TV is dead. Push marketing is dead. Long live the conversation!
You hear that a lot from social media advocates, despite all evidence to the contrary. TV viewership remains at or near all time highs, media companies are profitable and social media remains a very small part of the overall picture.
“That’s fine in practice, but does it work in theory?” some might say, “there are powerful social forces gathering which will obliterate conventional media practices.”
And you would be wrong. Everything we know about how ideas travel through networks points to mass media broadcasting remaining dominant.
We’re all wrong sometimes, probably more than most of us like to admit. Spouses, if we choose good ones, are usually very helpful in pointing out just how often that is.
We like to applaud visionaries, but they blunder just as often as anybody else and usually more spectacularly. If you are ever going to get anything right, being wrong is just part of the territory.
It’s not something they teach you in school. Smart people are supposed to have the right answers, but it takes much more than intelligence to fail fruitfully. Everybody is right some of the time, but to be wrong and do it well requires a special mix of genius and character.
Yahoo is an enigma. Once the sugar daddy of the online world it has become the poor relation who makes everybody uncomfortable. It’s still around, but seems hapless and adrift. What happened? Is there a future for Yahoo?
A recent insider account gives some answers, but raises even more questions about Yahoo and where online media is really headed.
They say that content is king, and they’re right, but what kind of content? Who will produce it? Can anyone make a decent living doing it?
These are important questions and simple answers are elusive. However, it’s not exactly the riddle of the sphinx either. Content has been evolving for centuries, even millennia, and, in truth, the underlying principles haven’t changed very much.
As technology improves, the variety, consumption and investment in content increase as well. Therefore,the future of content, as we shall see, is very bright indeed.
Marketing’s most basic question is who to target. You need to know who you want to sell to before you can determine market potential, promotional budget and overall positioning. In other words, you can’t do much of anything without a viable target.
Probably because it’s so important, people can get very passionate about one targeting method or another. However, what’s most important about building a consumer target is that it’s clear, understandable and actionable. It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Here’s a short guide to targeting consumers more effectively:
Nevertheless, some serious people, most notably Chris Anderson of Wired, are saying that it is. While the argument is intriguing, it is surely wrong and betrays a serious misunderstanding of what the web is and where the digital world is going.
Make no mistake, the web, conceived in a single month but embellished over two decades, not only survives, but thrives. In fact, it’s just getting started. read more…
Smart people accomplish things by finding solutions to important problems. This is a tough, disconcerting process that’s full of frustration and boredom. The great physicist Richard Feynman likened it to being a confused ape.
Yet succeeding isn’t enough for most people, they also want to be prophetic and that’s where they run into trouble. They try to codify their performance by making up simple rules that inevitably fail. It’s a trap that we all fall into sometimes, but should do our best to avoid.
What follows is a particularly instructive example of how, in the quest for simple, core beliefs, smart people can say some pretty dumb things.
It’s hard to believe, but it was only one year ago when, during a late night scotch drinking session, I came up with the dubious idea of starting a blog. A few days later (with some help from my developer friends: Pasha, Aleksey and Yuri) Digital Tonto was born!
I’d like to thank everybody for their enormous support over the last year. I never thought anybody would actually want to read anything that I wrote, much less participate in such an enthusiastic and meaningful way. I’ve learned a ton from your comments and suggestions.
In honor of the occasion, I’d like to share some of my favorite posts.
What’s going on here? Weren’t these companies supposed to be steamrolled by the digitized social media colossus? Actually, the media rebound was predictable and, moreover, the comeback is here to stay. Here’s why:
Successful marketers spread ideas. Regrettably, some unsuccessful marketers do as well. There is no shortage of false gurus that gain fame and fortune for themselves while doing very little for any product or service. Bad ideas can spread just as well as good ones.
Memetics can help us understand why. Unfortunately, “meme” is a term that gets thrown around a lot without much thought. People often use it to denote something they think is new and cool, but that misses the point entirely.
Understanding how memes work can help us understand how both good and bad ideas get spread.
Or install manually
Copy and paste the following Google tag code onto every page of your website, immediately after the element. Don’t add more than one Google tag to each page.
