Carlos Richer - Annotated Bibliography

Source: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-strategy/6-lessons-learned-from-the-demise-of-myspace/ [Argument]

Baer, Jay. "Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy." Convince and Convert Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy. N.p., 08 Sept. 2010. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

Jay Baer is a “hype-free social media and content strategist & speaker”, and is the author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help not Hype. Jay is also the founder of http://www.convinceandconvert.com, from which the source article was found, and is a host of the Social Pros podcast.

As the URL of the website itself would suggest, Jay Baer argues just what are the preliminary reasons a social-media platform and corporation might swallow its former competitor. Baer has the argument that the ability to have “free-range” for your own website is ultimately the reason why it might struggle to fit in a grander scheme of things. The author, specifically looking at his point about standardization in the article, is in favor of design uniformity. This is because having completely structured webpages across the whole site or platform is to the benefit of both the companies and the users consuming the service. There is a consistent user experience, and things are streamlined. Baer blames the typical, independent and individual web users for having committed “unspeakable crimes against HTML, fonts, color schemes, and animation" when comparing MySpace to Facebook profiles.

However, Baer recognizes that there’s different uses for MySpace and Facebook, and also admits to identify that the reason MySpace was popular was to have your own personal, free-hosted website that you could truly make your own; rather than focusing on functionality and having a specialized function like Facebook does. Being pro-structure is the logical way to survive as a company, and to limit the chaos a user might make upon them. What raises the question is if people are willing to sacrifice these creative forms of expressions over conformity. Evidently, as we know it nowadays and know that Facebook did indeed win over MySpace, but do people still miss it? Would giving them a choice to change a background color or font, while still leaving the tabs and links alone (for structure’s sake), work somehow? Is it, in the end, just more efficient and better to make a number of different accounts across other social media platforms to feed this craving? Tumblr comes to mind, in terms of it being a popular blog-post format site that is not obscure and hidden on the corner of the internet. I am curious to see if there is a middle ground that might be viable.

Baer concludes: “Once we were given the opportunity to completely screw up our own Web pages, we decided that maybe we were better off if social networks removed some of the sources of our own visual and layout demise.”