During the past few days, basically taking an extended weekend with Martin Luther King’s Birthday and the Presidential Inauguration, I spent some time thinking about “new media.”  As explained in my previous post about how I am trying to understand “new media,” I have taken at least three months away from the office with the goal of trying to get a much more robust view of new trends in communicating, especially using the Internet, especially interactive communications.  I have two goals: 1) understand what’s happening from the standpoint of a career communicator who has tried to see broad goals and patterns over the coarse of my life, and 2) undertand what’s happening so I may be able to move my own firm, Qorvis Communications, to assume more of a leadership edge.

I acknowledge this is a work in progress, and I am aware my ideas will change.  However, I do not think there is a way to understand what is happening without throwing yourself into it – the same way, as a philosophy student in the late 1960s I used to argue that a Westerner could never understand Zen by reading a book or talking to practitioners.  To understand some things, you just have to immerse yourself in it, and that is what I am trying to do.  I also appreciate that it is still early in the game to be making conclusions, but here are some additional thoughts since my last post.

1.  It Isn’t So Much “New Media” As It Is “New Communications.”

“New media” places the emphasis on a new distribution channel(s).  The distribution channel is important, and is the enabler of the bigger revolution.  But the revolution is really in the way we communicate, which goes far beyond the creation of the tools used to get messages back and forth between individuals and groups.  In my opinion, “new media” should be rebranded as “new communications” – it is a much more accurate and goal-oriented way of seeing things, and it doesn’t set up a counter productive either/or between “new media” and “old media” (or Mainstream Media, or whatever else it may be called).  The issue isn’t whether one type of distribution channel is better than the other; the issue is: how do you communicate effectively?  Those are two vastly different issues, and I think the first is silly and the second is dramatically serious.  I prefer to worry about the more serious of the issues.

2. Experts Should Be Listened To And Then Ignored.

Early adopters and users of Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone did have more knowledge than those who never used the phone before, and could therefore give advice to others about the phone.  But if others relied on the advice that resided with the phone experts who were around then, and if they stopped there, the phone would not have progressed.  I appreciate the value of the people who have been involved with blogging and interactive communications from the start.  But the reality is that “the start” consists of a few short years, and relative to the advances in communications that are still in front of us, the current “experts” are novices.  So, my mantra for now:  keep giving me advice and please respect that I am right to listen, absorb, and then do things my way.  I’ll make some mistakes because I didn’t listen.  But I’ll learn some things because I didn’t listen.  Some of those lessons people will be able to say “I told you so,” and some of those lessons may lead to new thoughts and approaches.  And that’s my goal.

3. The Tyranny Of The Early Definition Of Blogs.

There are those who would say that blogs should be very brief or else they won’t be read. But that is the same as saying that nobody wants to read extended pieces if they appear on a screen instead of on a printed page.  Well, if you believe that and you observe the ongoing and accelerating death of newspapers and book publishers (the traditional media for long pieces), you are led to the conclusion that longer thoughts just won’t be read anymore.  That is: if long pieces belong in print, not on screen, and print is dying, then long pieces are dying.  And I do not buy that.  I think the problem is anchored in the way people define “blog” – and reasserts the argument I’ve made previously that “blog” is an awful word.  Initially “blog” was considered (as far as I can determine) to be a series of regular short statements someone wanted to put in a domain where others could see them and perhaps react to them.  But the initial definition should not dictate the ultimate evolution just as the initial definition of an airplane did not stop the evolution from the Wright Brothers’ plane where the pilot was on their stomach instead of a cockpit, to the SST and beyond.  The Wright Brothers’ plane and the SST are both called “airplanes.”  They do have some things (lots of things) in common, but size and power and objectives are not among them.  If “blog” is going to be a generic for things individuals write that are posted for anyone and everyone to read on the publicly accessible Internet, then the definition has to be big enough to allow for very brief pieces and very long pieces.  If the definition of “blog” will not encompass such a broad range, then we need to come up with a new word to explain postings of a longer size.

