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

If we want independent and quality editorial to maintain a vital place in our democracy, we have to imagine a new set of relationships between platforms, editorial, marketers and audiences. A promising innovation is already in place at one platform: Twitter.

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.