"Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the prepared mind." Louis Pasteur

"Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience." Comte de Buffon

"One morning one of us, having no black, used blue instead, and Impressionism was born." Pierre Auguste Renoir

Today's image: Late Night Travel By Thomas Hawk Beautiful shot. Thank you for sharing.

Markets are conversations

Thesis #1/95, The Cluetrain Manifesto

One key benefit of today's hyperconnectivity is the wealth of conversation. Not a day goes by without someone starting or adding to a discussion. On topics related to media there's a robust diversity of ongoing discussion. Those working in media will gain valuable insight and advantage by devoting attention to a couple of particular discussions.

First, serious inside broadcasting baseball conversations and, second, the abundance of comments on broadcast media emanating from what Jay Rosen has called "the people formerly known as the audience."

Many of us arrived here from a different world. Access or exposure to some kind of thought leadership or best practice wisdom and any continuing professional education whatsoever were limited; trade pubs were delivered weekly, popular industry conventions staged annually. The important exercise of "holding a mirror up to the audience" was typically a once a year ritual - the perceptual research study - more event than process.

This should not be understood as a suggestion we should discount the potential value of publications, conferences or survey research. Au contraire, my thought is each would be enriched, complimented, not replaced, by careful study of available conversations. What has forever changed is context. The conversations are already in progress. Get engaged and involved.

To review the (now) obvious fundamentals as stated in The Cluetrain: "The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media." and "We have real power and we know it. If you don't quite see the light, some other outfit will come along that's more attentive, more interesting, more fun to play with."

Localized radar: To get a quick read on your market create a local Twitter list. Populate with all the usual suspects. For best results make it an ongoing curation. Invite listeners/viewers/followers to suggest additions. Here's an example created for Madison, WI. Such lists can well serve your market "listening" strategy. FYI - some clients have created a second list using a Twitter account not associated with the company so they can also track tweets of all media in their market.

The Broadcast Ecosystem

My sense is broadcasters would benefit from some discussion about ecosystems. Let's frame it this way: Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook are each building and fine-tuning (iterating) an ecosystem. A bespoke community set designed to create and sustain competitive advantage. What is the state of your company's ecosystem? Seems a fair, timely and important question.

You can Google "Amazon ecosystem" (or any, all of the big four above) and get an idea of the concept, including graphic representations. In my experience, a candid and valuable discussion about any ecosystem should begin with mapping. Have your associates independently create maps which reveal what they believe is your present ecosystem. Gather your team to share and discuss their maps. Create a map of your ecosystem. Iterate. How can your ecosystem be improved?

One example: broadcaster ecosystem maps include Audience & Advertiser clusters. Within the Audience cluster are lifestyle groups and their purchase needs/behaviors. These relate to buyer, potential buyer groups within the Advertiser cluster.

An area often overlooked in this mapping is your local developer community. The upside potential of establishing a formalized approach, a respectful place within your ecosystem, to effectively involve talented hometown geeks is not at all insignificant. Thank me later.

Good reads

The Future of UI: Contextual Intelligence. By Bob O'Donnell, here

EXCELLENCE. NO EXCUSES. By Tom Peters. This 737-page download is a gem, here

The Power of One. By Fred Jacobs. Fred offers up a solid post about the Nielsen LA Radio ratings scandal which turns into an interesting discussion via comments on how ratings are used, here

Witty Worried and Wolf. Nancy Wolf, the smart and celebrated communications lawyer, is not retiring, she's restarting. Enjoy her new blog here

SCOTUS: The Aereo decision, here

In closing let me share a wonderful image. This week Professor Gary Hamel delivered another of his thought-provoking talks. A keynote at the London Business School's Global Leadership Summit, his talk was about hacking management. The following image was taken from his deck. My thanks to Dr Hamel for allowing it to be shared here. Dare to distribute, discuss and post in your workspace.

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem." G.K. Chesterton

"By definition, risk-takers often fail. So do morons. In practice it's difficult to sort them out." Scott Adams

"Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of values." Michael Porter

Today's image: To Miss You by michelleBlack. Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing.


Today, more lessons learned from the ongoing development, presentation, discussion and refinement of my social media brief.

"If the news is that important, it will find me."

Those are the oft quoted words of an unknown college student. The student threw out that insightful gem while participating in a focus group conducted by researcher Jane Buckingham. The quotation itself became widely known thanks, in large measure, to an article by Timesman Brian Stelter (Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass It On, NYT 3/27/08)

The attitude, the expectation, inherent in that quotation signals a significant shift in relationships and responsibilities. What is really at work here represents a profound sea change in media behaviors. The definitions, patterns and rule sets of consumption are in various stages of transition or disruption as some have suggested.

As a practical matter, consumption (the economic activity of purchase) is being redefined. My sense is we are moving from generations of media built on businesses premised on attraction (i.e., importing readers, listeners and viewers) to a wholly new generation of media, a nascent mediascape, in which business models are fundamentally different. Success is a moving target predicated on issues of multi-channel distribution (exporting). A world of one-to-many is adding another layer or two, new constructs, many-to-one and many-to-many and all the while one-to-one connecting is experiencing nothing less than a renaissance. Thank you, Facebook.

