I remember sitting at my Guru Communications desk in Miami Beach seeing the Washington Post come online back in 1996. We were in the height of our frenzied growth and struggling against the five headed monster that was our management team. We had just finished launching Isle Bombardier a couple of months beforehand and we were all talking about how big Media doesn’t get it. But the Post did, and that was surprising and refreshing to see.

Reading the article Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers about the brief history of the Post online, I found a few gems that I wanted to share with you.

In particular, this quote from Warren Buffet is extremely relevant to the modern thinking of many of the Web 2.0 startups I know who don’t really have a business model or plan to revenue other than AdSense. I never really understood that form of business model in the early days (which is why I was not able to make Virtual Community Network a big success - I thought we were supposed to try to make money not light it on fire and burn it). While I disagree with the free spending strategy in principle because of the huge risks, I do now see how those risks can be mitigated to ensure some modicum of success.

And Kaiser recalls a conversation with Post board member Warren Buffett in which Buffett told Kaiser to stop worrying about the financial side: “There is no case in history of somebody assembling a huge audience and then failing to make money from it,” Kaiser recalls Buffett saying.
Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

This was the beginning of the “eyeballs” movement - build an audience, make the site sticky and make it viral to grow the audience. I still find it very interesting that today people expect to get to the same “sticky eyeballs” outcome by being “open” and letting their customers easily migrate to competitors. At least today there are standards of quality and methods of understanding audience expectations that make it more possible to create a product/service that really satisfies the needs of the audience.

What really make sense to me in this debate is that it clearly drives competition and motivates organizations with thriving collaborative cultures to make the best possible product in order to prevent people from leaving. It is sort of like an unsatisfied customer relief valve - when the pressure from customers leaving for a competing service get too high, is the company more likely to shut the valve or respond with greater innovation to reverse the flow?

This is seemingly being played out in the Flickr v. Zooomr discussion - especially now since the Flickr Famous Thomas Hawk is going to work for Zooomr. While he says he will still continue to post to Flickr, that does not make sense - he has switched his life to a new photo sharing platform by joining the company, he should make the full commitment to it. While it may be a stab at a brilliant marketing move (keep talking on Flickr about how much better Zooomr is), I feel that such a move is not in the spirit of authenticity that is so prominent in this era of the Web 2.0 Social Contract.

Which brings me back to the brief history of WashingtonPost.com and some of the more recent strategic shifts. To embrace more of the many to many aspects of the covversational Web instead of the one to many model that has been so prevalent for so many years.

In a recent all-company meeting, Caroline Little, WPNI’s chief executive officer and publisher, spoke of recent online innovations. “We set out, very purposefully, about two years ago, to leverage the medium of the Internet, to create more possibilities of conversation and to drive people to come and stay on the site: With blogs, comments on blogs, Technorati [links], comments on articles, a broader and deeper opinion section,” she said.
Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

I refer to this shift as moving from being the “Town Crier” to becoming the “Town Hall” - moving from the idea of media as voice to the idea of media as place - a venue where the conversation happens. From trying to control the conversation to facilitating it amongst peers. The Post does understand this better than most big media companies, but not completely. They still think the game is about driving people to the site and keeping them there, which is an ad revenue model rather than being a social one. This was further evidenced by their position looking out at the world from inside the organization.

Washingtonpost.com, they realized, wasn’t a completely separate product; it could also help market the larger Washington Post brand. Audience spikes around big news events sent a strong message: Readers yearned for the authority of The Washington Post’s reporting.
Web Site Starts From a Memo, Gains Millions of Readers

Internet usage always spikes around big news stories - email volume, IM volume, hits to the big authoritative news sites and now so does the amount of stuff people contribute to the conversation through their Blogs, Podcasts and Vlogs. Yes, people need to have a trusted, authoritative voice to turn to, but this is no longer the Post by default. In all fairness, the strategies that the Post has taken are in the right direction. They are willing to experiment a little, they are embracing conversational methods and they have a really bright team of folks working for them.

