Tag: Huffington Post

We think that "media" is a small part of "everything." But that's changing. Everything is turning into media: the world is becoming "media-ized."

Here's a framework for understanding what's happening:

First, we have broadcast media, the "original" media

    The information flow is one to many

    Examples: newspapers, TV

Second, we have communications, one person interacts with another

    The information flow is one to one

    Examples: face to face, phone, individuals talk

Third, we have transactions, a person goes to a merchant to get or do something

    The information flow is many to one

    Example: go to a store and check out
 

If you think about life in the distant past, that is in the pre-internet era (if you are old enough to remember that long ago), you can recall how very different those three categories were. 

Sitting down and talking with someone is clearly communications (one to one). While you're sitting down, you may agree to listen to the radio or watch TV. Then the two of you are consuming media (the media source is the one, the two of you are part of the many). You may see or hear an advertisement on the media. Later, you go to a store and buy the item (you are one of many people who go to the store).

These categories are clear and distinct; no one could possibly confuse (1) talking with a friend, (2) watching TV, and (3) buying something.

But on the internet, things have changed! These three categories, once so clearly separate from each other, are merging into minor variations of a single thing. They are now the variegated media-transaction-communications complex, a complicated single thing which has the characteristics of all three.

It's easier, and closer to the facts, just to say that the formerly distinct activities of communicating and buying things have become subsumed under "media." Why? The "place" where this activity happens is on screens that you can touch or have keyboards and/or have a mouse, the same kind of screen we use for watching TV, which is clearly a media experience. When communicating and transacting are brought into the world of screens, they adapt to their new world, and become media-like. That's why I say, the world is becoming "media."

I think about this a lot, partly because of personal experience, but also because I'm involved with companies that have to adapt to this new world.

The companies that "get" this convergence of everything to media are the ones who succeed in the new "everything is media" world.

Here are some of my favorite companies and a little sample of what they're doing that shows how they "get" it.

• Huffington Post is a "media" company. But they are clearly stretching the definition of what "media" is way beyond anything the media dinosaurs can fully comprehend, much less keep up with. The easiest way to see this is the way they are going beyond the classic "elite" media one-to-many model with thousands of bloggers, citizen journalism and an extremely committed and robust community of reader/collaborators who communicate with each other using the site's comments and connections to Facebook and Twitter.
• Demand Media is making progress on many fronts, with a full-fledged research operation to help guide their efforts. Some of their sites look a lot like on-line versions of classic niche media, for example www.cracked.com. Others are breaking the tyranny of one-to-many media by pioneering the use of professionally generated content to achieve something closer to many-to-many media, for example www.ehow.com. Finally, they are evolving the many-to-one merchant model in media-savvy ways, for example in the Daily Plate section of the Livestrong.com site.
• Federated Media is all about the shift from broadcast-style media to what they call conversational media. The whole premise of the company is that there is a new kind of media emerging that transcends traditional broadcast models, and this new media naturally calls for a new kind of advertising for merchants to interact with consumers. In fact, Federated Media is right in the middle of a kind of media that incorporates strong elements of conversation and makes a bridge to transactions.
• FirstRain is not a media company at all, in the old sense. Their roots are in providing search services to financial professionals. But now, like any new media company, you can search for something relevant and find their pages, for example this report on Yahoo. The harsh rule of media is that consumers will glance at your page; if they like it, they'll stay for awhile and explore; if they don't understand it or like it, they'll navigate away, and you've lost them. FirstRain is already a generation ahead of their peer group in understanding and implementing this.

You may think you're a media company — have you really gotten all the factors that are now part of succeeding in media? You may think you're an e-commerce company — have you really gotten how being an on-line version of a store isn't even in the right ball park, how you're now a media company? You may be a completely different kind of company, like FirstRain — do you get that success means becoming (at least in part) a media company?

That's because … in the new world we live in, everything is media!