Transmitter Ecosystem
As social technologies become more ingrained online, we are seeing shifts to lighter forms of real-time contribution, such as sharing or status updates on social networks, micro-blogs or share buttons. This is at the expense of written, long form content, such blogs or forums.
We call this new trend the “Transmitter Ecosystem”, and its impacts are evident throughout our research. Sharing and discovering content, news or online events, as opposed to consumers creating content is now the big impact of social media. Social is elevating the consumer to becoming the core distribution channel for content.
This trend is particularly apparent for heavy users that demonstrate (in the diagram below) how heavy usage (in this case of a micro-blogging platform) generates increasing propensity to share with “personal photos” being the only significant form of non-shared content.
This creates huge opportunities for brands by removing many barriers to entry when creating content. Increasing volumes of distributed content make it more difficult to cut through all of the “sharing noise” and drive engagement.
It also orientates users away from peer to peer influencers and onto “top down” influencers. This is a key reason why Twitter is dominated by celebrities, professional sports stars, politicians, journalists and anyone else in the public eye. Google+ and recent changes from Facebook, are mirroring this shift. Another opportunity.