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We talk about the idea that you must consume content to create content a lot around here, and I wanted to share a little anecdote that I’ve been using in presentations lately.
When Twitter first launched the big joke was that it was a place where people shared what they had for breakfast. Twitter fought tooth and nail against this idea, trying to explain that the service was actually much more serious than that.
But it’s not.
And that’s not a bad thing.
The way I see it, Twitter is just a big platform of what we had for breakfast. Except it’s not food, it’s what we ate on the web. A large proportion of Tweets have a link in them and those links are to whatever that person consumed moments before. It might be a Huffington Post article for breakfast or a YouTube video for lunch, but it’s still just what we ate. We are turning consumption into production.
My friend Grant McCracken wrote about social as exhaust data a few years ago and I think that’s a really nice way to think about it. Essentially what we’re seeing is a digested view into the lives of people and (increasingly) brands. Their social footprint is just that: a footprint. It’s the thing they leave behind after they take a step.