The social media hype is wearing off

The internet is transforming itself into a churchyard of abandoned Facebook pages, empty Twitter accounts, dead blogs and ghost communities. We are starting to react negatively to messages about ‘presence’, ‘transparency’, and ‘user involvement’. We have taken all the good things about social media to heart, and we don’t need to hear anything more about it now. A new trend is ‘cross-media’ – developed in the game and movie industry which have had luck with telling complex stories, creating multiple entry points and retaining interest across different media. Two examples are the Harry Potter and Star Wars universes.
af Jesper Balslev
Social media?
Okay, let’s say this straightaway: there is no such thing as ‘social media’ any more. The definition is no longer usable. There is media. They’ve all surrendered the ‘social’ and tagged on an effective and systematised distribution network of personal declarations – ‘likes’. The focal point of much of our media consumption has become the Facebook wall (or the Twitter stream, if you are one of the 50,000 Danish tweeters employed in the communications business).
 
It’s here we begin and end our consumption of news, stories and press releases, and for many of us it has become the method to sort through the tidal waves of information: to filter information through our friends, who are people we trust, and who are not looking to sell us anything, as such.
 
Apart from a few artsy fartsy flash sites, all media has bought into this distribution model. You will have noticed that Facebook's like button is now present in virtually every form of online communication, and you ain’t seen nothing yet. Soon you will also see the like buttons in your TV set, and the way it looks and your choice of programme will be guided by your social network. At some point when we have gotten used to ‘like’ physical objects, these will also start to invade the cityscape. Three of your friends like the exhibition in St Nicholas’ Church. Five of your friends like the black Adidas sneakers. Seven of them like The Ambassador 3 by Mads Brügger – you’ll see this when you're standing there undecided in the lobby of the cinema.
 
Henry Jenkins’ 2006 book described the meeting between the new and old media. Today it’s more about the clash between mainstream media and the distribution tools that social media have developed.
 
The convergence has come
In 2006 the media analyst Henry Jenkins published the book Convergence Culture – where old and new media collide. The book mapped a new media landscape, where grassroots and mainstream media collides – with lots of unpredictable consequences. It has been a turbulent time since the publishing of the book, where social media has turned everything upside down. The readers write the news. Writers have become self-publishers. Crazy night owls mash classics or are filming their laughing babies, bands release their music for free and directors finance their films on kickstarter.com. All this has weird consequences and surprising audiences. The middlemen are finally realising they need to figure this out before they become redundant.
 
We’ve all seen the same cases at the same conferences. Today it’s not about a collision between media, but a total fusion between mainstream media and the distribution tools the social media have developed.
 
Convergence Culture is also about technical convergence. All media come together on mobile media, and of course there is the almost historical experience some of us have had with the iPad. Here, for the first time in human history, we can effortlessly consume all types of media: music, films and books. And while we’re at it we can share our experiences of the product with our friends.
 
At Huffington Post it’s just as much about the users’ sharing as about the content itself. For example the ability to read the articles other viewers have read is a central theme.
 
If you’re in doubt about the value of social sharing elements, then take a look at media like TechCrunch and Huffington post (both recently sold to AOL for astronomical figures). Apart from having good content they’ve achieved their success by constantly innovating on their readers’ urge to share. A typical article on Huffington Post consists of 10 per cent content and 90 per cent buttons to share on the readers favourite network and to visualise your network’s relationship with the media product. Danes can try this little game: find an unknown object to share on one of these sites. Five years later this element will pop-up on the online version of Ekstra Bladet. And then, after a lot of scepticism and critique, on Danish media sites like dr.dk, gyldendal.dk and smk.dk.
 
The fusion of TV and internet
The great beast in the convergence is the fusion between TV and internet. From around October 2011 you could buy Apple TV in Denmark. At first it takes a bit of getting used to, to go from TV’s laid-back experience to actively seeking out the good TV moments by using the remote as a search tool. But when Google and others come out with their versions of internet-distributed TV, all the share buttons will start populating the programming. In much the same way as the music-sharing service Spotify will affect iTunes. 27 of your friends liked exactly 5.27 minutes of the debate between Helle Thorning and Lars Løkke at the exact moment where Lars did his gorilla walk and she cracked up laughing. When the iPad application Flipboard’s UX designers have sorted out the internet TV user interface and implemented the social algorithms, it will be like this: we watch TV and rent movies.
 
In a future not far from now people will start ‘liking’ TV moments – the internet is beginning to influence the TV media more and more.
 
From communicator to channel custodian
We have accepted these dynamics and thus, unfortunately, reduced many professional communicators to sad text leftovers whose expertise consists of persuading the customer to also be here ‘where the audience is’, create accounts, have logins and passwords and spend a lot of time mailing information to customers because they don’t want to search their inbox (or didn’t know the account had been registered).
 
There has also been created a sea of slow-going accounts where nothing is really happening, and that we can point the fingers at – just look at Nestlé’s Facebook page. The strategy is only the mere presence.
 
This was not the vision we subscribed to when we entered this profession. The beautiful vision we subscribed to was to view the media as an orchestra we could conduct, to perceive communication as something creative and fun. The problem is that we really didn’t have any methods to transform this vision to anything practically applicable.
 
A new method is needed
The same Henry Jenkins that wrote Convergence Culture is the one closest to being able to formulate a method for strategic communication across media. He does this in his article The Seven Core Principles of Transmedia Storytelling. I’ll try and turn this article into a transmedia checklist, to use for the distribution of your media product.
 
We have to remember that technological development constantly scales the canvas, and that it will most likely continue to do so. Ten years ago you could sell the idea to spend lot of money on a well-designed blog, or a forum, or a wiki. Or on a crowd-sourced film (remember www.considerdenmark.dk – price DKK14 million).
 
