over the world to speak the same language about dance on this new platform. It is a one of the many great stories happening on Youtube everyday, and makes me confident that Youtube will see even greater success in the next five years.

I ran across this video on this post-final Saturday morning, and I think it demonstrates a classic way to tell the story of your brand. During the 5-minute video, I was filled with suspense and totally pulled into the misty Scottish highlands by the compelling string music and the single camera tracking shot. I really felt like I was there, taking a walk with Robert Carlisle the whole time…how about you?

Over the past couple of years, it’s been pretty clear that online video can be used for so many interesting purposes. YouTube has allowed amateurs everywhere to share music videos, funny videos, creative mash-ups, and all sorts of user-created content. Hulu has provided pretty high-quality, on-demand professional TV episodes. News sites like CNN and the New York Times have used online videos to enhance news reports. But one of my favorite uses of online video has to be TED. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, and Design”, and it is a non-profit group dedicated to “Ideas worth spreading”. They organize conferences all over the world every year with speakers like Bill Gates, Al Gore, and Chris Anderson, to discuss new ideas relating to technology, science, business, and all sorts of global issues. And even though TED conferences are difficult to get into, they make their conference videos available online, and these are really thought-provoking discussions that are totally worth your time.

For example, this following TED video is a speech given by Tim Berners-Lee. He literally helped create the world wide web 20 years ago, and now he discusses what he thinks his current project, which he hopes will “do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.” It’s so cool to hear him talk about what it was like building the web 20 years ago, and how he originally wanted to make it easier to share documents. And then now we hear his vision of creating a web where raw, linked data is the core functionality. He encourages the audience to yell, “Raw data now!” I think having more and more linked data available on the web could make it easier for scientists to tackle certain issues, but I’m really curious what the privacy implications are for so much openness and shared data on the web. It could definitely make finding certain information easier, but what kind of privacy safeguard would we have? Who would regulate something like that? And how would we determine what format raw data is presented in?

News came out last week that social ecommerce site Groupon has received $1.35 million in funding from venture capitalist firm D.S.T, and has also received an evaluation of over $1 billion. Considering Twitter received its $1 billion valuation 3 years after it was founded, and Facebook received such a valuation after 2 years, Groupon’s $1 billion valuation after only one and a half a year after its creation may mark the coming of a collective-buying age. On Groupon, users can receive daily discounts of deals from many local services and retail stores if a certain number of people all sign up for the deal. Groupon epitomizes collective behavior as a way to scale, and thus reducing economic costs, so it can strike a win/win situation for both consumers and retailers.

Besides this economically-driven collective behavior on social commerce sites like Groupon, flash mobs are another kind of collective behavior that also demonstrate how collective power can be facilitated and even amplified by social technologies. A week before last Thursday’s Earth Day, I received an Facebook message from a USC student group summoning its members to dress in blue and green to resemble the earth and “flash” for 10 seconds in front of Tommy Trojan at a certain time during Earth Day to show our pride and make a public statement. Interested members could sign up on Facebook and coordinate what color they had decided to wear. I did not join the flash mob, but I heard from several friends who participated that it was a very successful event.

Clay Shirky in his book, Here Comes Everybody, states that today’s adoption of social media can help people self-organize, and therefore reduce the economic costs of organization, and reduce the threshold cost of collective behavior to make it more likely to happen. Flash mobs and collective buying on Groupon are both self-organized collective behaviors that are the beneficiaries of social media technologies; while it is known that the sum of collective individual actions is greater than individual actions taken on their own , modern social media technologies have removed the economic barriers and encouraged more collective voices to bring more power to our society.