In the pre-artificial intelligence environment, corporate identity management was a term indexed to Google. A company’s face largely consisted of what appeared in search results and, at a lower level, photo-video based social media assets (Instagram, TikTok). These were, depending on the context, either the information that appeared when the company’s name was searched and an extension directing to the official website, or the brief descriptions that appeared above the website results with Google’s “snippet” feature and the other websites below them, which largely consisted of articles published on the internet. Private companies wanting to use this situation exploited it by preparing texts shown as blog posts on pages that only appeared in Google searches but whose path you couldn’t find from the main page of the site, comparing their own products with competitors and bringing their own products to the fore. But today, companies can handle these jobs more easily and cheaply by giving advertisements to journalists instead of setting up their own editorial teams.
Journalism and old media
The situation that has also affected our country today is that no private journalism activity is autonomous. They either produce content under an open advertisement or sponsorship agreement, or there is an unwritten conflict of interest in the background and they act as spokespersons for institutions to maintain this situation. Because I follow it closely, almost no autonomous publisher remains in Turkey in the technology and automotive fields with very high confidence. Although things seem different from the outside in other fields, I am sure that ethical problems will be encountered when their internal workings are examined, because it is very difficult for a publisher to survive in Turkey only with advertising or subscription revenues. Therefore, when you search for the best x product in a Google search, it has become impossible to reach an opinion based on real experience because these institutions that commit ethical violations also have a larger budget for SEO work, and if there is an autonomous journalist somewhere out there, it has become impossible to reach their opinions with Google searches.
Up to this point, we see that what the market values in the current situation is not ethical or autonomous journalism, but only the “reader’s purchasing decision.” That is, the produced content becomes valuable only if you click on the links inside or next to the content and buy that product. There are those who believe that this was better in cases where content was behind paywalls and you had to buy newspapers and magazines, but back then, as the sale of that media was targeted, the covers of these newspapers and magazines were used as a tool of manipulation (this still continues, but their circulations are approaching zero). So the conclusion I have reached retrospectively today is that journalism has never been done with noble feelings, it has always consisted of a system that serves different goals (product sales are the most innocent of these) that are not written inside the produced content but are delivered to you with that content.
Visual-based social media
We see that institutions showing both commercial and public activity in social media such as Instagram and TikTok have a presence to keep up with the times. This approach will continue to exist to create organic connections. Apart from this, they have become environments where people share their real experiences, and in this case, they are exploited just like in the journalism sector by using “influencers.” Generally, it doesn’t seem to be an area facing extinction like journalism, it seems it will continue its existence in the coming periods until the artificial intelligence interface becomes similar to the approach of social media sites. I don’t think it can maintain its feature of being an environment where people scroll to death and spend hours for very long.
Today, when we look at the companies that invest the most in artificial intelligence models that process language and images, we see that most of them are media companies. XAI, the owner of Grok, is also the owner of X (Twitter). Of course, Elon Musk constantly changes these property rights within each other to avoid taxes, and tomorrow X could own XAI. Google, the owner of Gemini, is also the owner of YouTube and Google Maps (Google Maps might not be a platform that comes to mind when social media is mentioned, but it fits this definition), Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, is developing Llama language models, Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has different companies under its roof developing many different models. I first explained this connection between them as follows: these companies have a lot of data, and who else could be as lucky as Instagram to train an image model?. But today I think this situation is even deeper. These platforms have ceased to be platforms people use to establish organic communication, and now the platform is evolving to be handed over directly from people to artificial intelligence. Human influence might not be zeroed, but I am sure it will shrink significantly proportionally. Now no one needs to record a video to watch funny videos. Artificial intelligence models will analyze the conditions necessary for you to stay on the platform and reach the level of holding you hostage by producing content that is 100% suitable for this in real-time. The production of ‘personalized infinite content’ that maximizes the dopamine cycle based on the user’s current heart rate, pupil movement, or past sequence of interactions will be the main engine of this captivity. As this process continues, the boundary between the real and the artificial will completely vanish, and our minds will be confined within a digital bubble that no longer feels the need for the outside world. Therefore, in this future, people will continue their organic communications, but I think the importance of visual social media in corporate identity management may decrease. Of course, my thoughts for written social media are very different.