But this is a strategy that has proved to be infertile and cognitively stressful. How to coordinate the blog and the Facebook page? What about pictures? Should we use WordPress' own gallery function or place the pictures on Flickr? What about that Instagram? And what about the expensive, branded video solution we bought? Should we really scrap that in favour of YouTube?
 
Jenkins’ answer is to step back and devise a transmedia (and in fact a media-subordinating) communication strategy – a scalable strategy that emphasises storytelling techniques rather than the technical issues.
 
The seven principles of transmedia storytelling
Before we look closer at the now-famous seven principles, we need to establish a basic premise: use 90 per cent of the given budget to simplify the narrative elements. What is our brand in a sentence or a picture? What do we stand for? Think of why Marvel Comics and their super heroes do so well in transmedia storytelling. They use simple, highly recognisable characters whose story we can quickly pick up. It is a big problem for most businesses/organisations that they do not do this work before they communicate. We can confuse the media landscape’s open spaces with an obligation to also convey all the available information.
 
So, the basis for a successful transmedia venture is a simple story that we vary for each new media that pops up. If you can make it a battle between good and evil, I can already now reveal that you’re on the high ground. The simpler you are in your core story, the stronger you stand in the fight against complexity.
 
Principle #1: Create engagement
(Spreadability vs. Drillability)
 
Make it possible for your audience to share (link to) the product – (spreadability). This is a no-brainer. Drench it with every sharing element you can find. Copy it to YouTube’s user interface. It increases the spread and increases the cultural value of communication.
 
At the same time make it possible for your consumers to immerse themselves (drillability). Think DVD bonus features. Attach some pictures from the filming session. Or a napkin from the brainstorming session with notes.
 
Principle #2: Systematic distribution
(Continuity vs. Multiplicity)
 
This has to do with the simple, basic story we talked about above – one that can be easily recognised and picked up. Use new media to create parallel universes based on the basic story (multiplicity). Create a Twitter account for L'Easy Peter’s girlfriend and a Facebook account for a (fictitious) happy L'Easy-customer. Jenkins' point is that we enjoy retellings of a familiar theme.
 
Principle #3: Give something that consumers can take into their everyday lives
(Immersion vs. Extractability)
 
Or, as Jenkins describes it: “the perceived relationship between the transmedia fiction and our everyday experiences”. The story must be one that we can get lost in, but also one that we can carry out in reality. Think T-shirts, coffee cups and funny hats. It is in fact also a no-brainer. That is what the film industry calls merchandising.
 
Principle #4: Take the starting point in a finite world on a map
(World Building)
 
Henry Jenkins quotes a Hollywood screenplay writer:
 
“When I first started, you would pitch a story, because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character, because a good character could support multiple stories, and now, you pitch a world, because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.”
 
Come up with a world that constitutes the graphical representation and hotbed of your story. This is why Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and the TV series Lost work so great as transmedia stories. They take place in confined worlds and this creates comfort and recognisability, but also ensures the creator tremendous flexibility in going forward. If I were a TV producer on Danish series Dagpengeland (‘Benefits Land’), I would work hard on the ‘land’ (country) part. I would spend time drawing a map of the kitchenette, the hallway, the meeting rooms, Jean Reginald de la France’s office, the building’s neighbourhood, etc. Then I would make this map into a landmark of the myriad stories to which the concept links. I think it’s this world-building technique that makes Danish online universe for kids Oline so appealing, for example.
 
World Building is a concept that emphasises effects by giving the virtual world a graphical representation. Here it is used with the popular series ‘Lost’.
 
Principle #5: Seriality
Break your story into bite-sized chunks. Our attention-span on social ... whoops, on media is limited to approximately two minutes and 40 seconds. But this is now a new technique. Many great works have come out in serial format, before they became classic works. Charles Dickens mastered this form, and the advertising industry of course can fully master 30-second episodes.
 
Principle #6: Subjectivity
Any story can be varied indefinitely, as long as it is associated with one of the stories’ recognisable themes. Jenkins mentions, for example, a new Project Runway franchise, but this time told from the models’ perspectives.
 
Principle #7: Invite to action
(Performance)
 
When we’ve bought in to the story, we want to play with it. This is what online people call to ‘mash up’. For example, when Mad Men makes the ‘Mad Men Yourself’ tool available, where you can build avatars of yourself in fancy Mad Men aesthetic.
 
AMC has been able to make Mad Men work on different media platforms. Here is an example of how you can “Mad Men Yourself”.
 
Conclusion – a fresh approach?
The above is only a sketchy review of Henry Jenkins’ article and just one contribution to the emergence of a cross-media discipline. The article can be accused of being tautological, since it only comments on what successful transmedia stories have made to work by chance, and repeats it in more academic language. But I think Jenkins offers a fresh way to think about the message strategically, and he gives us a language for re-thinking communication – in a way that transcends the individual media. And if you are creative enough, I think, you could use the method even on The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration’s yearly reports. In any case this would produce some noticeable communication.
 
Replace stress with games
What has us stressed with all the new media has been the idea of ??repeatedly having to reproduce the whole object of our communication in a lot of new formats and on platforms we are trying to make behave like an informational website – and in the same brand aesthetics. This is something we must forget about and start seeing new media as an opportunity to vary the basic story – with the possibilities inherent in each new media.
 
Think of each new media as an invitation to create a new angle to your story – but also as an extension, a variation, a playing with the basic story. This also provides another starting point to think about creative communication: a lot of magical things happen when you start to think about classical rhetorical methods cross-media (e.g. Christian Kock’s concepts of economics, reader activation, intensity and contrast).
 

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