Posts Tagged ‘Journalism’
So you think you’ve finished your studies? You may have graduated years ago, but let me tell you, in today’s economy, school is never out.
If you don’t have it already, you need to develop a philosophy of life-long learning. Things are changing much too fast to rely simply on what you learned at uni or TAFE.
For example, whether you’re a small or a large business, you can’t stick your head in the sand and ignore trends like social media. That means not only mastering existing tools, but staying abreast of emerging tools, as well.
It’s pretty clear that most businesses should have a Facebook page and a Twitter account. But when it comes to using some of the newer social media tools for your business, how do you pick a winner? You need to look at factors such as the take-up rate, how it integrates with other tools, and whether it offers something that is not only different, but hopefully useful, as well.
Google+ is one on the cusp (though, supported by and integrated with the raft of Google tools, it’s a pretty safe bet that it will be there for the long haul).
The location-based tool Foursquare, used by more than 15 million people who check in at locations and share their visits with friends, has had a lot of publicity and has attracted venture capital investment. But how important is it to people to become the ‘mayor’ of frequently visited spots? Are people using it mainly to make their friends jealous about where they can afford to go on a holiday?
A tool that I think ticks more of the boxes is Pinterest, an online pinboard service that, in the words of CBS Moneywatch, “attracts people who need to organize the chaos of Internet-age information overload.”
Pinterest describes itself as a social network meant to connect everyone in the world through the things that they find interesting.
The site lets you create and curate multiple pinboards in any category you can create, as well as following others’ pinboards. It falls somewhere between window shopping and actual collecting. You can log on through Twitter or Facebook, so you can tell your friends and customers about your boards.
At the same time, In contrast to Facebook, Pinterest pinners may end up choosing to follow people they don’t know purely based on the photos they curate, creating seemingly random new networks.
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- Tags: Australia, content, digital content, e-marketing, internet content, Journalism, Marketing, online marketing, Ray Welling, SMARTER BUSINESS IDEAS, social media, social networks
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By Ray Welling
In the competition between digital natives – Gen Y, which has grown up with online technology and digital immigrants – those of us who can remember typewriters and phones with cords attached – for primacy online, it seems that the digital natives have gained the upper hand.
Think Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, and a billion dollar online empire by the time he reached his mid-20s) vs. Rupert Murdoch (MySpace, phone hacking scandals, declining dead tree media empire). Or Natalie Tran (24-year old Australian vlogger with 156,000 Twitter followers, more than 400 million YouTube views and a cozy career in the making) against say, Tony Abbott (50-something Australian politician with 56,000 Twitter followers but no YouTube channel).
If you read the media reports on what’s hot on the web, there appears to be a strong relationship between a lack of history and Internet success.
But it’s not that simple.
It can be useful to have a long-term view of the online world, which only a seasoned digital immigrant can have. If you can combine that with knowledge of traditional, pre-Internet business principles, you can look past current fads and build a business model that’s sustainable.
For example, the current obsession with whatever is the latest online application exploding in the public consciousness ignores the fragile nature of web success.
With all the current talk of community-building and developing personal relationships, you’d think the concept was invented by Facebook. Digital natives may be too young to remember, but digital immigrants will recall that when MySpace burst on the scene, it was seen as the long-term future of social media. That is, until Facebook came along.
Early digital immigrants can go back even further and remember GeoCities, an online community where people could create personal pages and create a following of fans, which was all the buzz way back in the 20th century.
And consider the power and ubiquity of the Google empire. It may be hard for digital natives to fathom a time pre-Google, but digital immigrants can remember when Yahoo! was seen as the impregnable leader in search (As an aside, it used its cash reserves to buy GeoCities back in 1999), a crown it took from the equally-invulnerable Alta Vista.
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- Tags: advertising, Australia, content, digital content, e-marketing, Internet, internet content, Journalism, Marketing, Ray Welling, SMARTER BUSINESS IDEAS, social media, Video, video content, YouTube
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From Ray’s NETT blog:
What are the most important factors to consider when you’re communicating ideas to people? How do you get your message across successfully?
From my days as a journalist writing for newspapers and magazines through to my current work presenting digital marketing messages or lecturing to students, a few common themes have emerged in terms of what works consistently.
Actually, I exaggerate – there is really just one fundamental rule in successful communication: make your concept relevant to your target audience.
This is expressed as a couple of acronyms:
• WIFFM – what’s in it for me?
• WSIC – why should I care?
If you can understand what matters to your audience and work out how to relate your message to their concerns, you’ll get your point across.
This principle isn’t limited to written, visual or verbal communication messages: it extends to the communication of ideas, and can include the dissemination of those ideas through a variety of media.
Take music, for example. My favourite band of all time is the Doors, led by the late great Jim Morrison. The Doors tapped into the Zeitgeist of the 1960s with music that protested against traditional mores.
Their sometimes dark messages about love, fitting in and pushing back against parental barriers struck a chord with young Baby Boomers who were just starting to flex their muscles and question the structures of the world that they were inheriting.
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- Tags: content, digital content, digital marketing, e-marketing, internet content, Jim Morrison, Journalism, Marketing, online content, online marketing, Ray Welling, social media, social networking, The Doors, zazoo
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There has been a lot of debate in journalistic circles of late about the state of denial most journalists and media academics are in regarding new media.
A recent blog on Poynter.org recounted an exchange between digital media entrepreneur Elizabeth Overholser and journalism students at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism. Osder refuted one student’s lament that online news business models aren’t working. Then she advised the students that to figure out which online business models can work, ”Start with the impact you want to have. Figure out what audience you need to assemble to have that impact. And what kind of content is needed to do that. Then price it out: How much money do you need to do it?”
According to Overholser, a J-student groaned in reply, “If I wanted to do that, I’d have gone to Marshall (USC’s business school).”
Osder countered that while that response was understandable, thinking through the business side of journalism “forces you to be relevant and useful versus arrogant and entitled.”
I say: hear, hear! Journalists need to get their head out of the sand and embrace the Internet, because, like it or not, it is changing the face of journalism. Being a good writer isn’t enough in the 21st century; you need to be able to write web copy, operate a blog, do your research and link out to your sources, even use a video camera.
Like others who have been writing on this topic, I blame the university programs, who are still churning out journalists who are too “good” to do anything other than report and write.
Much as it pains me to say this, as someone who grew up and started their career believing in the purity and hyperspecialisation of journalism, the Internet, new ways of communicating stories, and citizen journalism are all a fact of life today, and journalists who won’t admit this and who won’t widen their perspective and their activities will end up bitter and unemployed.
From The HubSpot Internet Marketing blog:
“At the Inbound Marketing Summit last week, marketing guru David Meerman Scott encouraged business owners and marketing executives to ‘hire a journalist’. What was he talking about? More than 10,000 jobs have been cut this year at U.S. newspapers, and Scott sees the ‘dire situation for many reporters and editors as a tremendous opportunity for corporate marketing.’
“Why? Because journalists are trained to write, edit and, above all, tell stories in an even-handed way.
“‘Hiring people trained in journalism sounds like a good idea for marketers - they’ll be getting someone who’s more likely to be comfortable writing for a general audience, simplifying tricky concepts and telling stories,’ says Jon Fortt, a senior writer at Fortune.
“In the new world of inbound marketing, that’s what you need to do. You can’t interrupt potential customers with ‘marketing material’, you have to create rich, interesting content, that attracts people to your web site. You have to create content that’s useful to your customers, not gobbledygook about your product. Having somebody on your team who can do this will set you apart from the competition.”