If you were given a few million bucks from a venture capitalist to build a media company, what would that look like?

Not so easy, eh? So, I’m going to think about it, but then, it’s your invitation to think about it, too. Because some of what you and I come up with here might be useful, don’t you agree? Maybe we’ll figure out where some of these companies might hop next, or maybe we’ll just invent something new.

The Next Media Company Manifesto

Here’s what I believe might need to be true about the next media company:

• Stories are points in time, but won’t end at publication. (Edits, updates, extensions are next.)
• Curators and editors rule, and creators aren’t necessarily on staff.
• Media cannot stick to one form. Text, photos, video, music, audio, animation, etc are a flow.
• Everything must be portable and mobile-ready. (Mobile devices need to evolve here, too).
• Everything must have collaborative opportunities. If I write about a restaurant, you should have wikified access to add to the article directly.
• Advertising cannot be the primary method of revenue.
• In-line content marketing, clearly delineated/disclosed/explained is one revenue stream. One of many.
• Contributors come in many shapes: onstaff, partner (how pros like TechCrunch link to Washington Post), guest (for love and glory only), and conversational come right to mind. Who else?
• Value-add services are another revenue stream. Why not book hotels and flights from my travel magazine directly? Why not buy how-to information on marketing from Ad Age or FastCompany?
• Collaboration rules. Why should I pick the next cover? Why should my picture of the car crash be the best?
• Everything is modular and linkable. Everything is fluid. Meaning, if I want the publication to be a business periodical, then I don’t want to have to read a piece about sports.
• Paper isn’t dead: it’s on demand.
• Do-it-yourself publishing is next for us all. At first.
• We will all audition for mass physical distribution.
• It won’t matter (mass physical distribution) to us, lots of the time.

What Else?

Am I way off here? Is this too Pollyanna? What makes sense? What’s just wrong? How far am I off from your perspective?

I welcome the conversation.

There’s a reason people send me products. I’m not an expert. I write about them (or the ones that capture my attention) from the point of view of “some guy with a blog who got something sent to him.” It doesn’t hurt that my blog is popular, but that alone isn’t a good reason to send someone something. It doesn’t hurt that I have a reputation as being a nice guy, so I’m not likely to bitch and complain (though I do give my negative opinions, should I have them).

The reason that people send me products is that I’m the new “everyman.” I’m the point-of-view character who just messes with your thing, or reads your book, or makes a goofy video, and shares with people what I think might be interesting to my audience. It’s that last part that matters the most, though. You knew that.

Marketing is shifting away from impersonal interactions and back towards the more effective world of word of mouth. Blended with the world of word-of-mouth, however (or maybe more accurately, I should say that word of mouth is only one tool in the bag), are sponsored conversations. Ted Murphy just recorded a video about these recently. The only difference is that in one, things happen a bit more organically. In the other, there’s a bit of a push (which usually involves money or a product or a service changing hands).

To me, they’re like a driver and a putter (not that I play golf). Getting people to pay attention in this saturated market is requiring more and more creative marketing. I, for one, see that to be content marketing. But once you get onto the green (or in the financial sense, the case to earn some green), I think word of mouth is the more finesse-level tool. Make sense?

So when I get to play with a nifty camera or drink 30 year old whisky or get a chance to do something neato like that, just realize that I’m also part of a larger story, and that’s the story of the marketing world looking for a new kind of everyman (and I mean women, as well – the mommyblogger community is definitely alive and well with this experience).

Is it effective? I say yes, but ONLY if there is trust and transparency involved in the process. If people aren’t disclosing the relationships up front, and not respecting their community, I can see this failing fast. It’s up to us, but then, isn’t that the beauty of this new world? It’s always up to us.

What say you?

All Tomorrow’s Radios

Julien and I talk about how the skills we’re sharing in our upcoming book, Trust Agents, are not unlike the communicators (be they advertisers, marketers, entertainers, or others like politicians) who mastered the difference between print and radio. They shifted from one media type to another, were there first, and took their platform rapidly to the top. Same thing happened with TV, again with the Internet in general, and most recently with what we’ve called new media, social media, and whatever else.

Podcasting as we all thought it might be in 2006 is gone. That won’t happen. You can dispute the hell out of me in the comments, but I’ll truck out as many fallen gods as you want. I know them all.

