Where do internet “experts” come from? How can there be so many and how can they know so much?
The fast moving digital business disfavors incumbents. Companies with long histories of success can be brushed aside with startling ease. Legacy companies know this and want to do all that they can to achieve some kind of enlightenment, which inevitably leads them to “experts”. Unfortunately, hiring expensive “experts” very rarely translates into digital success.
At the intersection of Social Networking and Search is an exciting frontier that is just beginning to be realized. Through more efficient analysis and subsequent comprehension of the relationships between information we will gain a greater understanding of the world around us and interact with it. The implications for both publishers and marketers will be powerful.
I started my media career in the ultra-competitive national radio sales market in New York. I can’t say I was very successful, (I never could stick to those 5 bullet points), but I sure learned a lot.
Not before or since have I ever encountered a group of salespeople as passionate and knowledgeable about their product as the national radio representatives in New York. However, there was one guy who stood out from the rest and one day he taught me a lesson that I remember to this day.
Magazine Publishers’ digital efforts, to put it euphemistically, have been less than stellar. It’s a surprising and disheartening state of affairs because magazine publishers have valuable skills sets that should position them for digital greatness. What’s required isn’t so much a change in product, but a change in organizational culture.
Social Networks are revolutionizing how we view our world. People are connecting, businesses are being created or transformed, and the world seems like a smaller place. As with any transformation on a grand scale, a plethora of consultants, gurus, blogs, and how-to books have risen to meet the demand for information about the social revolution.
However, it is very rare to hear anything about the underlying forces that actually drive the social network phenomenon.
Everybody has heard the old saw, “I know I waste half of my ad budget, I just don’t know which half.” It’s a great saying because it’s funny, not because it’s true. Advertisers, at least those who spend a high proportion of their budgets on TV, know exactly where they waste their money; they just can’t do much about it.
Until fairly recently…
People who grow up in insular cultures are often more certain than those with wider experience. When I first arrived in Eastern Europe, I was eager to learn about the culture and was intrigued by the novelty of difference. I was very happy to discover that I didn’t have to look far to find people who were eager to instruct me. However, I soon realized that sometimes the locals were wildly off the mark when it came to analyzing their own culture because so few had experienced any other.
As a recent post by socialnomics’ Erik Qualman shows, many people in the Digital World seem to have the same problem as the people I met in the early post-communist world.
Magazine writers are some of the most talented people I have had the pleasure of working with. However, most find it hard adapting to writing on the internet. Many eventually do succeed and find that they enjoy the new medium; some others never really get the hang of it, while still others just accept the reality and plod through.
Whatever a writer’s particular inclination, here are some points that can help:
Can your company be Disruptive? A lot seem to want to be. In the hypercompetitive digital world everybody is looking for an edge and being “Disruptive” sounds like a good way to be clever and beat the competition.
The term is used (or overused) usually to show that one is “thinking outside the box.” Yet Disruptive Innovation isn’t about being wily or cunning, it is about passion and privation. Companies who seek it should be careful what they wish for.
As media companies struggle with their changing environment, they inevitably get bogged down on developing web product strategy. A flash of inspiration leads to intense research, the hiring of consultants and endless meetings with often very little to show for it. If legacy media companies are going to be successful in Digital Media, they will have to learn to change the way they think about strategy.
