March 2010 Archives

There's no doubt that the number of traditional journalism jobs is shrinking, and shrinking fast. I struggle to think of a single publishing company that hasn't had layoffs or title closures in the last few years.

You went to J-school to learn how to tell a story in words and images. Yes, the employers who traditionally hired your skills are shrinking fast. But there is an entirely new world out there for you to consider. Please keep an open mind about this.

I'm not talking about PR and media relations here. This isn't about writing press releases and trying to get your former colleagues to write or broadcast about you. Instead, I'm talking about creating stories as you are now, but for a corporation, government agency, nonprofit, or educational institution instead.

Headline Uses FAIL, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

I had no idea that the FAIL internet meme has become so mainstream that headline writers are using it now...

What does business look like when everything is networked?

Jeff Dachis of the Dachis group kicked off with some interesting observation that he and he team came up with15 years ago when he founded Razorfish in New York.: everything that could be digital would be, because it makes things better, faster and cheaper. 

And things have shifted that way, but there have been road bumps along the way. One major example was marketers co-opting the dotcom boom, and creating a  whole lot of business that shouldn't have existed at the time. 

Marketers took one way messages and tried to push them into an environment that was designed for more interactive and social communications - and he's suggesting that the same is happening to social media..

Indeed, marketers took something of a bashing in Jeff's talk. "Social media marketing is largely ineffective and incremental at best," he suggested. And it's still not very significant - only 0.5% of digital marketing spend is social media.

And thus, this is not a discussion about marketing, but social business - about using social tools to connect everybody in the chain that business involves. And, under Reed's Law, as the number of people in that network grows, so does the value of that network.

And the purpose of today is to try and address some of those issues: 

How do we take an industrial/assembly line model and move it to a sharing network?

What is it about our culture that we don't want to connect and share and communicate and how can we change that?

Busy day ahead...

"Girl with a One Track Mind" blogger and author Zoe Margolis has said she is taking legal action against the Independent on Sunday after she was referred to as a "hooker" in a headline.

Despite us patiently explaining who we were and why we were there ITN's "journalist" and idiot Phil Reay-Smith went on to describe the Whingers as "die hard Phantom fans". Lawyers have been advised as this is clearly defamation of the most serious kind.