Instead, what’s going to happen is actually a bit more like what PodTech was trying to do before it went awry. I have always admired the early business model Jon Furrier had in place for PodTech, which was more about making interesting paid content. The payload of the information was decent, and companies were paying to get that information out there. I used to subscribe to over a dozen PodTech shows as a software engineer, and Furrier’s interviews both inspired me, and also saved my company millions of dollars.

There are many people who made good money with podcasting and videoblogging. I’m friends with them, too. The difference was this: they weren’t trying to sell entertainment for entertainment’s sake. They had a product or a service and they had a business model around their use of podcasting as a medium. My two most cited examples: the Financial Aid Podcast and WineLibrary TV.

My Old Vending Machine / Candy Bar Analogy

Owning a company like Podango is like owning a vending machine. If you’re hungry, you don’t think, “I hope there’s a really innovative vending machine out in the hall. You think, “Man, I really hope they have a Snickers.” Simply, you want the candy bar, not the machine.

Podcasts are candy bars. They’re the content. The thing is, just like candy bars, it’s a volume game. People aren’t willing to pay $6 for a Snickers. So, you have to find a way to extract value elsewhere.

In the end, want to make money with podcasting? Figure out how to make money not on the media itself, but on what the media represents. Simple, and yet elusive.

Lastly, maybe you don’t have to make money on podcasting. Maybe it’s just a really great way to convey information, or to display feelings, or to share information in non-text ways.

What say you?

Photo credit KevinDooley

What’s Swedish for “Mentoring?”

At 10AM, I wandered into the kickoff of a two day meeting where Jim addressed a room half full of Norwegian and half full of Swedish news professionals. Tord Nedrelid and Bjorn Ottersen were amongst the leaders in the room, learning from Gannett about how to innovate with their web properties, how to build community platforms around news, and how to build blogging into news.

Hanging With the Pirates

Before my 1PM meeting, Jim took John and I upstairs to 11g, the area led by Michael Maness, Vice President of Innovation. We saw their commitment to innovation practices such as those followed by Ideo and InnoSight. The whole area, by the way, was a total pirate ship zone, where all kinds of ideas were being considered. I can’t talk about specifics, because I’m not sure what wasn’t ready for prime time yet, but let’s say that if I were working for Gannett, I’d be looking to sneak in there.

No Scare Tactics Here

Later, at the meeting, I meet with Chris Saridakis, President of Gannett Digital, and some of his team (Jennifer Carroll, VP/content and audience, Kevin LeFew, VP/technology and operations, Peter Lundquist, VP/product development), and John Stone and I pitched our concept to the team. As part of my presentation, I did some of my best faux Jeff Jarvis, citing how media is screwed and they have to get on board, and throw out the old models, and…

..and they were very much in the, “yeah, we get that. We’re on board. Let’s do cool things!” camp.

They’re Already Doing It

Simply, not only did Chris Sardakis and team get it. They, along with Michael Maness’s team, were already doing some really forward-moving projects. For instance, have you seen Make the Charts? It’s local ranking charts for local bands. So, if you’re in a punk band in DC, you can see how you rank, according to the local community. Borrowing from the DNA of USAToday, one of the first truly national-focused papers (if not, the first) in the US, Make the Charts takes National-done-local to a new inflection.

Another project they’re behind is Moms Like Me, which aggregates a mom presence across several platforms.

If you haven’t looked at USAToday.com closely, you might not have noticed their implementation of the Pluck social components under the hood. That extends to their 80-something local area newspapers in the Gannett system. I’ve used USAToday.com on slide presentations forever, because of how there are commenting, voting, and profile elements built in. It was nice to hear some of the behind the scenes from Gannett’s James Ku from Reno, NV, too.

Live In Front of a Studio Audience

Later that night, I presented to a packed crowd at the 11g room. In the audience were all kinds of really interesting and engaged people. I was excited that USAToday’s Executive Editor, Ken Paulson, stayed through my presentation and seemed reasonably engaged (he didn’t jump up and yell bullsh!t at any point). I also had people like Broadcast president Dave Louge, and a few other executives that Jim Lenahan kindly named, but that I failed to write down (so sorry, but you were appreciated, too). I saw my friend Jodi, and my new friend, Mary, and I spoke to Larissa, and Eduardo (from the 11g) team, and lots of other people who I might not remember your names well enough to type here.

