What do you think?

The storyline of what most people are saying is, “Yikes. It’s pop culture over hard journalism. Society will collapse. Etc.”

First, let’s be clear: the pursuits of journalism and the pursuits of publishing aren’t the same.

Journalists seek to create compelling information that is helpful and news-worthy.

Publishing seeks to push more product, deliver higher circulation value, and create more value for sponsors/advertisers/money-holders.

Publishers need content creators of some stripe to do what they do. Journalists don’t need publishers, but publishers pay, so that’s a decent place to connect with an audience and be paid.

But never confuse the two.

The move by AOL is both smart for business and helpful for journalists who’ve lost their jobs.

Does this spell the end of news as we know it? Um, no. But news has been broken for a while now. That’s a good chunk of what Jeff Jarvis writes about when he’s not writing about Google. (Oh wait: Google is a publisher/media company, too!)

See how tricky this is? But don’t let your “shame, because we want purist journalism” to get confused in there with the “publishers give people what they want, and what they want is pop content” argument.

It’s harder than that to unravel.

And you said…

Listening

Listening tools have more than one application: they’re useful for customer service. They’re good for PR & crisis management. They’re also good for marketing opportunity discovery, and finally as an R&D lead source. Realizing that there are many applications for the same category should give you a sense of what needs doing. Again, let’s look at this like a frame for your efforts. Once you’ve decided to take on listening, you’ll have to answer the following:

• Which tools should I use? (Free? Radian6? ScoutLabs? Sysomos? A combination?)
• Who should do the active listening?
• Where do we route the information?
• What are we doing with analytics tools? (Hubspot, Google Analytics, etc)
• How do we measure success?

Listening is primary to many of the other areas of practice, because it’s your primary instrumentation. As you can see, I include mechanical “listening,” the use of tools like Hubspot and Google Analytics, into the space of listening. This is normally bunched up in company’s web departments, with an SEO person. And yet, I believe we should align it here.

Connecting

Connecting embodies all the points of social presence and outreach, as well as community building. This is your Twitter and Facebook usage, your commenting on blogs, your building of private communities or your nurturing of other people’s communities. This is your HR hiring process as well as your lead generation. This is where all human interaction opportunities are routed. Even when listening detects some action to take, it should be handled by whoever is assigned to connecting. (Note: this could and might likely be the same person.)

Tools for connecting (just some serving suggestions – don’t use all of these):

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn
• Blog accounts like Blogger, WordPress, Tumblr, Posterous (“passports,” as I mentioned in my personal branding ebook).
• Bookmarking accounts like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon
• YouTube, Flickr
• Ning.com
• And what do you do on these? Who do you connect with? What are your contact policies? What are the rules of engagement?

What you do in connecting is very important. Here’s where social media really shines. Connecting and making it a two way street is such a big opportunity. It’s a chance for your customers/clients/prospects to feel seen, heard. It’s the essence of giving people what they really want most times: an interaction where both sides feel heard. It’s also the primary place sales people will find value in social media. It’s also where new blood is found for projects and initiatives. It’s where databases grow. It’s where you can nurture your organization and its connecting points. It’s where community can happen.

Publishing

The last of the three areas, but no less important, publishing incorporates how social media does what it does best. The ability to blog, make video, share photos and audio effortlessly, and do so for free or cheap is one of the reasons people come to the social media shores. Once you see the value in content marketing (organic SEO results, the opportunity to connect, the ability to share news in a non-email way, the chance to tell stories that matter to you and your organization), you won’t want to stop.

