Lowering the Barrier to Social Media Participation

ReadWriteWeb had a provocatively titled post, Real People Don’t Have Time for Social Media, yesterday which resonated strongly with me. I’ve long felt that the Web, and software in general, has only recently (read last couple of years ) started to be accessible to the masses, but the truth of the matter is that the barrier to entry is still too high for most people. What’s interesting though, is that the barrier is increasingly not the lack of specialized ‘geek’ knowledge, but the more typical constraint of time. And that my friends is why I’m so geeked about Jing.

I don’t know if Jing will ever become a product or be remembered in the annals of software history, but it does represent a revolutionary departure from ‘old school’ content creation tools which have a steep learning curve and require a substantial investment of time to create and deploy content. In its default configuration it requires almost no instruction on use while allowing nearly instantaneous creation and distribution of rich visual information.

It’s the ‘nearly instantaneous’ part which is really the key though. You see, multi-step workflows decrease the likelihood I’ll be an active content provider. Having to ‘think’ about deployment decreases the likelihood I’ll even make the effort to create the content in the first place. Even the possibility of making longer videos or editing decreases my chances of being an active content provider (post-production equals additional effort and thats an inhibitor).

The solution is really a no brainer. In order to increase social media participation you need to make the means of consuming and creating information as simple and intuitive as the capabilities we are born with. Hearing and seeing are physiological methods of perception–they’re hard wired into our brains. They, along with verbal communication, once acquired, have extremely low use barriers which is why we’re willing to leverage them on a frequent basis.

OK, so what does this have to do with Jing or social media participation? Good question. In order to increase participation we need a better means of communicating. I’m talking about organic software which empowers content creation and distribution and fosters community which leads me to John Nack. John threw down a post a while back discussing the potential of user generated help embedded within Photoshop.

Conceptually this idea sounds an awful lot like an application vertical of Jing (imagine Jing embedded seamlessly within Photoshop allowing the creation of five minute videos accessible and searchable from within a UI panel), but it was a comment response on the signal to noise ratio of user generated help which brought things full circle for me. High levels of noise (participation) reveal the real strength of community–volume of knowledge. Volume of knowledge in turn ensures a strong signal. Jing makes rich media noise effortless making it a critical facilitator of social media participation.

Call me crazy, but all of this leads me to believe that over the long run tools like Jing have much more potential than products such as Camtasia and Captivate. The pain to payoff threshold is just too high for old school tools to ever achieve the effortlessness needed for widespread participation.