Yesterday I had the opportunity to chat with the folks at TV Newser on their podast Morning Media Menu, as a preview of my panel participation at today’s TV Newser Summit in New York City. We covered a wide range of topics, from how I began exploring emergent, social media, to how traditional media has taken a shine to new media tools like Twitter. Steve Garfield called into the show and talked about the Today Show’s Jamie Gangel and her introduction to Twitter last week.
You can see @jamiegangel’s interaction with the Twitter community here. I’ve added some of the comments to my favorites. As part of that story, Jamie spoke with David Gregory who has really embraced the spirit of dialogue and smart community on Twitter. I’m guessing my most quotable soundbite from the podcast is:
“We’re Moving From Meet the Press, and Now We Can Meet the People”
Follow Meet the Press moderator @davidgregory and you’ll watch it happen. He understands the value of tapping into the collective intelligence of the very smart group of people on Twitter. Twitter is a tremendous equalizer. The community there will give corporate titans, rock stars, Hollywood celebrities, media notables, and politicians one chance to listen and contribute, and get it right. If they fail in those areas they get called on it. In a recent Howard Kurtz article, ABC newser Terry Moran crows about how Twitter counters:
the whole notion that newscasters speak from Olympus
- Terry Moran, ABC News
I really don’t think the folks on Twitter ever suffered from that misapprehension.
i’m really sad that I’m not able to make SXSW this year, because it’s a great conference to discover where much of this is heading. But last year at that very conference I witnessed first hand the challenge faced by traditional media. As I ate breakfast at the hotel restaurant a waiter - transfixed by the talking head on the cable news show, and apparently at odds with the pundit - began shouting at the TV. It occurred to me that this was a rather inefficient feedback loop. Social web tools like Twitter now give mainstream media the opportunity to do something they haven’t always been in a position to do that well.. LISTEN. But as Twitter friend Adele McAlear put it, traditional media must understand this is about JOINING the conversation, not controlling it.
Did you ever have control of the conversation? No. It always went on in people’s living rooms. Difference: Now you can hear it
Still, these are turbulent times for media. Part of my motivation for embracing social web technology is precisely because it has shown to be a tremendous disruptor of traditional media and I need to watch where all of this is heading and determine where I fit in. And as serial consultants like Michael Rosenblum, the architects of what may be the sunset of my craft, engage in schadenfreude tinged rhetoric on the web, I’m left feeling both hopeful and fearful of what lies ahead for media workers like me.
Being asked to sit aside a panel of very savvy media influencers is a very great honor indeed. I just hope I live up to the billing. At the end of the day, I’m just a news cameraman try to stay relevant in a rapidly changing media landscape.
See that blue line on the graph? That represents jobs data for the TV news industry according to Simply Hired. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a network news cameraman by trade, still clinging on to rapidly diminishing fortunes. The more appealing green line represents job data results for “Social Network”. So as that downward job trend continues across legacy media, I still believe there is tremendous opportunity in social media.
The New Television
About a year ago, I came across an interview with August Capital’s David Hornik. In this interview, Hornik refers to the sum of all of this social media as “the new television” and that “we will see increasingly specific social networks”. Both of these notions really struck me, and in my own post then, I hinted at a venture that incorporated those ideas.
The State of Social Networking Today
Since then there has been a lot of hype about social networking. From that hype has sprouted numerous white-label social networking platforms prompting this article in TechCrunch and this follow-up.
In the second post, Tech Crunch writer Mark Hendrickson looks ahead:
It will be interesting to see over the next few years whether this demand further intensifies as potential customers realize the value of niche social networks, or whether it slackens as people get over the hype surrounding this aspect of Web 2.0.
Many of these companies are targeting large, well-established organizations with deep pockets. Scan the chart and you will see big-name media companies, educational institutions, and corporations
-Mark Hendrickson, TechCrunch
Well a year later the results are in, and it doesn’t look good for corporate social networks. A recent Deloitte study, featured in the Wall Street Journal showed that the vast majority of them had failed to attract people.
One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.
-Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal
The article goes on to cite some staggeringly bad statistics and is pretty gloomy, but appears to put the blame sqaurely on the corporations, who just don’t get the community spirit thing. Marhsall Kirpatrick has his typically droll take on all of this, pointing to a social network built around a cat litter brand, that is emblematic of these failures.
Social networks where a brand name product is what everyone rallies around are a dumb idea. They are stupid. No one should submit themselves to the indignity of creating a user profile and friend connections based on cola or cat litter.
-Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web
Hehe.. I like Marshall. Kirkpatrick also appears to be bullish on niche market social networks.
Building A Community Around Passionate Fans
As some of you know, I’ve been working on something along these lines for some time with a business partner. We are perilously close to unleashing it upon the social web. We feel we have built the foundation for a strong web community that celebrates the passions of a creative constituency. But simply because we aren’t a corporate site, doesn’t mean that we won’t face our own EPIC FAIL. It’s all in the execution. We have partnered with white-label social network developer, Pringo, to design and develop this space and are currently in PRE-LAUNCH beta. (leave a comment here if you’re interested in taking a look)
What we’re discovering in this pre-launch phase is that the community won’t adapt to the platform, the platform has to be right for the community. As we move forward, we must be able to adapt to the needs of our community or we will share the same fate of many of these corporate social networks. Similarly, those white label social network platforms listed in the Tech Crunch post must have the flexibility and agility to keep up with how people are using the social web, or as I’ve come to call it…”the new television”.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
Let’s operate under the premise that Einstein was right about this. Why then, do I, and nearly everyone else on Twitter continue to keep coming back to this infuriatingly unstable platform to connect with our communities? It’s likely because, for now, that’s where the people are, and while most users are getting frustrated with nearly daily outages, no one is taking that first step toward migration. That seems to be the million dollar question - why do we keep coming back? To be more precise, it could soon become the $250 a year question if Jason Calacanis holds sway with the folks at Twitter. Recently there has been a chorus of people from Om Malik to Pat Phelan calling for some type of metered/pay service.
Om Malik’s post is essentially an indictment of the users, “extreme users” specifically. Let me get this straight… it’s the users “fault” that Twitter keeps going down?? This is how you want to introduce a pay/metered system on Twitter?? I have a difficult time reconciling Twitter’s desire to scale with imposing a fee structure on those who help drive growth in order to solve underlying technology issues that they didn’t anticipate. This smacks of hubris to me, the kind of hubris attendant in a brand that thinks they’re the only game in town (think cable company only with hipsters at the helm). This has already driven to a contest to build a better mousetrap and in the interem, I wonder if folks will simply migrate to an equally useful existing platform like Jaiku or Pownce. If Twitter offered added value and created REAL pro accounts, offering tools to organize friends, send messages to groups etc, then I’d consider paying.
Under the Om Malik plan I would pay around $60 a month. It’s important to note here that none of this discussion has come directly from the Twitter team themselves. But given the uniformity of the this pricing structure amongst the bloggerati, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if this turd in the pool has been floated with at least the implicit aknowledgement of Twitter and/or their investors. Now, $60 may not seem like much to some people. But let’s get real for a minute, as our buying power diminishes daily $60 is not insignificant to me. That’s a weeks worth of gas in my Honda Element. For that $60, all that is being currently discussed is platform stability.
Imagine buying a car, driving it off the lot only to find that the engine routinely dies. Imagine taking the car to get fixed over and over again until the dealer finally tells you he’ll fix it for good for an extra $5000. What chaps my hide a bit here is that the early adopters (I joined in Nov. 2006), helped grow Twitter’s mainstream adoption. Nearly everyone on the service has evangelized the platform by either word of mouth, blog posts, mainstream media mentions, or workplace use. In many respects they wouldn’t be where they are today without the very people that proposed fee plans would penalize. Perhaps if I try to glean as much potential financial/professional benefit from every Twitter post, I’ll soon grow more tiresome than I already am. Then people will drop me in droves leaving Twitter more affordable to me. That should make Twitter AWESOME! It’s the people that make Twitter what it is. It is CLEARLY not the platform in and of itself.
Over the weekend, I engaged in an ideological video tete a tete with Seesmic CEO Loic Lemeur on the topic of paying for Twitter. The videos are short, but it’s clear that I don’t come at this unemotionally.
Drops in ad spending forecasts for social networks are likely drivers in the push for pay-for-use and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of this in places other than Twitter. Overall, I have no problem with paying for something I find useful, or that simplifies my life. I do take issue with the suggestion that Twitter hold stability for ransom. So to those forced with re-examining revenue models and premium” plans, I would humbly suggest creating an added value transaction, not penalizing the community that has helped build your brand.
March 10, 2009 
Posted in TV news, new media 
13 Comments » 
Kirkpatrick also appears to be bullish on 
Contact
Top Comments