Media, message, medium – the importance of owning your stream

Posted by Gina Rosenthal in social media | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m not going to have time to get into this as deeply as I’d like to – end of the year stuff at work, holidays, limited energy still (#blamethetruck), all that jazz…y’all know how things go. 🙂 But I need to get some of this out of my brain and hopefully into your stream for discussion.

sauronI wrote a post a few weeks ago called social media is bullshit. As I’m watching Sauron’s eye of the PR and marketing industries turn in the direction of content marketing, I think I was wrong in that post. The tools we collectively refer to as “social media” have been commandeered by traditional media. It is media’s job to shape and control the conversation via medium (tools) and message. And now they have focused on social media for the tool, and real content as the message.

Is this a good or a bad thing? Well, let’s take a very topical example – Santa. It’s that time with the jolly old man gets ready to fly around the world and deliver toys to good little boys and girls. But where does your version of Santa come from? I’m American, did y’all know our version of Santa is actual a media creation?

 

From Santa’s wikipedia article:

Modern ideas of Santa Claus seemingly became canon after the publication of the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (better known today as “The Night Before Christmas”) in the Troy, New York, Sentinel on December 23, 1823. …In this poem Santa is established as a heavyset individual with eight reindeer (who are named for the first time)…… one of the first artists to capture Santa Claus’s image as we know him today was Thomas Nast, an American cartoonist of the 19th century. In 1863, a picture of Santa illustrated by Nast appeared in Harper’s Weekly (it is believed the inspiration for his image came from the Belsnickel). Another popularization came in 1902 in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Images of Santa Claus were further cemented through Haddon Sundblom‘s depiction of him for The Coca-Cola Company‘s Christmas advertising.

But what happens if no one in your family looks like what we’ve been taught Santa looks like? A blogger shared her thoughts on that in a post Santa Claus should not be a white man anymore (she actually recommends a penguin). But, how dare someone challenge the message that the media has primed itself to deliver during this festive time? People have gone nuts, retelling the origins of “St Nick”, telling kids that Santa IS WHITE, and now a plethora of vanilla, make everyone happy posts of multi-cultural Santas.

The machine turned out the content – through all of its channels – to get back to their story of happy holidays. Seriously, go google “is santa white” and click on news. There are thousands of posts, and maybe 3 different stories. Repeated over and over and over. The message – just hush up about feeling left out. That’s a silly opinion. Look, we love all colors of Santas. Now get out there and buy some presents. hohoho

If you want a look at how marketers craft brands, check out Santa’s brand book. It is hilarious, because it so based in the reality of how marketing works. These guide books are necessary in big companies so that everyone communicates the same way, but the problem is when people follow the books as law, and forget that we are supposed to be communicating with people. People don’t talk to each other like that. However, this is how media controls the message via available mediums.

Last thing I want to riff on is the stream. “The stream” are all the ways you can receive in formation with social media tools. Think of twitter, facebook, instagram….all of these rolling news walls where you interact with your family, friends, and companies. The constant flow of  information for you to interact with – this is your social media stream.

The stream is not a medium. The stream is content. I’ll put forward that the stream is socially constructed, and is constantly changing. You will consume what you come across and make meaning of it based on your own filters. So you will have a different reaction to the idea that Santa may not be white then I will have. Additionally, if you add comments to explain your world view, you contribute to and thus change the stream not just for yourself, but with anyone who consumes the information you have added.

So you can choose to be a consumer of the stream, because soon there will be lots of content in it brought to you by marketers looking to make numbers of all sorts. Or, you can choose to own your stream by contributing, asking questions and challenging others so that your personal needs for information are filled.

I chose the second not only for my personal needs, but for how I use social tools to market the products I work with. I actually need to get on some of that this morning. 🙂

This post doesn’t feel very well structured, but I wanted to get the ideas out there – would love to hear what others are thinking about this.

 

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