Obi Cubana And The Power Of The Social Media

Obi Cubana

 Days after the burial of his mother in Oba Anambra State, Nigerians are still talking about Obinna Iyiegbu, popularly known as, Obi Cubana. From the mainstream media to whatever else is in between, the burial has captured the imagination of Nigerians. It has also marked another chapter in the growing power of social media and the future it holds and why the print media should be concerned or at best improve their social media arm.

If you notice at the run-up to the burial there were no obituary advertisements published in Nigerian newspapers and even on the day of the burial, there were no newspapers that carried burial advertisements placed by the friends of Obi Cubana. With the quantum of money displaced at the burial, it is obvious that his friends could have bought over many pages of the national dailies. They chose not to. We live in a clime where any big politician who buries his mother would have his friends spend millions of naira in the placement of advertisements in various national dailies and the public barely noticed.

The burial in Oba was also not carried live on the mainstream national television networks like a certain governor in South-South Nigeria who has literarily become an ATM for some television networks in Nigeria that beams live his programmes, even if it was a road that was merely rehabilitated, and not many Nigerians want to watch the loquacious governor and his so-called projects.

Yet despite the mainstream media “blackout” for whatever reason by the friends of Obi Cubana, the burial was more than successful and will continue to be a reference point in elaborate farewell to the dead. Most of the images from the burial were shot with phones, yet the whole world is talking about these images. With Twitter banned in Nigeria, Instagram and Facebook played a huge role in making the burial a national event, which also drew international attention, as the Diaspora community were also talking about it.

To bring the impact into context, Obi Cubana was having about 800,000 followers on Instagram prior to the burial and within the period when it was revealed that hundreds of cows have been donated to him by his friends and associates, to the time the burial took place, Obi Cubana added over 200,000 people to his list of followers and reached the 1million mark and counting. And you know what it means to have up to 1million people following you on Instagram or any platform on social media in terms of branding, marketing, advertising, monetization and all.

What is happening in the media landscape is akin to the industrial revolution. Remember that there was resistance to the revolution initially because the new technology was going to take away jobs. Of course, it did initially, but when productivity increased as a result of technology, goods became cheaper and more and better jobs were created.

With the high cost of printing materials, dwindling print runs, high cost of distributing newspapers, and high cost of power among others, it is only a matter of time before the only newspaper alive is the newspaper online. Already more people get their news online than offline. I can only imagine how much the mainstream media houses lost in that burial. But their losses were the gains of the social media monetized platforms. Of course, it is true that the mainstream media is also migrating to the digital platforms and leveraging on their social media handles to reach more people, a lot more needs to be done. This new media environment that is fast maturing need innovative media practitioners. The paradigm is shifting and fast too!