More WIN from my feeds. Ross Mayfield has been posting about the different styles of relationship between users that various web tools promote. One post had this wee gem:Consider a 1.0 community feature, Forums. Forums are topic-centric instead of people-centric. There isn't the notion of following people, or leveraging the social network as a filter. You have to sift through what everyone is saying regardless of who they are, which I find tremendously inefficient. This also means that if someone is truly obnoxious you can't unsubscribe from them.
However, traditional B2B publishing companies are still, structurally, topic-focused. Our business is built and arranged around topic silos. But people don't live in topic silos. They have more than one interest, area of expertise and desire to communicate. And the more we try to shove those people into our pre-designated and easy-to-sell (for now) silos, the more we'll hasten our own demise.
We need to shift the balance from topic first, person second, to person first and topic second in every element of our publishing process. Until we do that, I don't think we'll every escape the trap of sprinkling a wee bit of magic community dust on fundamentally Web 1.0 offerings and wondering why we struggle.
Okay – I don’t want to come over all doom monger but someone’s got to play devil’s advocate and argue for the opposition.
What we do today is undoubtedly a hybrid of legacy and future publishing practices, and if we were publishing in Wonderland then I’m 100% sure that your way would be the way, Adam.
However, you shouldn’t dismiss (and I cannot as I would be out of a job) the role of our magazine-based websites in today’s business environment. And that is that they have to account for themselves in the revenue producing world.
Our board our a lovely bunch of people but even they would baulk at the suggestion that we discard our traditional topic-based advertiser relationships in order to build a brave new world before anyone else does and lead the publishing way at the cost of terminating relationships with clients that at 2 years behind us in thinking.
No, the prudent and logical path is to try to convert our advertiser cash one client at a time through doing a solid Web 1.0 job with elements of social networks and community attached until they have a clearer understanding of what the Web 2.0 is about and what power it holds.
At that point we should be poised to invest and realise the potential of the in-house learning that’s been encouraged for the last 18 months or so. Fortunately, by that time, because of some great RBI insight, we should not only have a core of skills but some decent technology and tools with which to do this at that point.
You're reading a hell of a lot more into what I said than I actually intended, there.
There is absolutely an element of "Wonderland" in what I'm talking about - that's part of my job, to think about what businesses like ours might look like in five years' time, or 10 years' time. And these blog posts aren't manifestos; they're thoughts in progress.
That said, I absolutely didn't "dismiss the role of magazine-based websites". Throwing away traditional magazine silos absolutely would be stupid - but blurring the lines around them, reaching out into other areas, and understanding the interplay between different areas of large businesses may well be critical to maintaining those precious advertiser relationships into the future, and are the first step towards that Wonderland of mine… :-)
I agree with shifting away from our topic-centred focus. Interestingly, RBI is trying to push the notion of beat blogs, which are by definition built around topic.
Ah, but are they? Or are they built around the journalist? :)
They should be built around the journalist. Agree. i think we have some way top go tho - you should know, you are the poor man who is trying to make it happen.
Great post Adam. Of-course, people congregate around content subjects that interest them but like you say, rebalancing it to people first, topic second allows it to be more individually useful.