Business - Written Tuesday, June 2, 2009 by Denis Hancock - 5 Comments

Should you care about what the amateur outties write? No… and yes.

One of the themes that I’ve been talking a lot about recently is that “broadcasting” has gotten an unfairly bad rap as many people associate social media with conversations and user-generated content. As I investigate how social media platforms evolve, I’m continuously finding that these developments, while significant in certain situations, are far less important than people tend to think – and that the future of social media may have a lot more in common with traditional “broadcasting” strategies than is commonly believed. Video viewership patterns on YouTube was one example (with content from “traditional” media sources tending to dominate user-generated content), and the popularity of top celebrities, writers and companies using Twitter as a broadcast platform is another.

The underlying idea here is simple. The vast majority of us cannot create good / entertaining content, no matter what we may believe. Just because millions upon millions of people create blog posts, videos, and tweets on a daily basis doesn’t mean they’re interesting to many people, or even being viewed. And while the rise of social media has led to an abundance of new content, every abundance creates a new scarcity.

In this case, what I think is becoming ever-more scarce is easy to identify – time. I think we’re crossing a major tipping point where people engage with many of these social media tools, get quickly overwhelmed by it all (knowingly or not), and fall back onto select few sites and people who provide the best content people are looking for in the proper context – and it has how these sites and people leverage social media that will be critically important to determining it’s future.

What got me thinking about this again today is Mark Cuban’s most recent post- Who Cares What People Write? To quote the first paragraph:

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