Import + Export

It is still important but no longer good enough for a successful media company to simply attract readers, listeners and viewers to a single specific newspaper, radio/TV station, cable channel or web site. The concept of reach, critical to the measured media enterprise, is moving beyond a single definition, it's embracing multiple interpretations. It's a new and different game; like going from the 2D chess we know and understand to that 3D chess of Star Trek. From readers, listeners and viewers reaching for our content to an audience also being reached by our content. Continuing to invite and direct attention to our place while also working to become a part of their places. Now in play...a new sense of place. Moreover, recent anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that while consumers are continuing to elect one or more traditional channels (soliloquies) they are adding to their media mix, they are participating (if only by observation) in one or more related conversations.

The entire notion of how consumer media transactions are conducted is changing. Dan Gillmor first referred to consumers as, "the people formerly known as the audience." Increasingly, these folks are in the game. What makes this difficult for some to grok is the so-called old media are not just going away. The new media, the emerging forms, are additive and sometimes appear to be the old media in the throes of some evolutionary process. Print = text, radio = audio, TV = video. The biggest issue for media managers is one of legacy, it's a matter of an accepted tradition of control. Jeff Jarvis, a former dead tree exec turned digital evangelist, has proffered a law, to wit: "Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don’t give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will." (Read more: The People Formerly Known as the Audience by Jay Rosen. June 2006)

For decades research was tasked with measuring media (s)elections, preferences of consumption after the fact. What ad did you notice? What station did you listen to? What program did you watch? As we move deeper into the new reality, the brave new world of hyper-connected real-time, the heads-up display, the dashboard, trumps looking in the rear view mirror.

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
R. Buckminster Fuller

Going forward, the significant matters that deserve the considered attention of media management include mobile (the new black) and ensuring that all assets are...

Digital

Discoverable

Ready to share

Next time: Why Tribune made a very smart move in changing their SEO's supervisor from the CTO to the COO. Plus, my thesis of Ready to share benefits from a practical illustration in the Hugh MacLeod concept of Sociality.

Bonus: Quotetrain #1 The new normal is that we expect businesses to listen to us. The companies that don’t are now perceived as Dinosaurs. - David Weinberger.

Spinning in the Grave. The three biggest reasons music magazines are dying. Jonah Weiner writes all about it in Slate, here.

"The ideas of the past, although half destroyed, being still powerful, and the ideas which are to replace them being still in process of formation, the modern age represents a period of transition and anarchy." Gustave Le Bon

"Great ideas come into the world as quietly as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear the faint fluttering of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say this hope lies in a nation, others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. Each and every one builds for all." Camus

"A competing product, if it is never tried, can't act as a reward creating a conflicting habit. Every spouse knows that." Charles Munger

Today's image: Lorain lighthouse at sunset by ronnie44052. Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

Way back in 1999 I left CBS and signed on with my first dot com. I was the old media guy (radio, TV, cable) given the privilege of working in new media and learning from a bunch of gifted young players. It was the year everyone was reading and talking about Cluetrain (the site). It was the beginning of my love affair with digital media.

If it's been some time since you've read Cluetrain and especially if you've never picked up on it, please take a moment now to lock it into your bookmarks here. Join me in reading Cluetrain again and do join us if it's your first time around. It reads as fresh as spring rain.

Today's post in tribute to Chris, Doc and David. Thanks guys.

people of earth...

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about "listening to customers." They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.

Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It's going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.

Read on here. (But don't tap on the glass as it just annoys the animals)

And then he wrote: Dr Dave says "The world is far more interesting than the mainstream media have let on. Blogging is all about discovering just how interesting the world really is." From his post The people vote with their clicks

Bonus: Marc Andreessen makes the case - Benjamin Franklin, blogging role model.

Closed circuit to Chicago Sun-Times: Where's Katie's money?


Legendary Lobel leaving WBZ: New England television sports icon Bob Lobel is leaving CBS' WBZ with a contract buyout, part of the recent company wide budget cutbacks.

I once worked for Bob. He was then and has always remained since a great gentleman. A hard working professional that was never really happy unless the best possible performance had been delivered. Bob delivered more amazing performances than anyone can easily remember, over the last three decades he was always there, a part of many of our most cherished moments of New England victory. During his exemplary career Bob wrote a page turning chapter in the history of sports journalism.

Bob cares about his work, he's deeply passionate and accordingly what he does really matters. Bob will always matter to listeners, to viewers, to colleagues who admire and respect his tireless dedication. He will always mean something special to all of us who, like Bob, truly love the game.

Bob serves as an inspiration to me and a great many others. Thanks Bob. Let the next game begin. Jackie MacMullan covers Bob's story via The Boston Globe here.

Congrats & cheers: Sean Compton joins Tribune as SVP, Programming & Entertainment.