by Jonathan Blank on December 30, 2009
With so many people observing, documenting and opining about the financial impact of the failing mass business model for newspapers and other mass media, I don’t hear or read enough about the cultural impact of this change. I am saddened that 15,000 people lost journalism positions in 2009. And it’s hard to grasp that a 150 year old institution like the Rocky-Mountain News can just vanish.
While jobs and P&L’s are important, I think we will look back at 2009 and remember this as the year consuming media changed from a “shared experience to a sharing experience.” Phyllis Myers, producer for NPR, coined that phrase on a December 23 broadcast of Fresh Air. Here’s the difference in a nutshell:
Shared Experience -
- In the morning we all would pick up our daily newspaper and read about the same events and trends. While the angles journalists took were different, the articles were generally pieced together using a simlar investigative method.
- At night we would all gather around our living room and watch the same broadcast news as our neighbors.
Sharing Experience -
- In the morning we read the links emailed to us, the status updates of our friends and the Tweets of those we follow.
- Throughout the day we check in with any number of social networks that make up our communities of interest.
This is the big change. We don’t share an experience anymore, we just share information and opinion.
I want to share my best wishes for 2010.
Photo Credit Funchye
by Jonathan Blank on November 12, 2009
Findability use to be a term narrowly associated with SEO. But now findability is the charge of all marketers, as our primary job is to enhance the probability that our content and experts will get found and be shared.
Put simply, findability is the degree to which companies, content, and experts are easily located using search terms and through the process of sharing with networks.
Findability on the internet is not a new concept. It is about as old as the West Coast offense; Peter Morville wrote the book on it in 2005. But it has been generally confined to the studios of web designers and offices of e-marketing professionals. That’s because, until now, we could effectively get the word out about our whitepapers, studies and announcements through calling, mailing and emailing people.
But today when you pick up that phone, stick on the stamp or press the send button, you do so knowing there are fewer people on the other end and those that are still there are probably ignoring you. Against this backdrop of outbound marketing getting less effective, findability has become the primary concern of the entire marketing department - business unit marketing, content marketing, public relations, search engine optimization.
Take public relations for example. According to an analysis by BusinessWeek , there are approximately 19 percent fewer journalists in 2009 than there were in 2008. The same article concludes there are 11 percent more public relations professionals. That is a 30 percent swing in the ratio of people pitching to people listening and covering. Oy.
And for the nearly 80,000 journalists left in the country, they don’t need to pick up the phone. They can decide what to cover through an ambient awareness the news through RSS feeds, Twitter, Google and online news rooms. Just as Facebook allows us to have an awareness of what our friends are up to (without talking to them), the larger social web allows journalists to have an awareness of what news is happening (without talking to PR).
So go forth and find. Focus your marketing on making your content more relevant and more extraordinary. Make it easily shareable. Use it as a response to the content of competitors. Yes, actually talk openly about how your conclusions compare to that of others. Take the time to Google your experts and see if their digital footprint matches up with their point of views. Are they easily found? Are they easily connected with?
Put the phone down (no one is picking up) and find out how findable your company and its points of views are.
Picture Credit: Niznoz