But the jury on relevance and authoritative voice is still out and probably won’t render its final judgment for another 10 years. Personally, while a track record and brand loyalty is important, I now judge news sources on the merits of each piece they publish. I am just as likely to stumble on a Washington Post story as I am one from the New York Times. What matters most to me now are the filters like TechMeme, TailRank and Digg. Then it comes down to the people I trust and then the organizations. Until I can build a more personal relationship with Post reporters (neither myself or them have the time to do so), I will only have a limited amount of trust that I can give the organization.

This fundamentally misses the most important point, that Greg Narain paraphrases nicely

Is anyone really dealing with the relationship that’s held and the realities of maintaining that connection and loyalty over an extended period of time? Socialtwister 2.0

That is the problem with social media - and that is the opportunity.

technorati tags:beyondblogging, washingtonpost, zooomr, flickr, web2.0, socialmedia, conversation, newmedia

Categories: Conversation, New Media
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This is a podcast interview I did with Andrew Noyes, the Associate Managing Editor for Washington Internet Daily and Associate Editor for Communications Daily. Andrew wrote a nice bit of coverage on some of the important highlights from the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last Friday. We wanted to go ‘beyond’ the reporting he did and get some more of his perspective on the subject. He is obviously another one of the bright people from DC who ‘gets it’.

We talked about several of the big pitcure topics discussed at the event as well as the personal/professional Blog debate and how Blogging and Journalism can co-exist. Unlike several of the mainstream media people I have met over the last year, he sees the advent of Blogging as a positive occurence, as it is a great source for story leads. This is definitely a podcast you want to hear…

Notes: The show was recorded using Gizmo Project from my iMac in San Francisco to the conference room telephone at Warren Communications News in DC. It is 17:59 in length and has pretty decent sound quality given the VOIP to POTS connectivity and the use of iSight as my microphone. If you don’t get Washington Internet Daily yet, you should take advantage of this free trial offer they have to see why it is a must read for yourself.

Download as MP3 File (2.2MB)

Listen Now:

Categories: Conversation, Authenticity, Podcasts, Word of Mouth
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Funny that Steve Rubel’s post “I Like Companies that say ‘We Suck’” came out when it did - guess the universal consciousness is bubbling up a big world-shifting idea once again. I have been working on a post all week about a similar topic, but I think Steve’s focus on companies admitting their faults does not go far enough. Yes, the tech companies have had a bit of experience with Mea Culpa’s over the years, and this is a requirement for the establishment of trust for an organization’s voice, but the real change that is needed is for companies to embrace all of the truth and their intentions in order to develop real trust within the Commons and amongst its customers. The sort of FUD that Microsoft used to masterfully deploy (and is now being put forth by Google) has no place in the world any longer.

While owning up to corporate short comings is a necessary component of trust, I see it more as philosophical shift towards more openess and being ‘real’ than simply admitting that a company sucks at something. No, I am not talking about giving away your client’s upcoming product plans three months before launch so a competitor can do it instead - that would be harmful rather than helpful. I am talking about letting employees and representatives behave like the real humans they are, rather than simply delivering the corporate spin and enforcing the seemingly hard and fast rules that ‘the system’ dictates.

Part of the problem is much bigger than any one company, it is an undercurrent that is sweeping away the industry. I spoke with Ed Keller about this briefly via email before the Beyond Blogging 2006 event last week. In his press release announcing TalkTrack, he referred to “Marketers”. Summarizing my conversation with him, I inquired whether he meant just marketing people or marketing and communications people. From his perspective the use of the term “marketer” was all inclusive of PR, Advertising, Research, Marketing, etc… Merriam Webster agrees with his definition, calling it “an aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer” but I see a need to redefine this understanding - to rebrand the marketing profession with not a makeover, but a “MakeReal”.

From my experience, and from the nature of a conversation I joined on Burning Bird with Shelley Powers in April, I have come to see that many people believe that marketing is evil and as such “Marketers” have a bad reputation. I won’t get into all the why’s here, but the main point was that the non-marketer general public sees the smarmy SALES tactics of some companies as marketing and this rubs off on all other aspects of the discipline. In certain parts of Silicon Valley, particularly the Open Source world and among many engineers, this is one of the leading causes of anti-consumerism. But like most anti-establishment rebellion, it is often more about an assertion of personal power and freedom in a world that seeks to impose power hierarchies and use fear of scarcity to control people who are left feeling helpless within a system that favors the rich corporations over the rights of the individual.

