Did you see Instagram today? Said no one ever. Right now, at this very moment, over one billion humans are having a social media experience. No two are the same. With all other mass media experiences there exist a human scale common sequence. A magazine has 631 pages, 458 photos, 38 articles, 12 contributors, 62 advertisers and one cover that is experienced in such a way that the question “Did you see Vogue?” make complete sense whereas “Did you see Instagram?” makes no sense.

I say human scale because artificial intelligence is NOT required for a magazine, newspaper, TV station, Radio station, Xfinity, Netflix, any website (besides social media). Social media requires artificial intelligence because at this very moment over 600,000,000 personal experiences are being created from over 1,000,000,000,000 choices.

It’s not the billions of users that make artificial intelligence mandatory; it’s the library of content objects that makes it mandatory.

Curating 1,500 stories ranked from 1 to 1,500 from a pool of over a trillion possibilities in less than a second for one individual at that very moment in time is what makes artificial intelligence mandatory. 

Once you understand that a social media experience is created just for one person based on his/her history and predicted desires, you can understand why and how social media differs from all other media including digital media.

At IBM, clients would spend millions of dollars to understand the “customer journey”. A geeky way of helping business executives see their systems and processes through the eyes of their customers (instead of their own eyes). You’d be amazed at how hard it is to get one human to see the exact same things through another human’s point of view. Or would you?

We compare and contrast social media negotiations to the human experience because everyone we deal with has an intimate understanding of the human experience. Most humans can easily relate to how hard it can be at times to get just a few friends or coworkers to agree on just dinner plans or a project timeline.

Did you see Instagram today?

Luckily everyone can agree that this makes no sense at all. Every social media user already knows what they see is different than what you see on the exact same software. The beautiful thing about social media experiences is that all social media users have had plenty of social media experiences. All humans have had plenty of human experiences. Every human has experienced reality enough to know that “Did you see what I saw?” is a valid question. We all know that how we experience reality is different from everyone else we know.

We all know that every social media experience is different enough to never ask the question that can be asked about a TV show, Netflix, newspapers, websites, magazines, radio shows, TV stations, events, football games, concerts, books, etc.

Did you see the Wall Street Journal today?

We negotiate with machine learning artificial intelligent software agents to bring human attention to our client’s promises. We do this because we must.

Social media is software.

Social media is NOT media.