Publishing has many tools:

• Blogs such as WordPress (either hosted for free at WordPress.com or hosted on your own site, using WordPress.org), Moveable Type, Posterous, and more.
• Video platforms like Blip.tv, YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and dozens more.
• Audio platforms like BlogTalkRadio.com
• Live video like Ustream.tv, BlogTV.com, and more.
• Photo sharing on Flickr.com

The trick with publishing is to make the information relevant to the consumer of this media. B2B has great opportunities in using publishing to improve the communications/sales process by making simple, short videos instead of simply lobbing white papers. Customer service can create behind-the-scenes blogs to show how to better use a product. Smaller businesses can capture their best customers in a photo or quick video. People can record radio shows that cover what matters most to the business. The possibilities are endless, and the opportunities to promote great content are equally dizzying in their promise.

Tying It All Together

It’s in how these tools are all used, in the nuances of good etiquette, quality content creation, effective promotion, useful policies, and a myriad of other pieces that the details become important. We’re all chipping at this stuff in some way or another, and this part’s where we work on tying it all together.

At New Marketing Labs, we have worked with companies in all these areas, but it’s fun how there’s always a variation on the emphasis. In some projects, we do much more publishing work. In others, we’ve done almost all connecting. Blending these areas and fitting them appropriately for our partners is what is most exciting.

Your Take

Does this lay out the way you see it? Are you working in these three areas? How are you working on these projects with clients or inside your own company? If you’re a smaller business, how does this translate?

Photo credit pdz_house

Want to know about our book, Trust Agents? My co-author, Julien Smith, and I want to know if you are a trust agent. What defines a trust agent? Here are the six main secrets of being a trust agent. Do any of these sound like you?

Make Your Own Game

You can do what’s come before or you can take a unique swing at the world. If you’re Hugh McGuire, you’re working on Book Oven, a whole new way to look at books and reading. You’re someone like Perez Hilton, who took on People magazine and won, as far as we’re concerned.

Are you making your own game?

One of Us

Maybe you’re the person in your industry who’s come to the larger online conversation, like Leslie Carothers is to the home industry. Perhaps you’re the next Matt Cutts, who represents Google to lots of us. He’s more Google than Sergey or Larry, because he’s here. He’s one of us.

Are you one of us?

The Archimedes Effect

Understanding leverage is what separates the hobbyists from the professionals. Do you understand how to take what you’re doing in one instance and extend it out into something bigger or better elsewhere? This is what brought Madonna from just another singer into being a worldwide brand. Leverage is behind all the most powerful people in the world, but it all starts somewhere. Gary Vaynerchuk leveraged his wine store into his video project and took that into his media project and his book deal. Gary bleeds leverage.

Do you understand the Archimedes Effect?

Agent Zero

Connecting and networking and building relationships is what moves you from an individual contributor to an interdependent kingmaker. Learning how to be a core element of several networks is where we think a trust agent works best. Take Robert Scoble. He went from being a guy talking about Microsoft to a guy on a mission to be moved by what he saw around him. Robert connects with people all over, and finds himself at the core of many important networks.

Are you Agent Zero to several networks?

Human Artist

There’s a world of difference between knowing how to build relationships with people and coming off as “that guy.” You know who we mean: that person who shows up with a bullhorn to promote her projects, to blurt about her interests, and then to leave before you get a chance to say anything about you. A human artist is what we call the people who interact well in this new world, and who know how to build nurturing relationships. People like Liz Strauss and Terry Starbucker are human artists.

How do you relate to others?

Build Armies

Working solo is easy. Do you share what you know to promote larger interactions? Can you create resources to help you and then thread your efforts into theirs? Building an army, especially a loosely-joined and flexible group of people from many disciplines, is the key to being an advanced trust agent. People like Danny Brown, who started a social good movement know the value of armies. Ze Frank turned entertainment into a massively multiplayer online experience, one that has yet to be replicated successfully. The implications to business are obvious.

Are you ready to build armies?

If You Answered Yes to Any of the Above

You are definitely in the mindset of trust agents. Your examples might be different. You might not do as much of one of the six secrets as others (I’m still not very good with leverage, for instance). But at your core, you’ve caught on that these new online tools require a different type of person, and that not just anyone can get the most from the experience. You, however, are in the perfect position to be a trust agent.