4. Measuring Success.

Is the measurement of success of a blog determined by the number of hits the blog receives, or the number of comments it generates, or the influence exerted, the quality versus the size of the audience?   It’s an important question because if your goal is to measure success by the number of hits, you will take a vastly different approach than if you want to influence a small group of people.  I think that right now, a “successful” blog is considered to be one that has lots of hits and comments.  With that approach, The National Enquirer, with a circulation of about 2.7 million, is more successful than The Financial Times of London, with a circulation of about half a million.  Shall we begin to define “success” by popularity, or doesn’t quality of content, depth of analysis, etc. have something to do with success?  I am convinced that determining the success of a blog by number of hits is a big mistake.  Again: either the definition of “blog” needs to be expanded to include longer and less read pieces or there needs to be a new name for longer pieces.

5. The Most Famous Bloggers – And What Does That Do To The Definition Of “Bloggers”?

What do Keith Olbermann, Bill O’Reilly, and Lou Dobbs have in common?  I think they are among the best-known bloggers.  But although they “blog” online, their more popular blogs are not online at all but on TV and considered not “blogs” at all but “news shows.”  Consider the comparisons between them and the “ordinary” online blogger: personal views, very little objective journalism, very little regard for editorial control (or journalistic integrity, often dismissed in favor of building an audience).  It seems to me that the only difference between what they do on TV and what is done by bloggers on line is simply the fact that they are on TV and others are online.  Period.  So, are they only “bloggers” when they do it online?  If not, doesn’t that mean that “blogging” is not dependent on the distribution channel but is dependent really on access to any media where one can express their own personal views?  Which leads to the question: is blogging about expressing individual thoughts and inviting reactions, or is it about expressing your views online?

6. Promotion.

Despite my view that success should not be determined simply by number of hits, clearly if nobody reads what someone writes, that can be considered “lack of success.”  So, promotion to get some readership is necessary.  I’ve been looking at that, and been experimenting.  The jury is still out.  I’ve tried advertising, facebook, twitter, posting elsewhere, blast emails, individual emails, etc.  It’s still too early to determine what works, what doesn’t, and what works best.  I’m going to keep testing.  Right now, I am biased to think that there is an entirely new way to promote things online – I do not think one approach works.  I am inclined to think along more robust approaches, similar to my thinking about the “organic message.”  And that brings me back to Number 1, above:  what has changed is not simply the distribution channel, but the way the interactive distribution channel allows a much more effective approach to communications, which I continue to define as:  getting well-crafted messages to specific target(s) to achieve specific goals.  In other words:  focusing on blogs and other ways to communicate is less important in my view than addressing the much more significant question of how new distribution channels allow much more effective communications. Focusing on interactive media qua interactive media will yield an understanding of how that particular channel(s) work; focusing on how various distribution channels can add to effective communications is a different question, more important, and the focus of my on-going interest.  At least until I conclude that I am wrong, which is very possible.

7. Vested Interests Of Blogging.

There are some who say that there is a culture to blogging that doesn’t allow for self-promotion, but I just don’t get that logic, at least not yet.  I do not understand why anyone would spend time writing posts for the world to see (and possibly react to) just for the sake of writing something down.  There must be some motivation.  The person who simply wants to expose a pet theory or observation is doing it for some reason: to get ego satisfaction, to persuade people to move in a certain way or adopt a certain way of thinking about an issue, to be a provocateur.  Is that pure?  Are there no vested interests in that?  If those vested interests are legitimate, why wouldn’t the desire to gain visibility for a company or a product be any less legitimate?  Businesses often want to position themselves and/or their people as “thought leaders.”  Posting articles is a legitimate way to do that.  Is that wrong?  Does that render the blog “impure” by some hallowed rules of blogging?  I do not think so.

8. And, For Me That All Means (At Least For Now) ….

I’m going to keep on testing things, going in different directions, making mistakes, asking for advice, listening to the advice, sometimes ignoring the advice.  Some of my experiments will become obvious; some less so.  I’ll keep writing about what I discover.  But, I continue to think that the most important goal of my effort is to try to discover some “unifying” view of communications in the 21^st Century, which includes interactive media as an extremely important component, but not (I now think) the be-all and end-all.