Tara Hunt picked up on this conversation with her post entitled “Marketing = Eeeeeeevil!” which contains some other great insights on this subject. While I agree with much of what she says in this regards, I disagree with her push for what she calls “Pinko Marketing“. To me, what she calls Pinko is really just a retelling of the original Cluetrain Manifesto - which she duly credits for much of the inspiration for her idea. The Cluetrain heavily influenced me and was a huge part of my original inspiration for pursuing the development of conversational intelligence software back in 1999 (before everyone but perhaps Intelliseek). While the principles are strong, the use of the term Pinko feels wrong, as does its association with communism.

I believe what we need to be talking about here is “Real Marketing“. As in keeping it real, being real and telling people what is really going on.

It may seem like merely a semantic difference, but there is a more fundamental shift of intention and focus at play here. Real Marketing is about matching products and services with the people who can truly benefit from those products and services. It is not about getting more people to buy something and maximizing market share. It is about getting the right people to purchase a product and helping them to get the most use out of it. It’s not about increasing sales for the purpose of making the numbers, it’s about getting more loyal customers who are obtaining real value from the product. It is about creating maximum efficiency in operations across the board - and that is only achieved by open and honest conversations.

As almost every panelist said at the event last week, we as “Marketers” can’t control the conversation any more - we can, however, participate in the conversation and facilitate certain portions of it. This reminds me of numerous meetings with almost every big client I have had around the issue of enabling open conversations through message boards or open comment systems. They were all ‘afraid’ of what people might say. Afraid that some truth might be exposed in regards to a product short coming, or a design defect, or a bad customer service experience. As I pleaded then, and still plead today - “THEY ARE ALREADY HAVING THESE CONVERSATIONS, AND YOUR VOICE IS NOT BEING HEARD BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T INVITE YOU TO JOIN THEM - THEY DON’T TRUST YOU!”

I have been working on a model of the stages of engagement in a customer relationship since my days of being Chief, eBusiness for the US Mint. While there are many deep things at play here in this model, the most fundamental premise here is that communicating the knowledge a customer needs to move through each stage of the relationship is the key - not advertising and not sales in the traditional sense. In this regards, I do agree with Edelman’s assertions on the potential for Communications Professionals to lead the way in the Social Media future we are just beginning to live today. Communications is conversation, so that is simple enough. I differ with them in that I see important roles for all practicioneers within the “Marketing and Communications Industry”. Advertising still has its place, as does research and an understanding of market segmentation.  What is needed is a more holistic approach that is centered on people.
Real Marketing means the end of empty hyperbole and hype. It is beyond the sales of Word of Mouth Units, the practical equivalent of increasing the volume of the sizzle - it is about increasing the nutritional value of the steak - about getting to the heart of what really matters. It still calls for the proper seasoning to make it tasty to the person consuming it, and we need to listen to whether the person wants that steak pink in the center or well done, but it is not so much about how many people hear that sizzling plate of Fajitas as it travels from the kitchen to the table. It has everything to do with people being able to get near real time information on what is in that dish, how it was prepared and what the people who have tasted it have to say about it. It is about the reputation of the restaurant, the description on the menu, the conversation with the server and the conversation over the shoulder with the person sitting next to you. It is about informed choices - it is about the market of conversation - it is about the market as conversation.

So what to do with this understanding? Blogging is a good place to start because it enables the sort of two-way dialogue that is essential for making Real Marketing work, but we definitely need to go ‘Beyond Blogging’ to make it Real. To really get the most from this however requires a fundamental shift in perspective - perhaps Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements might be a good place to start. Or better still, let’s start a conversation right here and try to get to the bottom of this together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Word of Mouth, PR Community, Real Marketing
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So what does Beyond Blogging actually mean? I have asked a lot of people that and received some very interesting answers. But I think to really get Beyond Blogging is a matter for the framing question. I.e., is the question really about what is Beyond Blogging, as in what does the future hold? Or Is it about going beyond blogging today, to imply that there is much more to this whole phenomenon. From my perspective, Beyond Blogging is about creating a deeper understanding of the best practices that work today while setting a path towards what we need from technology to do a better job for our clients in the future.

