Odd.  I’m of the opinion that when people wrongly believe you have died, speaking up might actually be a fairly effective means of changing their perceptions.

Here’s the progression as I understand it from Second Life’s birth as the “next big thing,” through to today’s exhumation.

• Second Life launches to great fanfare and hype–>
• Hype starts to fade as (a) companies question the ROI (b) people who loved the game dynamics moved on (c) the press got interested in the next Big Thing –>
• Second Life begins slowly and methodically reinventing itself and sees impressive results in users, time spent on the site, etc….And decides it’s a good idea not to talk about any of this for a long, long time.

The irony for me is in seeing a new media pioneer resort to old-world communications strategies.  When you’ve been in PR long enough, you’ve probably experienced at least a few times working with a white-hot brand.  And you probably rode that wave as far as you possibly could, wringing every ounce of coverage you could out of the attention the media lavished on your client.

But in the age of authenticity, hype is the enemy.  It’s seductive as hell, sure–but 99 times out of a hundred, hype will misrepresent your brand, even while claiming to extol it.

It reminds me of one of my heroes, Bruce Springsteen.  When Springsteen landed on the covers of Time and Newsweek in the same week, way back in 1975, the Boss was distraught by the hype because he saw it for what it was: a real threat to building a life-long relationship with his audience. His answer, though, wasn’t to clam up.  It was to go out and bust his butt doing what he did best: play passionate, marathon rock concerts that converted even the most hard-boiled skeptics.  (He did the same thing a decade later when the Born in the USA hype went nuclear.) Eventually, even as the press coverage dropped to “normal” levels, it started to focus more on the music and the concerts, not the phenomenon.

Yes, hype is a dangerous thing.  But so is silence.  The marketplace is littered with companies and brands that couldn’t live up to the original hype. The only real solution is to communicate–consistently, honestly and transparently.  To keep telling your story.

Second Life, welcome back the the land of the living.  Don’t make the mistake of going dark again.

Photo Credit

If it’s hard for him, it’s hard for anyone. And, of course, the still evolving media landscape bears witness to this fact. No need to rehash the lowlights of the last half decade in news, but the lack of a frontrunner for a sustainable business model for the news industry is evidence that more turmoil is still to come.

In thinking more about Scoble’s and others’ comments made during last week’s panel discussion on the future of communications (see initial post here), an underlying current throughout it all was the quest to add value for whatever audience you’re speaking with.

Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee acknowledged that what she was doing wasn’t much different from what newspaper columnists have traditionally done and Chris O’Brien of the San Jose Mercury News and the Next Newsroom Project acknowledged that the printed paper likely won’t be the core of what the Merc eventually becomes (he also made an interesting observation that the radio remains the place where Bay Area commuters consume most of their media yet radio is frequently omitted from these sorts of discussions).

On the hunt for value...

Remove the delivery vehicle (the paper, a blog, the radio, TV, etc) from the conversation and what remains of news is the information itself (which you could argue is as it should be). And with no barriers to entry and general information overload, the information needs to add value. Anything less and relevancy will wane, no matter who you write for.

Richard Brewer-Hay, principal blogger for eBay over at eBay Ink, said to me afterward he’s most intrigued how newer communications channels have enabled two-way dialogues (or even many-to-many) rather than the traditional one-to-many. That, he said, fundamentally changes the value proposition for journalists and audiences. This works great for Richard because he’s able to leverage his role into a true dialogue with eBay’s community. Letters to the editor just don’t cut it anymore. The letter to the editor presents a voice, but it’s a voice that isn’t replied back to and doesn’t spawn other conversations. It’s the tree falling in the forest and no one is quite sure if anyone else is around to hear it.

Post into any story and you’ve now contributed to a “live” conversation, and impacted the rest of what’s to come and can see how it all plays out. Likewise, fully formed conversations can get built up through many voices all riffing on whatever original content gets posted to the Internet.