If you are a trust agent, Julien and I want to meet you over the coming months. We’re traveling the US (and sometimes abroad), and we look forward to connecting with as many of you as we can. Why? Because that’s what we do.

I’m excited you’re part of the experience. We’ll appreciate your help, your input, your support, and your own experiences as part of the project. It’s how we do things. Thanks in advance. You’ve already made this all very much worth it.

If you haven’t joined the Trust Agents Community, swing by. And if you want to buy a copy of Trust Agents, you can get it here.

Thanks!

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.

What do you think?

I’m thinking about media companies a great deal as I say this. Tom Steinert-Threlkeld wrote a piece about how older media organizations are having a rough time figuring out the new stuff. Here’s a quote:

The Fourth Estate hasn’t done that great a job of creating a Fifth Estate, on the Internet. Name one breakout online site or service created from within an established media company.

Beyond this, there’s a lot to absorb, and it’s worth checking out. I pulled that one quote to say that it is interesting to consider.

Consumer Reports or Consumerist? (hat tip Paul Gillin for this idea)
People or Perez Hilton?
Newsweek or the Huffington Post?

I’m not one of those “kill all the old newspapers” types. I think there’s a lot a company can do. But it’s HOW one gets there that I’m starting to wonder about.

If I Did It

I’d make an “escape pod” model, something like this:

• Pick a small core team, half insiders, half raw new outsiders.
• Stake them a startup seed round.
• Let them go a few months on that.
• No corporate oversight, only report backs. It’s spend/try/live-or-die.
• Assess. Good? Then raise an A round or give them more corporate assets.
• Revise revenue targets.
• Observe. Kill, or green light.

I’m starting to think this is the way to incubate ANY property in this newer media environment, and I’m curious as to your take on the above model, and/or whether you think traditional media organizations CAN put new crops into the ground without pulling up the roots to check how they are growing?

What do you think?

Photo credit, lexdenn and sage.

I am working on an internal research project and am trying to build a reasonably accurate model of today’s online advertising/marketing value chain… essentially we are working to build a common understanding of how the big pieces fit together and how the $$ flows between the various segments. Ultimately, I’d like to pull together a single slide that covers:

• The brand advertisers (GM, Procter & Gamble, and all the way down)
• The ad agencies
• The media planners/owners
• The ad servers (Doubleclick) and networks (VideoEgg, ScanScout, Tribal Fusion et al)
• The publishing platforms (Brightcove, Move Networks)
• The destination media sites (from CBS to Youtube to Facebook and everyone in between)
• The mega-players who bring multiple pieces to the table (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL)
• The ad targeting (Revenue Sciences) and measurement firms (Quantcast, Dynamic Logic, Nielsen, Omniture)
• Any other major categories that I missed?

I’m not in this space at all, but you might be. If you’re interested and have information about this, please email me: blog at chrisbrogan dot com.

Holy cats!

Stop Me if I’m Wrong

Is this the first major print publication that totally turned over their website to being something much better than a digital clone of the print edition? Because sure you can read some articles from Fast Company on the site, but this thing starts out with mymymymymymy and gets even more yum-my as you go along. Throw in a big fat profile, write a blog post, join some groups, and look around for members. It’s a social network hiding inside Fast Company’s website.

Am I wrong?

The Value in This

Should FastCompany report great success in this project of theirs, it will show publications that they don’t have to recreate their content in digital form and call it a day. The website for FastCompany is no longer a subscription lead generator. It’s a robust network for learning more about the community they’ve fostered, an opportunity to develop other value propositions, and a chance to enhance their community’s numbers and cohesive nature by way of giving them a “home.”

I’m all for it. I hope other magazines follow suit. How sick would a Wired network with all the right bells and whistles be? What other publications would make great social networks? WSJ anyone?

**UPDATE: Saturday morning blues over at FC:

Photos uploaded with Skitch