Do You Remember Napster?
A few weeks ago, I published the following article, Oh Twitter, How I Once Loved Thee. The article is about push versus pull marketing and how social media created trackable engagement channels between organizations and consumers. It also explains how over the past ten years, the demise of service features offered by Twitter, made it less valuable to marketers.
For the past couple of years, another push versus pull phenomenon has been building and it reached its tipping point last week during the Democratic National Convention (DNC). In addition to issuing thousands of press passes, the DNC invited 200 content creators (previously referred to as influencers). Some legacy media were not too happy about it, including comedians like Stephen Colbert. Check out his bit about Carlos Eduardo Espina speaking at the DNC. During his speech, Espina mentions that he graduated from law school and that he’s a content creator with 14 million followers, which Colbert makes fun of here at 2:24. Demeaning Espina’s accomplishments and followership is where legacy media completely misses the point and the opportunity, much like recording companies dismissed Napster.
Espina is not an influencer trying to get sponsorships to sell products no one needs. He’s a subject matter expert (sme) and a community activist doing work on immigration. He creates bilingual content and uses social media as a tool to reach the communities he serves, and his content is accessible to all who search for it. 14 million followers are significant, in contrast, Stephen Colbert Late Night has 1.7 million, which is not too shabby.
Like Espina, a majority of the creators invited to the convention are smes and create videos that speak to politics, like Gen Z Texas Activist Olivia Julianna, who has a remarkable rise to online prominence that I encourage you to check out. But, there were also a few traditional influencer-type content creators, like Indian American lifestyle creator Vidya Gopalan, who interviewed Kamala Harris, something the legacy media has complained about not having access to do.
Viewers are going to and following content creator accounts, looking for them, and looking to engage with them, which is why the Harris team invited content creators to the convention. The campaign is listening to the conversations that are happening in social media (pull), which isn’t easily done with legacy media (push). As I mentioned in my Twitter, social media engagement is the game changer in marketing. Channels will come and go, especially if they are not managed correctly, but full-on access to engaging content is here to stay.
Many legacy media outlets are having issues staying afloat, competition is fierce, it often seems to audiences that ratings trumps content (pun absolutely intended). But like all other businesses and lifeforms, you must adapt or die. Don’t malign content creators, it’s simply hypocritical when every news outlet and media personality has a social media team repurposing their recorded content for social media channels. It’s very likely that news outlets are reaching many more consumers through social channels than through traditional ones, so consider prioritizing the socials. And once you do this, listen to your audience.
Twenty-plus-odd years ago, when Napster came out, it was absolutely revolutionary, and definitely illegal to have full access to unlicensed streaming music (content). Was it bad for artists? Yes. Did they lose money? Yes! Did we stream music anyway? Yes! Did any big music publisher listen to its customers and attempt to work with Napster, or buy it to create a new platform to meet consumers not only where they wanted to be but where they were already going? No! If you’re old enough, you’ll remember who did, iDo. Hey legacy media, there’s an opportunity here, you just need to be bold enough to collaborate because we’re not going back.