Soylent Media - it’s full of people!
Derek Powazek has kicked up some discussion over the term ‘user generated content’. As he writes: “They’re words that creepy marketeers use. They imply something to be commodified, harvested, taken advantage of. They’re words I used to hear a lot while doing community consulting, and always by people who wanted to make, or save, a buck.”
Derek goes on to make a very useful point that we should refer to media online by what it actually is: “let’s not give in to the buzzphrase du jour. Let’s use the real words. Those people posting to Amazon pages? They’re writing reviews. Those folks on Flickr? They’re making photographs.” A lot of good discussion regarding this in the comments of Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.
Where Derek loses me is when he then goes on to coin his own buzzphrase du jour, “if we must have an umbrella term to describe the whole shebang, I have a suggestion. Try this on for size: Authentic Media.”
Others across the blogosphere have chipped in their two cents, offering up new and old descriptors such as “Edge of the Network Media”, “Unwashed Mass Media”, Contributed Media, Social Media, Participatory Media, We the Media, and of course, Web Two point Oh. One person even offered up “3C (Consumer Created Content)“ as a viable alternative.
You can go ahead and call it ‘pumpkin pie’, for all I care. It’s not the label we give these tools, but how we use them, that’s important. So long as we make sure that the media remains authentic, participatory, contributed, on the edges or from the unwashed masses, then the term is secondary. No matter what words you use, there will be someone trying to co-opt the phrase for their own inauthentic, closed and non-participatory purposes.
As for us creepy marketers, its for us to try and educate our clients on the value of an open, authentic discussion versus a closed and stick-to-the-talking-points approach. It’s up to us to understand the value of what we have growing here and know enough not to poison the well. It’s up to business and the customer, together, to learn that there’s nothing wrong with making or saving a buck: provided its done fairly and openly, trading value for value.
Now go and enjoy your Soylent Media.
