In the pre-AI environment, corporate identity management was a term indexed to Google. The face of a corporation largely consisted of what appeared in search results and, to a lesser extent, photo-video based social media presence (Instagram, TikTok). In these, depending on the context, there was either information that appeared when the corporation’s name was searched and an extension directing to the official website, or short descriptions appearing above website results with Google’s “snippet” feature in searches made according to the corporation’s feature, and other websites below it, which largely consisted of articles published on the internet. Private companies wanting to exploit this situation were preparing texts that appeared like blog posts on pages that only appeared in Google searches but whose path you couldn’t find from the main page of their official websites, comparing their own products with competitors and highlighting their own products. But today, instead of establishing their own editorial teams, institutions can handle these tasks easier and cheaper by advertising to journalists.
Journalism and Old Media
The situation that has spread to our country today is that no private journalistic activity is autonomous. They either produce content openly under an advertising or sponsorship contract, or there is an unwritten conflict of interest in the background, and they act as spokespersons for institutions to protect this situation. Since I follow it closely, I can say with very high confidence that there is almost no autonomous publisher left in Turkey in the technology and automotive fields. Even if things look different from the outside in other fields, I am sure that ethical problems will be encountered when looking at their inner workings because it is very difficult for a publisher to survive in Turkey only with advertising or subscription revenues. Therefore, when you search for “best x product” in a Google search, it has become impossible to reach an opinion based on real experience because the budget allocated to SEO works by these institutions that commit ethical violations is larger, and if there is an autonomous journalist somewhere out there, it has become impossible to access their views through 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 “purchasing decision of the reader.” That is, the content produced only becomes valuable if you click on the links within or next to the content and buy that product. There are those who believe this was better in the past when content was behind paywalls and you had to buy newspapers and magazines, but back then, because the sale of that media was targeted, the covers of these newspapers and magazines were used as elements of manipulation (this still continues, but their circulation is approaching zero). In other words, the conclusion I have retrospectively reached today is that journalism has never been done with sublime feelings; it is always a system that serves different goals (product sales being the most innocent of them) that are not written in the content produced but are delivered to you with that content.
Visually Based Social Media
On platforms like Instagram and TikTok, we see that institutions engaged in both commercial and public activities maintain a presence to keep up with the era. This approach will continue to exist to build organic connections. Apart from this, they have become environments where people share their real experiences, and in this situation, they are exploited again by using “influencers,” just like in the journalism sector. Generally, unlike journalism, it is not an area facing extinction and seems likely to 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 the environment where people scroll to death and spend hours for very long.
Today, when we look at the companies investing 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 ownership rights among each other to evade taxes, and tomorrow X could own XAI. Google, the owner of Gemini, is also the owner of YouTube and Google Maps (Google Maps may not be a platform that comes to mind when social media is mentioned, but it fits this description). Meta, the owner of Instagram and Facebook, develops llama language models. Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has different companies developing many different models under its umbrella. At first, I explained this connection like this: these companies have a lot of data, and who else could be as lucky as Instagram to train an image model? However, today I think this situation is even deeper. These platforms have stopped being the 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 may not be reduced to zero, 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 reach a level where they analyze the conditions required for you to stay on the platform and generate 100% suitable content in real-time, holding you captive. Therefore, in this future, people will continue their organic communication, but I think the importance of visual social media in corporate identity management may decrease. Of course, my thoughts on written social media are very different.
New Media
When we come to the present day, we see that artificial intelligence has completely eliminated the need for the journalism sector, and this will soon affect social media “influencers” as well. When you want to learn something, you ask an artificial intelligence conversational bot, and depending on the situation, it either conveys what it knows to you or conducts an internet scan with tools expressed as “web scrapers,” analyzes the results, and gives you an answer. This means that you can build and protect your corporate identity by shaping the answers these language models will give.
The issue comes down to the training of artificial intelligence models and influencing the environments these “web scraper” tools access. As a result of the feedback collected from the content produced with results scanned from the internet, language models today avoid scanning news sites and columns on topics that are not newsworthy and primarily scan social media. If we divide them by 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 scan photos and videos. So when you publish an Instagram post about your institution, you must ensure that all the information in the visual is also in the description. Visual social media platforms are copies of each other. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, all of them work as if they are different interfaces of the same application, but written social media is not like this. Even though YouTube is a video sharing platform, since the transcripts of all videos are created, it is a platform that we can also consider as a written social media platform 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 era” or “appeal to the youth,” and I do not think this approach will be successful in the long run. Of the open ones, since the format is short on X and most of the content is produced by bots, I think the works done here will also get lost in the crowd. I have never seen public pages on Facebook being scanned in any search so far. This is not because it doesn’t have the potential, but most probably 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 come to forums, which 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 of all, let me start with the forum that has fallen victim to the current disease of the media and is of no use to use: Ekşi Sözlük. This platform today has become a platform where all the problems we talked about regarding journalism are experienced and even non-commercial events are brought up. In the past, it could be logical to use because the probability of standing out in Google searches was very high, but moderation deficiencies created question marks in this situation. Today it has no importance anyway, and you won’t easily see it being scanned by artificial intelligence models.
Another one of these, which I can call somewhere in between, having a high advertising weight but also high organic engagement, and I guess one of the oldest forums in our country, is Donanımhaber forum. Because this is a forum in the literal sense of the word, it is currently heavily scanned and has potential. However, the classic forum structure makes it difficult to create a corporate identity here, and I guess it is not possible to maintain a presence without a commercial connection. While it may not make much sense for private and public institutions, I think it can be a very important platform for NGOs.
Let’s come to the site that has already begun to shape our world of thought from today and has the potential to advance the job to our physical world in the future: Reddit. In 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 sub named ObsidianMD is an environment where Obsidian users share usage scenarios, express their problems, and find solutions with each other. Or MAKUVET is a sub where students and alumni at MAKU Faculty of Veterinary Medicine ask each other questions and give advice. For example, when you ask a technical question about the Obsidian program, artificial intelligence models first scan the ObsidianMD sub, or when you ask a question about MAKU Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, they first scan the MAKUVET sub.
Conclusion
In summary, the paradigm in which corporate identity was managed over Google search results and exploited with SEO has now ended.
The new paradigm is now built on the necessity of shaping the answers of artificial intelligence models. Artificial intelligence models have to turn to authentic and unfiltered human experience to gather information. At this point, Reddit, with its specialized sub-communities (subreddits) gathered around specific topics, is becoming one of the main arteries that artificial intelligence feeds on. The face of an institution is now solely the answer given by the language model when a question is asked about that institution, and one of the most effective ways to influence this answer is for the institution to maintain a presence on Reddit. This is followed by the institution keeping its own website easily accessible and up-to-date. Finally, detailed written descriptions made on visual social media posts come into play.