Essay2-Social media versus traditional media in terms of content quality

When the content quality of the media products is discussed, whether the content could satisfy the consumers’ tastes should first and foremost be considered as a critical criterion since no media can survive and flourish without the audiences’ support. In other words, the high content quality means large amount of audience base. Therefore, how to enlarge the customer base with high qualified contents becomes the kernel in the media industry.

Customer-oriented perspective and concept plays a very important role in the media-related economy. How to make the audience be interested in and attracted by the products you offered? The answer is that you must know about them. However, you are not necessarily to be a superior psychologist. No one can know better about you than yourself. Hence, why not involve the audience into the value creation process.

The development mode of the traditional media industry is typically that the producers produce the contents, and the customers consume them. It could be called the typical value chain in which the customers lie at the end of to behave the consumption function. However, in the new social media industry, the audience are not the purely consumers any more, they become the co-producers and the co-creators in terms of participating in the value creation process. And the whole media economy system turned into a new era which can be called the value constellation era.

With the value constellation concept, the audiences do not only consume value but also create the value for themselves. Just like Youtube and Wikipedia the consumers are the producers. What have to be mentioned here is that with the development of the consumer-produced products, the phenomenon which is called the free economy mode appears. Consumers favored the free information and service online. Free is awesome! Besides, with the new social media technology, the contents and the offerings could achieve the high customization level which means the consumers could have a more effective and efficient communication with the producers. A case in point could be the comparison between the Youtube and the traditional mass TV media contents. On Youtube you can search the topic which you favored with the key words searching in terms of aggressively inquiring rather than passively accepting. And the rating system as well as the related comments can offer the reference to help you to know whether the content is worth watching. The quality of the content is guaranteed in this way. What is more, the range of the contents is also much lager than that offered by traditional TV channel. For the traditional TV program, the contents are designed and produced by the procurers; the audience could only passively accept those limited offerings without interactive communication.

Another quality related issue which I want to mention is the democracy construction under the social media mode. The relevance and accreditation mechanism for the Slashdot’s model of moderation, karma and meta-moderations could be a good example to illustrate the democracy construction in the social media world. Slashdot selects the moderators from all the users randomly by the automated system according to several criteria to review and rate comments of the other users. Similarly, the peer-review accreditation for the moderators themselves is used to supervise the moderators. There reviewers are also randomly chosen from the users according to related criteria. In this way, the moderators’ power is balanced to facilitate the democracy construction.

The quality of social media content can be also achieved by the activities with the open source concepts. The development of Linux system could be a good example. Besides,the goodwill and reputation mechanisms are well implemented by the social media to guarantee the quality of the content through offering high traceability to the available contents.

Finally, I’d like to mention that the authority is based on the high quality and good reputation. When you get the high quality, then the authority comes.