CAN THE SOCIAL DILEMMA DISMAY YOUR STARTUP?

 
Starting your Business

CAN THE SOCIAL DILEMMA DISMAY YOUR STARTUP?

Kaushal Kumar
  • 'The Social Dilemma' may not cause any turbulence in your business, but the problems it highlights may.

  • Discover the underlying issues that tech giants create for start-ups directly or indirectly.

Jeff Orlowski's The Social Dilemma Netflix documentary reveals behind the scenes of Silicon Valley companies and how they coded the business model to feed and benefit from the dopamine addiction to tech.

 'The Social Dilemma' can be put a great conversation starter for brands today. And as delves into the insidious workings of Silicon Valley companies and offers you the insight of how they manipulate human psychology, it is indeed interesting for business leaders across the world to explore.

MY STARTUP AND THE SOCIAL DILEMMA, HOW ARE THEY RELATED?

While the world is familiar with the concepts of social media addiction, personal data protection, and misinformation and many other unleashed internet-based demons, the alarming 'dark side' of social media has also reared its ugly head, and 'The Social Dilemma' showcase the same with the interviews of visionaries who created. Be it co-inventor of the Facebook "Like" button, Justin Rosenstein, or former Director of Monetization at Facebook, Tim Kendall, or other great minds of Silicon Valley.

So, with user's attention being a product that technology companies sell to advertisers, social media platform have continued knitting a fib to capture the audience with addictive elements and deep personalization technologies. Similar to a mirage, it is presented to users what they want to see, deploy more and more time there and then acknowledge advertisers.

WHY YOUR ORGANIC DIGITAL MARKETING ISN'T AS EFFECTIVE AS PAID ONE?

If you didn't know what happened behind the scenes and exactly how the social media brands like Facebook which is free for everyone, sells advertising to companies, then this may explain exactly why your organic ads aren't reaching many people. In the age of sponsored ads glorifying advertisements, Facebook has designed a structure to entice companies especially start-ups desperate for work to spend on promotions.

This explains essentially why more and more brands in their social media strategy are including a set budget for paid promotions along with hashtags and content.

THE POWER IMBALANCE

With billions of people and their data, big tech companies have too much market power to an extent where they can influence our personal and political environments. So, someone in charge of single-handedly determining how the internet will look like and innovation will offer in terms of news, visual media, cloud storage, communication like calls and messaging, and more, can be pretty terrifying.

The solution, regulations, with proper regulation of this diverse and unleashed wild demon, internet, can start-ups grow without fearing an imbalance power.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA ADDICTION AND ITS INFLUENCE ON WORK

The documentary explains how social media creates a dilemma as it turns your "psychology against you" so that you stay stuck to the screen and that is why it has become an addictive activity with negative consequences. A start-up especially in it initial stages is defined by the leader's actions and undivided attention to work and to be that, you cannot choose to fight with another battle that can prove to be less productive.

As a start-up owner, your core values of productivity and useful tips like turning off desktop notifications, not downloading applications that restrict your daily use, etc, as a part of a non-judgemental open dialogue can be guiding light. The aim here to ensure a healthy mental state fo mind at work by all professionals.

FAKE NEWS AND START-UP OPPORTUNITY

While the documentary highlighted how fake news spreads 6 times faster than true news, making this the 'king' of online content and big tech companies like Facebook are unable to curb with the issue.

Facebook has found that they can affect real-world behaviours and emotions, without users even being aware of it, this all results in real-life (offline) effects such as governments and other organisations weaponising social media to incite political polarisation, conflicts, riots, and even violence.

The Social Dilemma offers a potential business idea for start-ups. Yes, one can use this market opportunity to start a brand that can help regulate fake news and misinformation.

You can help brands and their websites leveraging technologies like AI to mitigate the risks of misinformation spread in multiple languages, text-photos, and other forms.

ACT APPROPRIATELY

While the recent entry in Netflix's Top 10 list of most popular movies since its September 9 is creating a lot of buzzes and it offers the solution of abandoning social media altogether for which critics are calling out the show 'for slamming social media'.

It is indeed essential to understand if your business needs social media, for example at B2C brand may require it to connect to potential clients, but B2B brand won't. Now, essentially as an entrepreneur is how these problems can dismay your start-up and while one cannot ensure that this documentary affects these companies at the bottom line, but it can steer somethings for start-ups.

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