Wyatt's World
Can local social media succeed? My company is going to try. Should be interesting. No one else in the world is trying.
There’s no doubt social media has succeeded on a global scale. Facebook is one of the richest companies in the world. Whether this can succeed locally remains to be seen.
Technically, we’ve done it. Our local Facebook competitor, Friends, is up and running on northsidesun.com and 22 other websites. You can easily post text, images and videos. You can invite friends to join via text and email. We recommend friends of your friends. We do all the things a social media app should do. Just go to our website and click Friends from the menu.
When the first printing presses were invented, there were only a few. But by the middle of the 20th century there were a million printing presses worldwide. Could the same thing happen with social media platforms? We hope so because Facebook’s monopoly is dangerous.
Technically, it’s been a breeze using the dominant industrial strength open source content management system, Drupal 8. Amazon Web Services, of course, is our host.
But can you get people to use it? That’s the million dollar question.
To encourage folks to use it, we have integrated micropayments into our local social media platform. Post and get paid! You can choose to get paid by Venmo, Cash Ap, cash, check or Paypal. The more reads you get, the more you get paid. A thousand reads will get you $10. Two thousand reads will get you $20, up to $50 per post. That cute cat video could make you money!
Soon we will be doing a promotional launch and pay out $10,000 to the top 10 posters based on number and quality of posts and how many friends they have.
I have a question for all you Instagram and Facebook posters: Exactly how much money has the trillion-dollar Facebook ever paid you for your valuable content? I know the answer: Zippo. And to add insult to injury, they track you and spy on you.
As a de facto monopoly, Facebook has raised its advertising rates in a spectacular fashion, all the time throttling down the number of friends and fans who see a post. Organic (free) reach is something like two percent of your friends and fans.
Not so for Friends. All your posts will reach all your friends. That’s true for individuals. And it will be true for advertisers who post as well. You can choose to make a post public or private. Only your friends will see your private posts.
The idea is to create a local social media network and cut the whole community in on the gig. We all benefit. The community benefits. Advertisers benefit. The money stays in the community instead of being sucked off to Silicon Valley.
We hope we blast off to a roaring start. But if not, we’re in for the long haul. We’re part of our community and our news platform is self sustaining. We think Friends will grow slowly and surely if not explosively.
In addition to Friends, we also have Neighbors, which is a social media platform for neighborhoods. Go to northsidesun.com and click on Neighbors. We have already set up all the local neighborhoods or if you can’t find your neighborhood you can create one yourself. It operates similar to Nextdoor, but locally owned and operated.
Just like Friends posts will be seen by all your friends, your Neighbors posts will be seen by any and all neighbors who have signed up. The more neighbors who sign up, the better it will be. Micropayments will also be part of Neighbors to encourage participation. We also have Groups, which will allow
any local group to choose members and exchange posts. Churches, clubs, civic organizations, hobbyists, friend groups or whatever can all create their own local group. Groups can be public or private, whichever way they are set up. Like Friends and Neighbors, Group posts can be public or private.
Anyone can set up a group, give it a name and start inviting members by text or email.
One important distinction with our local social media. We don’t track you for advertising purposes like Big Tech. There’s no secret code under the hood.
Another big benefit of local social media is local accountability and oversight by our team of local journalists. Real human beings who live in your city and town. This allows for judgement and discretion, not computer algorithms. Rants, screeds, fake news and rumors will be filtered out. It will have integrity, responsibility and trust.
I mean when you think about it, what could be worse than a social media platform that is global rather than local. The global scope of Facebook and other global platforms completely and utterly deprives a community of its uniqueness, its localness. It’s global massification of our culture imposed by robots. Double yuck!
I have no idea whether this will succeed but I can’t fade off into retirement without giving it my best effort. But I can’t do it alone. Our hundreds of dedicated local employees can’t do it alone. The community must join this effort and make it happen. We have to take back our platforms from these gargantuan, data tracking monopolies.
People may think this is far afield from printing a local newspaper, but I disagree. This is very much in keeping with the local, community tradition of local news. The only reason a person subscribes to the local paper is because it is unique and local to that community. The reason to support and adopt a local social media platform is based on the same concept. This is a natural extension of the local newspaper.
We are defined by our uniqueness, not our sameness. That’s why local restaurants will always be better than chain restaurants. We’ve been stuffing our brains with the chain chocked Facebook content for too many years. Let’s try to do something on our own as a community. Why not? What do we have to lose?
Wyatt Emmerich is publisher of The Northside Sun in Jackson and owner of Emmerich Newspapers.