Putting Social Media To Work

Ft. Peck Dam, the first cover of LIFE Magazine, by Margaret Bourke White

In 1936, when Henry R. Luce launched LIFE Magazine, the world’s first ‘picture’ magazine, it was the depths of the Great Depression.

Luce imagined that he might sell 250,000 copies of the first run (at 10 cents a copy).

In fact, by the time the third edition came out, he was at an astonishing 2 million copies and no let-up in demand.

LIFE was the fastest growth circulation magazine in history, and before its first year was over, had become the number one magazine in the world. Luce had tapped into something very basic and created the world’s first media phenomena.

No one had ever seen anything like it before.

In many ways, Luce had created television before there was television – a purely visual way of ‘seeing’ the world, even if it was in print.

The explosive success of LIFE anticipated the explosive success of TV that was to come two decades later, and in doing so, killed LIFE.

But this isn’t about LIFE.

Instead, it’s about what was on the first cover – the Fort Peck Dam.

The photograph is by Margaret Bourke White, one of the first powerful women photojournalists in the world.  Luce, unlike pretty much everyone else in the rest of the country, had no hesitation about hiring and empowering women, and Bourke White was no exception. Her visual images of raw industrial and architectural power captured Luce’s (and the nation’s) imagination.

At that time, prior to the Hoover, the Fort Peck Dam was the largest hydroelectric power source on the planet.

Hydroelectric captures the raw power of the forces of nature inherent in rivers by forcing them through floodgates and spinning turbines to create cheap and plentiful electricity.

Luce, with LIFE and later Facebook showed us where the mighty rivers of social media lay.  Today, FACEBOOK has 350 million members, all ‘working’ away on the site.

Yet it is unproductive. That is, it while it creates vast volumes of content, that content is all over the place – unfocused.

Suppose it were possible to ‘capture’ the raw power of social media (which is clearly there), and direct it through a set of floodgates to spin turbines (so to speak), to make the now massive but unharnessed power of FACEBOOK or indeed any social media create something of real focus and value?

And at as low a cost as having a river spin turbines – as opposed to mining coal and burning it to boil water to make steam to spin turbines. Would it work?

Maybe.

Maybe we’re looking at the question of how to monetize social media like FACEBOOK or YOUTUBE all wrong.

We’re still applying old 1950s thinking to a 21st century problem: ie, sell, ads.

FACEBOOK, with its 350 million members and YOUTUBE which now uploads a breathtaking 23 hours of video every minute (!) are clearly telling us something.

Looking at them is like looking at a massive raging river racing to the sea. There is vast raw power there – but how to put it to work?

I say, ‘build a dam’.

Yesterday, we completed a 4-day training session for 44 people at The Travel Channel Academy.

44 people (who paid for the privilege), produced 88 stories about Washington DC in four days.

That is a lot of content, 88 stories.

They are spinning a turbine of content at a very low cost.

To date, we have trained and fielded nearly 2,000 graduates of The Travel Channel Academy.

That is, 2,000 people around the world with video cameras and laptops who have all been trained to the standards of the Channel to provide video content for The Channel and its website.  An army of content providers, at a very low cost.

And yet, it is only the very tip of the iceberg.

A grain of sand on a massive beach.

Thousands of cable channels, millions (quite literally) of websites, iPhone and iPads that all need or all will need vast volumes of low cost video content on a regular basis.

It’s a demand that simply never existed before.

And where is it going to come from?

Because the machine to create it also does not exist….yet.

The notion of flying one high paid journalist with a camera crew to Iraq or hiring a ‘professional’ video production company to make vast volumes of content for the web or iPhones simply does not make economic sense. In fact, it does not work at all.

But before us is a mighty river of content, being produced in almost incomprehensible volumes, waiting to be harnessed and put to work.

It just need to be focused.

The monetization of social media is not in selling ads appended to FACEBOOK or pre-rolls on YOUTUBE, it is in the people themselves and what they can produce when properly trained.

The demand is there for the content.

The raw power is there to produce the content.

What is needed is simply putting the two together.

It’s called, making a market.