As Howard Rheingold says, “What it is -> is up to us”, so let’s get involved in the conversation and start trying things out, seeing what works and sharing what we learn with one another. It’s a about letting go of what you know and how things have been done in the past and looking for better ways to serve our clients - to create the most impact for their organizations, to tell their stories in ways that reach their intended audience. Now more than ever, the people who build these Web tools are open to the process of co-creation - my friends at BuzzLogic have been working very closely with a few key communications firms ever since they began development on their soon to be released software and will likely continue to do so forever. [Disclousure: I am an advisory board member for BuzzLogic]

So why now? What’s really different? Everything - and nothing. As Joe Kraus says, “It is easier than ever to launch a company, but just as hard as ever to build a business.” For me, what is really different is that we are finally in the throws of the Knowledge Economy and on our way to the next evolution, the Wisdom Economy.

In the knowledge economy, the value is no longer based on what you know, it is created from the unique way in which you apply what you know. It is found in the unique value of your relationships, the richness of your experience and your ability to adapt the insights you have gleaned from past failures and success in new ways for new situations. While we learn much from the patterns and protocols that have worked for us in the past, we need to think like Edwards Demming and Tony Robbins - we need to strive for Constant and Never Ending Improvement - finding better ways to accomplish our client’s goals as Tom Foremski suggests in The New Media Release.

Beyond Blogging is also an understanding that this new era of “social media” and Web 2.0 is about more than a technological revolution - it is about a fundamentally different way of viewing the world. It is a Chaordic world, not one in which the old world “Command and Control” hierarchies will work much longer. It is not a world of lies and cover ups - it is a world of authenticity and impeccable honesty. It is about filling the funnel instead of cllimbing the ladder - it is about helping one another by sharing what we know and being LoveCats. As I have written with The Noble Pursuit, it is also a time when fear and power are losing their grip on much of the modern world, but runs rampant in the unintegrated gap. It is whole brain thinking. It is about love winning out over fear. It is about the abundant capital of knowledge driving the economy forward instead of the scarcity of resources. It is about respecting the “Z-list” Bloggers as much as the A-List ones.

It is about people first and technology second. It is about you and me, in conversation with one another, asking the big questions or the silly one’s - at a conference table, in the hallway or over beer - enjoying the world around us and doing our bit to help make things right in our own unique way, using our own special gifts.

Yep - I know - all that idealism is fine and dandy, but what is Beyond Blogging for the communications industry specifically? What should we be concerned with as professionals? First you must understand how to work with consumer generated media to further your goals. Word of Mouth is a great practice area, but it can not be bought and sold for its full value. Monetizing it in units is just simply wrong from my perspctive - though it may be what the media buyers of the world want to do, it does not make it right. Its real value comes from the hearts of raving fans and the real troubles come from those that are really pissed off.

The trend I have been watching most closely over the past few years since getting into conversational intelligence and word of mouth has been the use of knowledge to further the goals of marketing. As consumers have access to more and more information, they rely on being able to find out what they need to know - they strive to make meaning out of the noise. So why not help make the meaning for them by replacing some of the advertising and communications mix with messages that teach people the important bits instead of always tugging on the emotional heart strings. While it probably won’t work for Coca-Cola, it might for Diet Coke - in a real sense, a nutrional label is a form of knowledge marketing in itself.

What does knowledge marketing mean? What does it look like? AdSense is one example - simple short text blurbs that must avoid hyperbole. It is Campbell’s Soup offering a series of alternative recipes for using its soup in other dishes. It is AdSense sending an email newsletter that helps advertisers better optimize their campaigns, helping them get the most from the service offering. It is American Express offering small business expertise as part of their Open program. It is a hundred other uses of producing media and applications that help people move from being a potential customer to being a loyal one who is selling your products for you and teaching their peers all the tips and tricks that they learned along the way. This approach creates natural word of mouth amongst your most highly valued customers and may take the form of an advertisement, a web site, a brochure, an email newsletter, a non-profit tie-in or any other form.

