Less is More: The Group Chat Era

I’ve posted a few times about the shift we’re seeing across media and marketing, namely, from a mass reach / high volume / 'everything to everyone all the time' paradigm, to a model of the niche and focused; and with it an approach that emphasizes quality over quantity.

This is already manifesting across a number of disciplines: Publishing, Influencer Marketing, Social Media, and Search.

Publishing:

This is probably the most evident. With few exceptions (like the NYT) the mass reach, always-on approach to publishing is done. Look at Vice. BuzzFeed. The Messenger. The myriad other digital and traditional media outlets who have gone through layoffs and cutbacks over the past 6 months because the model is broken.?

At the heart of the problem is the value exchange. If you try to be everything to everyone you end up as nothing to no one.?

And beyond the scope of the content, you have the cadence. The “always on” mentality of publishing something every day, regardless of whether or not there’s something worth publishing has never made sense to me. It erodes trust with your audience.?

I think we’re seeing this play out now with newsletters and podcasts. The best creators with the most loyal followings are the ones who can say “hey, I may not send a newsletter every day, or post a new podcast every week, but when I do, you'll know it's because I had something worth saying.”

That’s the attitude that builds trust amongst readers, which can be parlayed into advertising and revenue opportunities.

The highly engaged and loyal audiences that advertisers seek must be grown, not bought, and cultivated though trust and relevance.

Influencer:

If you gave me $1,000,000 to spend on an influencer marketing campaign, 99 out of 100 times I’ll opt to spread that budget across 100 micro-influencers for one hundred smaller $10,000 deals.?

Big creators with massive followings are essentially just celebrities at this point. And like Hollywood stars, working with them is about borrowing their equity for cultural relevance and leveraging their large audiences to build awareness. Nothing wrong with that at all. Often times, that’s the goal. But if you want to really drive purchase intent in a way that impacts the bottom line, The “micro-influencer” might be the better choice.?

Creators who have demonstrated a specific expertise and create content for a niche audience can claim real influence. And with smaller, focused audiences, they can maintain meaningful relationships with their fans.

Social:?

I grew up in the magical days of the AOL chat room and instant messenger (AIM). Then I watched as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram rose to glory in the era of mass social media. But Facebook's decline has been well-documented and Twitter is on it's own perilous road. While I would partially assign blame to certain leaders making certain decisions about how to run those platforms, I think it's equally about the pendulum swinging from mass to niche.

The Group Chat is going to more valuable than shouting at strangers in The Virtual Town Hall. People are self-assembling smaller, interest-based cohorts on Whatsapp, Discord, Slack, and Signal.

It could be a small group of peers you met at work event that you keep in touch with; perhaps it started as fantasy football group that has long outlived the league for which it was created, or maybe it's to connect with other likeminded parents in town with kids at the same school as yours.

Or maybe it's all three.

What's clear is that as people seek more value and relevance for the time they're investing, we've moved from Mass Social to the era of the interest-based Micro-Community aka, The Group Chat.

Search:

Google has been synonymous with search for as long as I can remember, but perhaps even their dominance is coming to an end. Not because it takes 5 minutes just to scroll past all the ads and sponsored placements in the search results, eroding trust with their uses, but because people are going elsewhere for more relevant and helpful information.

I remember a keynote from Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Alpha at a past SXSW, many years ago, in which he demonstrated the early impact of alternative search engines, allowing for queries like "Show me exactly what flights are flying overhead of me where I am right now," which is the kind of thing that wasn't possible with Google at the time.

Now, we've all already seen, and been party to, the impact that AI tools like Chat GPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft's CoPilot, which can produce more useful and valuable responses than your typical search engine, depending on what you're looking for.

And then there's YouTube and TikTok, which have become my go-to platforms for all sorts of helpful content like recipes, DIY instructional, history and science, etc.

Now, there's a media literacy element here, as it's on the user to parse through responses to ensure the information they're getting, and the people they're getting it from, are credible, but regardless, they contribute to the erosion of the SINGULAR SEARCH ENGINE.

Sure, I'll quickly Google train times, but I'll go to Yelp for restaurants intel and TripAdvisor for hotel reviews and vacation ideas; I'll use ChatGPT to answer questions about a work project, and I'll go straight to TikTok for insight into - and demonstration of - a new recipe I'm trying out.

AI tools, category specific sites, and short-form video are all stealing share away from traditional search engines for certain types of queries.

All that being said, in the immortal words of Jim Barksdale , "there only two ways to make money in business: one is to bundle; the other is unbundle.”

We're seeing this cycle play out in real time in the streaming space, as the once-coveted a la carte menu has become more of a fragmented hellscape.

And it's likely going to happen with everything I outlined above. Micro-Influencer Ad Networks. A single unified search platform that packages up the best of AI, Video, etc, into one simple interface. A new publishing model that bundles individual niche content creators, each with their own audience, into one larger, scalable, sellable, medium.

But until then, I'm going to enjoy the next wave of media bespoke media. And if you've got any openings in your group chats, hit me up :)