Dissemination out; Engagement in
Companies that still rely solely on traditional media to reach a mass market are losing ground in the battle for hearts and minds of their stakeholders.
Why is this so?
1. The first and most important change came in the form of the transformation of the communications industry with the advent of the Internet, and more recently, the birth of social media. We want to know it all and know it now, and if we do we tell our friends.
2. To make things just a tad more exciting, with the changes highlighted in point one, there are interest groups everywhere that now have a global voice, following and influence. They are talking with each other about you and your business right now.
3. The third and most interesting factor in all of this is the societal shift (resulting from the first and second points above) to a more socially aware, a more globally connected and activist middleclass. Organisations are now finding stakeholders at every level to be a great deal more demanding of social and environmental responsibility, of transparency, and constant communication.
How we access news, from where and what we do with it is changing. So, what does this mean to you?
It means that while your PR department is busy inventing messages and stories to send out on the wires to the major metro newspapers, bloggers are dissecting and challenging and perhaps proving reality to be a very different story.
Beware the 19th Century corporation operating in a 21st Century world. Dissemination of corporate information is out, engagement is in.
While still serving the purpose of delivering news to a mass market, traditional media channels and especially print newspapers, are facing some challenges of their own. There is a growing global constituency that doesn’t believe them anymore, or rely solely upon them as their news source as they used to. Newspapers have increasing competition for readers in the form of multiple news sources (blogs included), and challenges of timeliness and space.
Therefore, and perhaps because of the above, you no longer have control over your corporate message.
Contrast declining circulations of newspapers worldwide with the explosion in growth of media outlets online and their viewing numbers, and we have a massive change underway with which a lot of organisations have yet to come to terms.
While the mainstream media grapples with how to deal with the drain of readers from the printed page to their own online sites (and how to monetise that), the bigger issue for the media empires, and in fact all organisations, is the growth in the use of all forms of online media to source, to generate and to share information.
Just the number of eyeballs on certain sites every month is staggering. Twitter, the newest and smallest of the social media sites boasts 20 million visitors per month. YouTube is around 75 million a month and Facebook is edging over 113 million, and Yahoo gets 135 million unique visitors per month. All numbers from Compete.com.
Of greatest concern to media outlets should be the fact that they are increasingly bypassed as tens-of-millions of people share stories, photos and videos directly. Perhaps tired of being fed the same limited/filtered stories by media outlets, the consuming public has turned to each other as a more trusted source of information, however true, false, or misplaced that trust may be.
To the chagrin of mainstream media empires, the blogosphere in particular represents the ultimate democratisation of media.
In a speech to the National Press Club reported in full on Crikey, News Limited CEO John Hartigan savagely dismissed blogs as, “Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance.”
Ah yes, and News of the World is um, what exactly?
This is the same News Limited that owns a great deal of old media (and some new), and that has foreshadowed a move to charge for access to its old media content online.
“We have never been challenged as we are now, to justify why someone should pay for our
content,” he says. (I could completely blow my chances of ever getting a column in a News Limited publication if I say another word, but it’s killing me.)
Hartigan states, “I believe people will pay for content if it is:
• Original…
• Exclusive…
• Has the authority
• and is relevant to our audiences.”
Indeed John, in that very small paragraph you have identified precisely the root cause of the explosion of the blogosphere you so deride. This is what readers want.
Rare it is that newspapers do have original exclusive news today. This is not a criticism. In this age of technology – it is very easy to access all sorts of information and to disseminate that information more widely, more quickly and more frequently. So rare is the exclusive news-breaker, that the papers usually win awards for these occasions.
Stories today are more likely to be frequent and repetitious, and sometimes by the same journalists with the leverage of talent within media conglomerates across journals. Again, this is not a criticism, it is a fact.
Likewise, for a new or small to mid-size business or non-profit, it is increasingly harder to get a mention in the mainstream press. You can send all the press releases you like. You can call journalists directly, but their attention for the most part is focused on the main public company players or major soap story-like scandal. And it doesn’t matter how important your business service or non-profit cause is, if there is some scum bag getting off a plane, the TV cameras will be there, not at your event with the Governor-General.
You will read 500 stories about a Fortune 500 company before you will read about an innovative start-up. This is actually why magazines like Fast Company and Red Herring were born. The mainstream press didn’t pick up on this vacuum within their own pages then, they are not doing it now.
What people want is not necessarily what newspapers are delivering.
I know from having worked as a public relations consultant trying to get media coverage for my client, it can feel as if you are repeatedly hitting up against a brick wall in trying to get the attention of mainstream press. It is either too niche a subject, too small or unknown an organisation, or too boring a story for the journalist. Too bad if there is an audience out there wanting the information – it doesn’t get through the filtering of the media outlet.
So too can the news be stale by the time it reaches newspapers and magazines today. For example, if you live in Australia and watched the men’s single final of Wimbledon two nights ago, you knew who won at the same time as the news media. You watched it live. You saw it on the Sunrise Program over breakfast, read a few stories about it online yesterday and saw it again on the 6pm TV news last night. But today is the first opportunity the newspapers had to run the story – some 24-hours after the event. It was front page news of the Courier Mail today. Ho hum.
The public thirst for information continues. It is just the delivery channels and timelines that are changing. Where the mainstream media remains the judge as to what consumers will and won’t read, the consumer has developed a workaround.
I don’t disagree with John Hartigan’s statement at all. The challenge for all media is to source and protect and deliver original, exclusive, relevant material. It’s what wins them awards and readers.
And it is also the appeal of the blogosphere. It is a fact that major breaking news stories have been led by the likes of Drudge and Crikey and Huffington Post. There is in fact, a lot of new and original and niche information being delivered by respected authorities in various fields, directly to audiences who seek them out, find them newsworthy and “shareworthy”.
And increasingly, savvy corporations are taking their message directly to their investors, customers, employees and other stakeholders via their own websites, blogs and YouTube channels.
Regardless of how riled the media empires are about the blogosphere, if you are not engaging with it, if you are not monitoring it and participating in it, you are missing out on a vast store of vital information about your customers and investors.
And sometimes, your own organisation, as told by your customers, or shown by employees.
On YouTube.
© 2009 – 2010, editor. All rights reserved.
Category: Internet as Media, Reputation Management