In short, it is about a fundamental shift in the framework and focus of the traditional communications agency from handling the public relations, Web site content and crisis communications to one that helps companies in all aspects of their outbound communications. It is about helping clients organize their knowledge assetts and figuring out how to best communicate them to the appropriate audiences in the most appropriate manner. It is about working to ensure the congruency of communications across all customer touchpoints - from press relations, to blogger relations, to internal communications, to sales scripts, to advertisements, to customer service centers and everything in between. Most importantly, it is about really listening to your customers and your markets, being engaged in the conversation and just keeping it real.

If you want to know more about this, come talk to me at the event tomorrow morning over at the Mayflower hotel - would be glad to hear your feedback and see what we might figure out together…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content, Media Relations, Blogger Relations, Word of Mouth
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I have been thinking about how to share these stories with you for some time now. My friend David Wickenden over at Fleishman Hillard sent this to our attention shortly after this series of articles was published in The Economist on April 20th, 2006.

It is quite simply one of the best pieces of reporting I have found on the bigger picture we are referencing with Beyond Blogging. I still don’t know how to boil it down for you, so let me first say that I highly recommend you find the time to sit down and read each of them all the way through. I could probably write 2,000 words on each of the articles, so it is best if I let them mostly speak for themselves.  The articles provide an excellent, non-alarmist perspective as to what all this stuff means and an understanding of how it affects your profession.

• Among the Audience
• It’s the links, Stupid
• Compose Yourself
• The Wiki Principle
• Heard on the Street
• Wonders of the Metaverse
• The Gazillion Dollar Question
• What Sort of Revolution

I would really like to sit and spend some time with the authors of this piece to dig even deeper. The inclusion of the broader historical perspective adds a tremendous level of understanding the current media ‘revolution’ in context. For instance, I have been watching as the old guard of Mainstream Media has responded to the Blogging phenomenon with scorn and disdain, portraying Bloggers as not only unskilled amateurs, but as hacks with a score to settle against others.

My experience has been completely the opposite - most Bloggers I know are more concerned with conveying the truth and are quick to correct themselves when shown to be wrong. Personally, I am not much of a researcher, but I know not to quote someone improperly as has happened to Todd Tweedy recently in his dealings with Tom Wasserman from Brandweek.  In the end, professional ethics come down to the individual’s interpretation - so my point is that both amateurs and professionals are human, we all make mistakes.
Some of the more important elements of the lead article tie in directly with some of my previous posts for this Blog:

“Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be making money from the content they create; others will not and will not mind, because they have other motives.”

“As with the media revolution of 1448, the wider implications for society will become visible gradually over a period of decades.”

“David Weinberger says that Mainstream Media ‘don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations’. That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, he says, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.”

“[Barry] Diller is confident that participation can never be a proper basis for the media industry. ‘Self-publishing by someone of average talent is not very interesting,’ he says. ‘Talent is the new limited resource.’ […] ‘What an ignoramus!’ says Jerry Michalski.”

What is lost on Barry is how much of a training ground this is for the next Spielberg, the next Jennings, the next Crichton. What you don’t get in the ranks of most media organizations is the chance to really practice the craft and experiment with media - there is little tolerance for risk or failure. This is exactly what the Blogging revolution is providing - free training for the media stars of tomorrow as well as a new distribution channel for the stars of today.

Quality of production is a discriminating factor for many consumers, but the quality of the content can come from a poorly delivered. The fact that the story is being told somewhere rather than not being toldd at all is what really matters. With the proper tools for creation and discovery, every story that matters will find its audience, no matter how small that audience might be.

This is the real power of going Beyond Blogging.

What is new is that young people today, and most people in future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not. They will have plenty of help. Sometimes they will rely on human editors of their choosing; at other times they will rely on collective intelligence in the form of new filtering and collaboration technologies that are now being developed.

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, New Media
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So it has been a little more than a week now since I have been blogging here and I still don’t know quite what to make of it. I do have some thoughts I want to share though, since it may be very helpful for those of you who are getting ready to step up and become a Blogger for your agency and/or on behalf of a client.

