At first glance, Tumblr’s recently announced hiring of Chris Mohney for their newly created position of editor-in-chief doesn’t sound like a stroke of genius. After all, Tumblr is a blogging platform, not a content creator itself. But Tumblr’s reasoning may just bring their community closer together while giving marketers valuable insights into what makes Tumblr users tick.
Mohney told The New York Times, “Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million, I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”
With this move, Tumblr isn’t just encouraging creativity on Tumblr, they are marketing their platform by leveraging the content created by users. Tumblr isn’t the only social platform that is making this move either. Twitter has already launched Twitter Stories, which aims to tell the stories behind influential tweets. Facebook has hired a managing editor for their 850 million and growing users, and LinkedIn Today began covering the biggest news on their networking service almost a year ago. These companies understand that in addition to offering a great service, they need to curate their communities, encourage them to interact with their platforms in new ways, and begin marketing themselves as a platform to both advertisers and new users.
Without realizing it, these internet companies are collectively bringing about the next stage in social media’s development. This next stage of “virtual community journalism” solidifies the rising importance and dominance of online communities as offline communities become smaller and more localized. Tumblr has attracted thousands of fashion bloggers who have built up a passionate community of trend setters–a community which has no offline space to congregate. For marketers, virtual community journalism may someday offer a platform to advertise and market to a vast decentralized group of people connected only by their passions and interests. Tumblr’s soon-to-be released blog has no plans to host advertising content, but advertisers will still be able to benefit from the trends and news of the Tumblr community straight from the source.
Social media 2.0 will need to vie for more of their users’ time and open their platforms for more advertising in a way that also enriches the social experience. Both are vital to social media’s growth and longevity. Virtual community journalism will be fascinating to watch develop as social media continues to shape our society and offer advertisers inside access into interest-driven slices of our culture.