But this doesn’t necessarily equate to value. Wading through a hundred comments on a story is rarely fruitful. I would rather have Seymour Hersh writing his stories for the print New Yorker in a 1-to-many conversation as there is absolutely no value I can add to his content. I am in listen-only mode when he’s talking.

Indeed, the construct of news doesn’t need to change. Journalists still need to be able do what they’ve always done best: Find the facts, find the viewpoints, and distill them down for the audience in a compelling manner. But a journalist who can’t add value beyond a press release essentially becomes commoditized by the press release itself.

Journalism today can be as biting as any time in the past, but the amount of information currently accessible and the number of viewpoints being thrown at us from experts and non-experts alike has had the effect of shortening our collective attention spans and reducing our tolerance for status-quo deliveries. The voices who have the greatest impact and can cut through the noise with impactful analysis – no matter whom they write for – will be the ones we seek out. Everyone else will just fade into the background as white noise.

Somewhat unfortunately, the tolerance for any slippage in this area will be minimal. If Robert Scoble is not adding value to the conversation, the collective public will banish him immediately and without remorse. Someone else will be ready and waiting to take his place, and we’ll be ready too. It’s a vicious turn, but it’s the world we live in currently. Here’s hoping that the people who deserve to be heard find their audiences and financially-viable platforms to support them.

Photo credit: Paul Keleher

In a short time, the panel managed to touch on many interesting topics that journalists, bloggers and communications professionals alike all grapple with daily, from the future of the newspaper – Aedhmar will continue to read the print version, Robert on the other hand, is pretty sure that “his son will never read a newspaper” – to the best way to ensure we all reach our audiences in effective and unique ways.

One thing is clear, the industry is undergoing one of the fastest and most dramatic changes it ever has. The speed at which newspapers, online sources and emerging platforms are changing currently guarantee that they will continue to evolve for quite some time. The opportunity for those in the business of keeping us informed is vast, albeit risky. For communications professionals, one thing continues to hold true: Know your audience and make sure you target the right medium while continuing to explore the best way to tell compelling stories. The platforms are changing, but the need to communicate and be transparent with increasingly fragmented audiences will only grow in importance.

The discourse ranged from politics (Robert blogged about it here) to whether or not ‘publicists’ are obsolete, to the potential demise of traditional media (staunchly defended by Joel Dreyfuss). While there was some heated debated initially, (which in this case is a good thing) that quickly dissipated, giving way to consensus around a very important issue to our business: if you or your company view PR as being only about media relations, then you need to change your ways, because peer media has redistributed the power of influence.

And we could clearly see that this fact, and how to respond to it, was on the minds of the event attendees as comments and questions indicated that they were grappling with issues related to this power shift: how to identify who has influence in the blogosphere, how to measure ROI, how much resource to dedicate to following blogs, (an issue on which Scoble and I were split – which I’ll address in a seperate post), and how to convince senior management that PR should not be (as if it ever really was) only about media relations.

And these questions can impact larger companies (only 4% of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs), because they have become highly specialized in their approaches to communications – for example, people (and budgets) are sometimes dedicated only to media relations, and this fact makes it harder to redistribute both dollars and human activity to peer media.  This is where we see smaller companies having some advantage (but only at the moment, and certainly not in all cases) because they tend to be able to take a more fluid approach to moving both dollars and activity around to match the opportunity peer media presents. For example, all of marketing can be just one or two people who realize starting a blog is a much more time and cost efficient channel to talk with customers than a printed newsletter.

But I think it’s important – as all the panelists pointed out – to understand that peer media is not an all or nothing proposition right now. At this point, if you and your company aren’t involved, you can begin easily by listening – reading blogs to learn what is being said about your company by bloggers. Once you understand the conversation, you see where you can make a contribution. And that only takes a little bit of time, and committment.

But enough for the moment – over the coming days I’ll take a look at some of the other topics we discussed and also get the podcast up.

I can’t thank our panelists enough for their contribution, it truly was an honor to be involved in this event.

Cathy