For starters, it is a lot harder blogging for someone else than it is for yourself. It is particularly hard to try to come up with new material every day and even harder to do so without the aid of an editor. It is not really hard because of the demands being put on me by others - quite the contrary actually - it is really hard because of the imagined demands I put on myself. Because of the questions I ask myself about the appropriateness of what I have to say and whether it will fit the needs of the people organizing this excellent event. Because of a concern that my friends at Fleishman Hillard deserve the best and because I want to give them even more. Because of the censoring I do on my own voice from a fear that what I want to share with you may not be well received. Because I want to help you learn about this great future for the communications industry that I see and which you will help to develop.

Of course, there are many other personal and professional reasons why it feels so hard, but most of all, it is hard Blogging for someone else because I still feel alone when I am writing. Blogging is supposed to really be a conversation, but in the beginning of any blog, it is a monologue with very few people participating in the discussion.

I was speaking with my friend Greg Narain of Live Journal’s publicized statistics show this to be true. Out of 10.1 million accounts on their service, only 1.2 million have updated their blogs in the past 30 days. About 12% in the past month, 7.4% in the last week and only 2.6% in the last 24 hours.

It would seem that most people are like me and are often too busy with work work to find the time to blog.

In all honesty, I did not ask the question why too deeply - I was more concerned with how some people out there could be promoting 30 million blogs when most of them are inactive. But Greg was very clear - “how much do you enjoy talking to yourself?” Without some sense of a connection with the people who may be reading what we write - without a feedback loop on whether or not what we have to say holds any value for anyone other than ourself, it is very hard to find the motivation to continue writing. The feedback could come from comments left on the blog, or from meeting the real people who read it and speaking with them directly. It could even happen by noticing in the statistics that more live humans actually visited the site than Web Spiders.

Personally, I kept blogging for the last year because I have been trying to become known for what I know - I am striving to establish my reputation, which is why I don’t wear a mask and choose to show my real self. I have been trying to build the brand called Chris actively for the first time in my life and I know that Blogs are one path to that end. It is an unfiltered connection between me and you - my words are not masked or edited by someone else. It is a slow and rough haul, but in the end it is worth it - I have made so many friends from my Blogging it is nearly impossible to count. And now, finally, with this blog, I am actually making money at it instead of just writing for myself and in support of my ideas for how to make the world a better place.

My Blog statistics show a very light readership overall - around 30 Feedburner subscribers and around 20 views for each post within the first 24 hours or so (before I shifted my blogging to here and to the BrainJams site). But, some of my older articles, like this one on “The Rise of Amateur Conferences” which was cited by Wikipedia, continues to get page views (15 last month). it has staying power, and for this reason, it motivates me to stay and continue my pontifications, even if no one is commenting, or no one, not even the people I am working with, have anything to say about what I am writing today.

It would be quite different if I were the Chief Blogging Officer for a large corporation with lots of customers, or if I were already a published celebrity writer, but going from relative unknown to a basic level of awareness is quite a hard path on one’s own. So when my friend and BrainJams PR volunteer Jerry Cashman told me that the editors and writers he is speaking to know of our non-profit’s work, and know of me through my blog, I was somewhat taken aback. I have no idea how they could know me and I had no idea that I had even generated some basic awareness at this point, despite my efforts to do so. I have not really talked to them and I certainly don’t know them (except for a few I call friends).

So my biggest insight on Blogging for someone else is a reinforcement of a core value I hold, and a follow-on to my post yesterday on Authenticity and Transparency. Keep it real, do it for the right reasons and all will be ok in the end - even if it sometimes feels like you are just talking to myself - because you never know who might be reading…

Categories: Blogging, Conversation, Authenticity, Statistics
2 Comments »

I have been a part of ‘new media’ since it was barely even new back in 1994. In all that time I have only met a few Mainstream Media ‘oldtiimers’ who really understood the impact that the technology was having - more so lately of course, but I am still in awe at those who vehemently resist change. The good news is that many of those who get it have all been working for the BBC over the past year on a blueprint for their strategic vision called ‘Creative Future‘. I highly recommend that you follow that link and read it in its entirety, so I won’t be including much of it here except…

Some key points from BBC Director General Mark Thompson

“The second wave of digital will be far more disruptive than the first and the foundations of traditional media will be swept away, taking us beyond broadcasting.”

