Social Media University, Global (SMUG)
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Here’s the presentation I’m giving this morning at the Ragan Communications Corporate Communicators Conference in Chicago. I’m part of the Social Media track, from 9:45 to 10:45 CDT.
I welcome any questions or comments below. And if you want to follow or participate in the Twitter stream, please use the #ccc09 and #smug hashtags.
…do you really think as a PR professional that you will be immune from the need to retool and innovate?
See what the Chicago Tribune’s Phil Rosenthal reports today about restructuring at WMAQ-TV, Chicago’s NBC affiliate.
News producers, writers and editors at NBC-owned WMAQ-Ch. 5 were told Wednesday they must reapply for new multi-faceted positions, the demands of which reflect the station’s efforts to provide content not just for TV but the Internet, mobile devices and other emerging platforms.
The new jobs – with titles such as platform manager and content producer – are to be posted beginning Thursday, not just for internal candidates but outsiders as well.
In response to concerns about whether existing staff will be able to adapt, station manager Frank Whittaker says WMAQ plans to make training available.
Continue reading “If TV Newsrooms Are Requiring Versatility…”
Last night, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, Minn. reported on its Web site that it was filing for bankruptcy:
The filing, which was made with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the southern district of New York, had been expected for months. It follows several missed payments to the paper’s lenders, and it comes less than two years after a private equity group, New York-based Avista Capital Partners, bought the paper for $530 million.
In its filing, the newspaper listed assets of $493.2 million and liabilities of $661.1 million.
Like most newspapers, the Star Tribune has experienced a sharp decline in print advertising. Its earnings before interest, taxes and debt payments were about $26 million in 2008, down from about $59 million in 2007 and $115 million in 2004.
I’ve written several times previously about the immense economic challenges facing traditional media, especially newspapers. The Star Tribune case is of particular interest to me as a life-long Minnesota resident. McClatchy bought the paper for $1.2 billion in 1998 and sold it two years ago for $530 million. So the current economic climate has something to do with the bankruptcy filing, but the economic decline for mainstream media isn’t of recent origin. Other newspaper companies, include Chicago’s Tribune Company, also have filed for bankruptcy.
I think there will always be a Star Tribune in some form, but clearly we’ll be seeing major changes as it tries to find a way to operate profitably.
All the more reason for anyone involved in communications to devote time to learning about social media. A couple of decades ago you could reach a mass “audience” through just a few big media hits, whether via PR or advertising. No more. The so-called “audience” has dispersed to millions of alternatives, mainly on the Web, and its members don’t just want to passively consume. We want to interact.
Newspapers are going to need to take this into account as they go through their Chapter 11 experiences. Many if not most have offered interaction and the ability to comment on their Web sites for quite some time, so simple interactivity isn’t going to be enough. To survive and thrive, I think they’re going to need to find ways to make their communities contributors instead of just commenters on what the “professionals” produce.
What do you think? Can newspapers survive? How do they need to change?
Below is an interesting video my wife discovered this morning, and it highlights why continuing education through institutions like SMUG is so important. One of the interesting segments says:
The top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010…did not exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist…using technologies that haven’t been invented…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.
I don’t agree with everything in this video (for instance, how can they know what the top 10 in-demand jobs will be in 2010?), but in general it’s quite thought-provoking.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8]
Here are a few of the thoughts it provokes in me:
At least half of my job as it currently is structured didn’t exist in 2004. My title is “Manager, Syndication and Social Media.” The syndication part, providing medical news content for traditional media, isn’t new. But being a manager for social media (and the fact that we have a social media team at Mayo Clinic) is definitely a more recent development.
The pace of technological change is amazing, but in many ways it reverses some societal trends. Following widespread adoption of radio and TV (the timeframe of which is mentioned in the video) we entered a mass marketing era. Before that time, we were a society of smaller communities, and word of mouth and localized media were the most important ways of disseminating information. But mass media meant advertisers carpet bombed us with their messages because they could, and there was no way for us to really escape.
While in some ways the era of social media seems to be hurtling us toward a wild new world along with other technological innovations, in another sense it reverses some of those 20th century realities.
It’s never been easier for word-of-mouth messages to be distributed. For instance, I have a few hundred Twitter followers who will get a tweet about this blog post. If some of them decide to retweet it, they may pass it to thousands of their followers. And RSS, Facebook and Friendfeed (to name a few) are other ways the message will get distributed. RSS is the oldest of these technologies, and it first became widely available in 2003.
So with hundreds of millions of people able to make their thoughts potentially available to anyone in the world (for free), and with the social media tools making it easier than ever for friends to stay in touch and reconnect (and for people of common interests to congregate, regardless of geography), the mass media aren’t the only game in town anymore. Which is why we continue to see headlines like this one.
Word of mouth is free. As my friend Andy Sernovitz says, “Advertising is the price of being boring.” Or as Seth Godin puts it (I just downloaded one of his audio books), “Small is the new big.”
And that’s why SMUGgles will be ahead of the game; you’re preparing for and adapting to the changes that are happening, and seeing how these new tools can help you solve the problems you face in your work.
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I know that MSNBC has 168 hours of program time to fill each week, and with its blogs the New York Times editorial board no longer needs to limit itself to commenting on all the news that’s worth printing (because blogs are essentially free), but their hyperventilation yesterday over Sarah Palin more than two weeks after the election is amusing and instructive.
It seems the carnage of a couple of turkeys being slaughtered in the background (after she had issued the traditional gubernatorial pardon of one of their next of kin) was just too much for these scribes’ sensitive souls. MSNBC thought the video needed to be sanitized (for the kids, at least):
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8DTSPzU0RI]
Here’s the unedited version, linking directly to the point where MSNBC averted its (and our) eyes. Pretty gruesome, huh? I’m sure MSNBC has never had anything quite so awful on its programs.
I hope they enjoy their berries and nuts for Thanksgiving.
Tim Blair has a good overview of the reactions (the LA Times’ Elizabeth Snead, with her condescension toward Gov. Palin “making little to no sense (as usual),” while Snead herself uses the profound phrase “slaughtered alive” in the next paragraph, is another highlight) and John Hinderaker at Powerline has more good analysis.
A decade ago my now-teenage daughters got first-hand experience with the origin of the phrase, “running around like chickens with their heads cut off” as we helped some farmer friends round up their poultry for slaughter. I guess my girls were more emotionally well-adjusted at 7 and 8 than MSNBC’s David Shuster is today.
It is instructive to see the inordinate attention to the turkeys’ holiday holocaust, especially in light of some “meatier” recent news about mainstream media, such as
Journalists often lament that the economic woes facing mainstream media have dire implications for our democratic republic, because no one will have resources for serious investigative reporting.
It seems the attention to the Palin poultry proceeding may be a sign that the mainstream media descent into triviality is already well advanced.
Meanwhile, I can’t help but embed this classic clip because of its association of turkeys and mainstream media:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iafzqOCaxA4]