PrintLate last month, Forrester released data indicating that the numbers of social media content creators was declining. Specifically, the percentage of people writing blogs, creating videos or producing music is dropping.
While we have always recognized that the number of content creators in health social media is low, some marketing communications initiatives rely on content creators to drive interest and enthusiasm. Will the decline in content creators cause problems for health marketers using social media to drive awareness and behavior change? Or, is this much ado about nothing?
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Content is King
By dharlow on Thursday, October 14, 2010
Anecdotally, folks are moving more and more to short-form social media communication: sharing of previously-created materials via tweet, status update, etc., vs. long-form blogging, etc.
To my mind, a content-rich blog (incl. embedded video) needs to remain the "home base" of any successful social media endeavor -- it can be shared through the short-form channels, but needs to be replenished and refreshed regularly, so any drop in numbers of the folks who actually create that content is bad news. It means that the growing number of shared links will be pointing to a dwindling supply of new content, leading us into a death spiral return to a new status quo effectively equivalent to the ancien regime of static websites. One could argue, on the other hand, that this new status quo is but a way-station on the road to the Next Big Thing, but I haven't heard any more detailed prognostication about what that might be, and I'm not buying.