I’ve written a few pieces on media that might add some fuel to your fire. I wrote a series for Unica a while back, and talked about the meaning of “social media”, as well as the use of social media by businesses trying to leverage new vehicles to develop customer intimacy.

Someone else I’ve come across that we may want to invite into the discussion: http://gmrwvu.blogspot.com.

Definitely looking forward to continuing the dialog.

/chris

Continuing the cross-blog conversation, I am developing a post that attempts (from an armchair, admittedly) to reframe public influence games (PR, marketing, sales cycle communications) by reconstructing two terms that I find very intriguing: ‘narrowcast’ and ‘broadcast.’ I think such construction efforts are necessary, since vague exhortations to use social media are rightly criticized for being hand-wavy.

Will shoot you a heads-up when I post that, and I look forward to an interesting exchange about that.

BTW, just finished the ‘Bob’ thread you point to in this post. I can’t help feeling that we’re getting only one side of the story there. Getting the manager’s story, as well as the other ‘evil’ manager’s story, would make for a great and complete case study. But I guess that’s too much to hope for.

Venkat

Thanks for posting. I’ve been enjoying your blog at http://www.ribbonfarm.com and recommending it.

Thanks for the Phil Meyers suggestion. I’m picking it up today. I actually started out in journalism, and I’m the child of two lifelong journalists. My father was an editor at NYT for many years.

So many thoughts to explore on this topic, but we’re very much on the same page. I’m reading Habermas now as well, trying to get my arms around the changing implication of Publics….

I’ll keep the thread going on your blog.

/chris

On this particular piece, you should perhaps think about the PR crisis as a race to the bottom between corporate messaging and the messaging vehicles they target. A grim game we are playing now is watching to see what dies first: traditional news media or the PR industry that tries to drum up impressions through them. Phil Meyer’s awesome and influential “The Vanishing Newspaper” tells the tale of the ongoing collapse of the media, leaving PR wondering where to look for more impressions, and how. Gannett just announced the biggest layoffs in newspaper history.

One reason people have an incentive to ignore this shift is that acknowledging it means accepting that you have to work at a tougher game for the same reward. Social media’s big plus is 1:1 messaging, but that also means more work in creating 1:1 messages efficiently on a mass-customized scale. 1:1 eyeballs are the only kind left, and they don’t come cheap. That’s why people delude themselves with splogs in place of strategy.

An analogy I like is to energy. We lived for decades on very cheap energy, which was cheap mainly because it existed in vast and easily tapped underground reservoirs. Now, not only do we have to go to a complex portfolio of multiple energy sources (not “switch”), but each source takes individual cultivation. The hard-to-reach pockets of “attention oil” require specialist drilling for every well. Every new source from wind to ethanol needs its own infrastructure. So the overhead cost per joule extracted is increasing rapidly.

Shifting back to messaging in PR, the cost of finding the right microchannel to that last eyeball-second is dropping. We are now tapping into the hardest-to-reach pockets of attention in the attention-scarcity economy.

Game on. Ostriches getting separated from non-ostriches. To the extent that marketing/PR had a slight reputation as the “party” function of the corporation, the party of cheap eyeballs is over. They now have to work as hard as other functions, ranging from engineering to sales.

Venkat

This is an amazingly well-thought out article Chris and I agree. People dismissing social media as a paradim shifter sound like people who say “Who cares what’s going on in New York in regards to fashion”. Dismissing a sub-set of people (ie people who use social media) off-handedly because of some snake oil salesmen who do (in my opinion) overhype their grasp is as ridiculous as listening to the snake oil salesmen. And who suffers? Not the consumer, but the brands.

I had a totally 100% bad experience with Comcast. I would have never dreamed of giving that company a second chance. I told everyone I knew how much they sucked. Yet, a couple months ago, Frank started Twittering and now I have a glowing recommendation of him and a better overview of the company as a whole.

So yes, a shift is happening and smart people are utilizing it while everyone else can worry about fructose corn syrup in their koolaid.