What a Tiny Social Media World We Live In

I have a feeling that no matter how successful a person is, he or she will always admire someone who has already achieved even more and has more books published, more millions in the bank account or maybe more children who do better at school – and this is probably what ensure continuous progress – people always want more and will always find new role models as soon as the previous goal is achieved.

This is probably true in every field and social media is hardly an exception. In fact, I think online business world provides us plenty of examples of success stories that should be admired – so it is no wonder that here there are probably even more people willing to copy someone else’s success instead of trying to build something unique of their own instead.

The role models are easy to find here: it can be Michael Arrington for bloggers or Evan Williams and Biz Stone from Twitter for entrepreneurs who produce their own startups and dream of growing huge one day. No matter who your personal guru is, I am quite certain that you have a feeling that this person lives in something of a very different world compared to the one you personally live in and probably you think it would be cool to live a life of such a star – not a pop star but a social media star. And who cares that pop stars have so much more admirers and fans?

But the problem is that many of us simply don’t realize that the vast majority of these “social media stars” are very local and only rarely people beyond the small social media crowd actually know they exist at all. The only exception is if this social media celebrity gets featured frequently in the press and on TV – the information sources that reach people beyond the social media circles where we only turn to blogs and Twitter for our information.

To me this was a huge revelation when I realized that people that actually seem to be pretty close to the social media world don’t even know the names of the biggest heroes here. For example, I have recently had a meeting with a guy from Netherlands who has a small development and support team here in Novosibirsk and he is currently looking for an opportunity to expand the business – hence the meeting.

His business definitely qualifies as “internet business” as his company provides domain registration services and SSL certificates. Is not this an online business? It is, right? And he actually happens to use Twitter – his account actually has a few dozens of followers. But after talking to him I am under impression that despite of his specific field of domains, DNS and SSL news he hardly ventures into what people in the social media field consider to be cool – new startups that help us waste our time in yet another manner or sometimes (rarely) help us do something actually good.

When we began talking about social media issues with his company, he mentioned that in Europe he does not know many people who actually deal with social media as a business. I immediately remembered my own trip to Loic LeMer’s LeWeb conference and Paris and the impressive crowds of people there and mentioned that I was under impression there were plenty of professionals in the field in Europe – citing LeWeb and many people there. Looking at his blank face I realized he probably never heard about LeWeb and my guess turned to be true when he admitted he has never heard about the event or its organizer.

I have to admit that I myself tend to admire Loic for his achievements and for his personality – he is such a friendly and open person for someone with his experience and his influence. And isn’t Loic a good example of what many entrepreneurs are supposed to want to be? He is a success, he runs a number of well-known startups, he has support from investors and numerous contacts in the blogosphere that help him get the visibility his products and events need. He also runs LeWeb, the event to attend for everyone who knows what Web 2.0 is in Europe – even though he does not live in France any more. What’s more, his events have been attended by the president of France and Loic and his wife are frequent guests at various official receptions. Is not this something of an ideal life every web entrepreneur is supposed to want to have?

Probably yes but if you think this is really a life of a celebrity, you probably are not exactly right because social media celebrities are still only popular in this very crowd – and hardly ever reach beyond that. It is hard to evaluate exactly the size of the crowd but it is definitely a limited number of people. And even the people from the very close fields are not always aware of the biggest social media stars.

Now after this situation I am definitely under impression that no matter what you achieve in the social media world, you should never really expect this popularity to be worldwide as you will still only be recognized in this very small crowd. And the main question now is: is it really worth fighting with each other to get to the top (for example, in tech blogging) if you cannot even be qualified as a true celebrity?

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