“We can deliver much more public value when we think across all platforms and consider how audiences can find our best content, content that’s more relevant, more useful and more valuable to them.”

According to a report from Mark Sweeney of Media Guardian, the BBC’s plan for going “Beyond Broadcast” calls for a “a three-pronged approach to refocus all future BBC digital output and services around three concepts - ’share’, ‘find’ and ‘play’.” It would seem that share is really at the heart of these efforts as they hope their audience will be using the BBC site for customizing their news experience, writing blogs and posting video content. “User generated content” has often been of late a key element of business models designed to keep costs of operation down, it is a pleasure to finally see someone use the concept in its proper context. Apparently, the BBC is taking the idea one step further, asking their audience to submit their redesigns for the BBC home page.

Ben McConnell over at the Church of the Customer Blog makes a great point, which is one of the reason this story interested me so much:

“The world is changing for advertisers who hope to insert themselves among the networked community masses, too. They must also cede traditional expectations of control not only to be heard by the community, but to be relevant.”

As I have been telling all my friends and associates for the last year, the key aspect of remaining relevant in the era of social media and user generated content - as a media company or as a brand - is to understand you can’t control what people do or say, but you can participate in the conversation. Or at least, you can participate as long as you are honest, helpful and authentic. So rather than thinking like someone who controls all aspects of the situation, think about media as being a facilitator instead of a dictator. What sort of conversations do you, as a human being, want to have with people you trust? with companies you trust? with companies you don’t trust?
It would seem this sort of understanding will go a long way towards ensuring your, and your client’s relevancy in the future - Beyond Blogging and Beyond Broadcast.

Categories: Conversation, New Media, User Generated Content
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I was in the middle of writing a blog post on Living with Uncertainty when I came across this poem from Tom Atlee called Let’s Nail It Down, Before It Gets Away!. This is the third time in as many days when the emotional learning brought on by a poem has been great and swift - when the creative use of words has helped me understand something more deeply. A timely reminder of the power inherent in true wisdom, spoken from the heart. The ability to help people understand expansive concepts in simple terms through the power of words is something that every human shares.

It is the power of conversation. It is at the heart of all media.

In every form I have examined, media is about some one, or some organization communicating with you - having a conversation, or at least wanting to have one. The Broadcast models is often referred to as one-to-many and is unidirectional. The Internet is about one-to-one conversations, which is bi-directional. Now social media has truly enhanced the Web with many to many conversations, held within some broader context, but always a personal conversation. Some examples to consider:

• Blogger
• Nightly News Anchor
• Rock Band
• Print Ad
• Television Commercial
• Play
• Movie
• Radio Talk Shows
• Poem
• Press Release

Are they not all examples of people holding conversations? While you may consider the Rock Band to be giving a performance (as do I), on the most fundamental level they are communicating with you, telling you a story - even the instrumentals do so. It is all about the connections between people, their ideas, their emotions and their actions - and how we communicate those via mediated conversations with one another.I am not quite sure where this is going yet, but I think it is a key insight that will be at the core of another big idea in the near future. I spoke a little more about the idea of media as conversations (ok, perhaps I rambled on about it) with Eddie Codel in this NetSquared Vlog entry. I had not yet worked out the idea of media as conversation fully, but the original question was how do you use Blogs for your non-profit community. My answer was simple, the blog is my site, it is my primary media, it is my way for communicating with everyone - it is where I have conversations with the people who care about what matters to us.

At the same time, it is just one of the many ways in which I have conversations with people and with groups of people.

The lesson though is that we should perhaps think about Media as we think about having a conversation with someone. That blogging is just a conversation between me and you. Perhaps you have something you want to say, so you can comment on this. Or perhaps you have something so important to share that you want to more closely associate it with your online identity, so you write about it on your blog and (hopefully) you link back to me. But the blog is adaptive - it is both a broadcast communication, from me to everyone out there who reads it and a potential one-to-one conversation. Most importantly, it is as easy to do as it is to type and click a button.

This is what makes blogging so powerful from my perspective, and why my answer about how we use blogs was so simple. Once you make the conceptual shift to this understanding and enter the flow with a genuine vooice, the world will change ‘write’ before your eyes.

Categories: Blogging, Conversation
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