Towards a New Social Media

One Billion Dollars. Cash. This is the amount of money Facebook laid down to purchase the mobile photo-sharing app Instagram on Monday this week. That’s a lotta dough. It is obvious that this relatively young start-up has immense potential in the eyes of Mark Zuckerberg, who approved Facebook’s single largest acquisition in history. With only 13 staff members in a small office in San Francisco, Instagram has acquired 35 million users in only 18 months, and doubled in size in the past five months. Their release of the Android version of the app last week garnered a million new downloads in a 24 hour period. At its core, Instagram is a community of photographers, sharing the world through their own mobile lens. Users can enhance photos with a variety of artsy filters, and share them with their followers who can “like” or comment on them. Essentially, Instagram is all about what users see.

Now I want to talk about another social media network. It’s called Everest. If you’re scratching your head and wondering why you haven’t heard of this, it’s because it hasn’t debuted yet. Mark my words though, it could be bigger than Instagram, and – gasp – bigger than Facebook (if they don’t buy it first). Why? Because Everest is about what users do. In their own words, Everest’s vision is to, “unlock human potential by inspiring and empowering people to live their dreams.” It’s the first comprehensive social media tool designed for a community of action. Ok, here’s an example. Say you want to run a marathon. Everest helps you plan your steps along the way with timely reminders. It connects you with others working towards the same goal, and provides support from more experienced marathoners who have ran before. You can also capture and share moments along the journey, and revisit them once you have accomplished your dream.

Another amazing feature of Everest involves sponsorship involvement. Partnered sponsors have the ability to create additional “dares” for any challenge users set out to achieve. If a user accepts and completes a dare, they are rewarded with a prize (e.g. 20% off a new pair of running shoes). By incorporating dares, Everest is incentivizing their users to actually follow through with their goals, and get out and DO IT. This is a truly powerful model for translating virtual interactions to real world results.

Now apply Everest’s model to a community of activists who want to change a law instead of climb a mountain. They won’t be able to achieve that goal through sharing an event page and gathering a bunch of followers. Facebook (who you know) , Twitter (what you think) and Instagram (what you see) are communities that are perfectly sustainable in just the virtual realm. Everest is about what you do and how you do it. It depends upon real world results. This is the direction social media needs to take if it wants to more positively affect social causes.