The presentation is balled up in a trash can somewhere, but essentially, I imparted a message that media makers need to atomize, to modularize, to give your ideas handles, and to start seeing themselves as being in the information business, not the newspaper business. I pushed with passion the idea that communities want better relationships with advertising, as opposed to simple placement against content, and that media organizations could actually lead this space, instead of accepting the editorial-only side of the business equation. The rest of what I said might eventually come available here, though Mogulus had trouble at the very moment we started recording.

What I Took Away

I never presume that companies “don’t get it,” at least not the companies kind enough to indulge my visits, and seek out what I think might come next. But I guess I do still have some bias around what I perceived would be the level-set of people inside a big news organization like Gannett. I need to keep myself open to the perspective that these big companies “get it” just fine, and that my role is to help further augment their visions with my industry learnings and implementation guidance, instead of thinking that I’m going to bring fire to the natives every time.

Sure, not every company gets it, and yes, every company has different views of how this will all go, but with my eyes opened by all the bright minds I encountered in my long day at Gannett, I feel that I’m going to presume that there are voices and minds inside who see the future just as clearly as you or me, and I’m going to listen better.

By the way, Jim Lenahan and I met at the first BlogWorld Expo, where I complimented him on being the only big media company there. I got more long tail business leads out of that one conference than any event before or since. I hope some day someone says that about my New Marketing Summit events.

What say you?

No matter how many of our fluffy toys make business more human, there are still real, solid goals that need to be met before marketing teams of the world embrace these tools as part of their set.

So today, while I’m at the conference working with the hot exchange of information, I wanted to give YOU my blog ,and have you write your thoughts and ideas on how what we’re doing helps the process.

What value are we giving to the larger communications world? Not even marketing, but how are we helping MEANINGFUL communication evolve?

That’s my question for you. Your job is to make the comments section way better than the post section.

Good?

The following are the raw ideas that will become the basis of the FRONT part of several of my upcoming presentations. What comes after will be the “how to” part, but this is the theory and storytelling part. It seems a bit crazy. For those of you who’ll be in the audience at any of those events, you can nod knowingly when you see where this all grows in the coming days and weeks.

I’m calling this video presentation (totals just a hair over 10 minutes in four parts), “From Cowpaths to Mastadons.”

From Cowpaths to Mastadons

Part 1:

From Cowpaths to Mastadons – 1This gets a little crazy, but I’m talking about marketing and how social media impacts it.

Part 2:

From Cowpaths to Mastadons – 2Where I talk about awareness, and how toilets know more about me than my laptop.

Part 3:

From Cowpaths to Mastadons – 3Where the mastadon comes into it.

Part 4:

From Cowpaths to Mastadons – 4 -endGutenberg Presses, pamphlets, newspapers, blogs, oh my.

I’m really interested in your perspective. Feel free to make videos, audio, text posts. Go off and riff on your blog. Whatever. This is what’s on my mind. I’m curious as to how you interpret it.

I’m a big fan of sharing. Feel free to use this post elsewhere for your own purposes (except to make money). Just please add a link back to [chrisbrogan.com] . Thanks!

It’s great reading, and it’s worth thinking about. If you’re thinking of hiring a new media type, give Marshall’s thoughts some consideration as well.

How to be a new media consultant – Marshall Kirkpatrick.

Photo credit, Brian Solis, who I saw last night at a party, and who is a super photographer.

AARP Magazine – 24,204,313
AARP Bulletin – 23,567,607
Reader’s Digest – 9,684,759
Better Homes & Gardens – 7,681,722
National Geographic – 5,051,999
Good Housekeeping – 4,686,152
Family Circle – 3,967,065
Woman’s Day – 3,924,195
Ladies’ Home Journal – 3,918,472
AAA Westways – 3,764,966

Is there an active community online or off, for each of these magazines? Are you seeking to reach them with what you’re doing? These are the TOP TEN magazine properties in the US. To reach into them is to find the heart and soul of the mainstream and share what’s possible.

Look at the online presence for National Geographic, whose mission is to inspire people to care about the planet. I can spend money, read lots of things, spend more money, read more things, look at things. But I can’t talk to other community subscribers. I can’t put my videos up on the NGS site.

AARP has over 24 million subscribers. Can we be helpful to them? Is there a way to bridge that world to what we’re doing over here in our little fishbowl?

While we’re talking about how cool FriendFeed is, and how much we want big businesses to join the conversation, I want us (and by “us,” I mean anyone contemplating their social media expertise) to think about the Top 10 magazines and what we might do with these people to help them engage.

What’s your take?