John Battelle's Search Blog Marketers: Your Role In Social Discourse Is Critical

Programs like Twitter's Amplify finally combine the power of a platform’s scale, data, and precision with the marketers’ responsibility to support editorial’s crucial role in social discourse.

Audience arbitrage on platforms has even more destructive attributes. Because media buyers have outsourced their audience acquisition to either the media company or the platform itself, the marketer becomes disconnected from the context of its audience. The context and meaning that holds all brands together is lost. Media companies, pressed by ever... See more

Media companies found themselves increasingly subject to the whims of the platforms’ algorithms and business models. They replicated a Packaged Goods Media model on top of the platforms, and discovered – shocker! – that they no longer owned the audiences they were trying to sell to marketers. Instead, they had to buy audience from the platforms, an... See more

The fact that we’re even having to ask that question shows the problem: unlike in the newspaper business and in the broadcast business, social media has no separate sphere that’s divorced from profit maximization.

Over the past ten years, media companies have responded to their loss of audience by creating “viral” editorial that performs well inside the platform’s engagement-at-all-costs ecosystem. Predictably, however, quality editorial – the context journalists create for a living – rarely qualifies as viral.