New media
When we come to the present day, we see that AI has largely rendered the classical journalism model obsolete, and this will soon affect social media “influencers” as well. When you want to learn something, you ask an artificial intelligence chatbot, and it either passes on what it knows to you depending on the situation, or it does an internet scan with tools called “web scrapers,” analyzes the results, and gives you an answer. This means you can build and protect your corporate identity by shaping the answers these language models will give.
The topic comes to the training of artificial intelligence models and influencing the environments accessed by these “web scraper” tools. As a result of feedback collected from content produced with results scanned from the internet, language models today avoid scanning news sites and columns on topics that do not have news value and scan social media first. If we categorize according to the type of platforms, let’s start with visual social media first. These scans will close this gap in the future, but they do not do photo and video scanning. So, when you publish an Instagram post about your institution, you must make sure that all the information in the visual is also in the description. Visual social media is a copy of each other. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat all work as if they are different interfaces of the same application, but written social media is not like this. YouTube, although it is a video sharing platform, is a platform that we can also handle as a written social media platform because transcripts of all videos are created in the background. For written platforms, first of all, areas that do not have open access have no importance for corporate identity. For example, Discord, Twitter accounts that are not open to everyone, and closed Facebook groups are not used by artificial intelligence. Among these, I have witnessed Discord being used to “catch up with the times” or to “appeal to young people,” and I do not think this approach will be successful in the long run. Among those that are open, since the format is short on X and most of the content is produced by bots, I think that the work done here will also get lost in the crowd. I haven’t seen public pages on Facebook being scanned in any of my searches so far. This is not because it doesn’t have the potential, but most likely because there is no content. Instead of spending energy on this, the institution should always keep its own website up to date. Now let’s move on to the forums that once came to mind when the internet was mentioned but whose importance decreased with the spread of Facebook, yet have become important again today.
Forums
First, let me start with the forum that fell victim to the current disease of the media and has no benefit in being used: Ekşisözlük. Today, this platform has become a platform where all the problems we mentioned regarding journalism are experienced and even non-commercial events are on the agenda. In the past, it could make sense to use it because it had a very high probability of standing out in Google searches, but lack of moderation created question marks in this situation. Today it has no importance anyway and you don’t easily see it being scanned by artificial intelligence models.
Another of these is the Donanımhaber forum, which I can call in-between, where advertising weight is high but organic interaction is also high and I assume is one of the oldest forums in our country. Since this is a forum in the full sense of the word, it is currently being scanned heavily and has a potential. However, the classical forum structure makes it difficult to create a corporate identity here, and I assume it is not possible to exist without a commercial connection. Although it doesn’t make much sense for private institutions and public institutions, I think it can be a very important platform for NGOs.
Let’s come to the site that has started to shape our thought world from today and has the potential to advance the work to our physical world in the future: Reddit. On this platform, there are sub-sections called “subs” and these sections have their own walls. These walls can be used by followers under the moderation of the section. For example, the ObsidianMD sub is an environment where Obsidian users share usage scenarios with each other, express their problems, and find solutions. Or MAKUVET is a sub where students and graduates at MAKÜ Veterinary Faculty ask each other questions and give advice. Artificial intelligence models, for example, scan the obsidianmd sub first when you ask a technical question about the Obsidian program, or scan the MAKUVET sub first when you ask a question about MAKÜ Veterinary Faculty.
Conclusion
In summary, the paradigm where corporate identity was managed through Google search results and exploited with SEO is now over.
The new paradigm is now built on the necessity of shaping the answers of artificial intelligence models. AI models are forced to turn to authentic and unfiltered human experience to collect information. At this point, Reddit, with its specialized sub-communities (subreddits) gathered around specific topics, becomes one of the main arteries from which AI feeds. Now, a company’s face consists of the answer the language model gives when a question is asked about that company, and one of the most effective ways to influence this answer is for the company to maintain a presence on Reddit. This is followed by the company keeping its own website easily accessible and up-to-date. Lastly come detailed written descriptions of visual social media posts.