Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. Why it's all happening on the web | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore

Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. Why it’s all happening on the web

May 23rd, 2005

Peter Preston writing in yesterday's Observer made a comment which chimes perfectly with our book.
He said

There are times, times of profound upheaval, when one change seems to fit with another – then, suddenly, to change everything. This may be just such a time…

Preston fires off some stats about the difficulties that newspapers are suffering, including: the Baltimore Sun down 11.5% year on year, the Los Angeles Times -6.4%, The Chicago Tribune -6.6%, The Washington Post -2.6% and the San Fransisco Chronicle -7%.
And its not only newspapers that are suffering – the FT Monday 23 devotes a half a page to the increasing travails of the UK's ITV as viewer numbers fall and growth is snatched by rivals.

As Emiko Terazono writes in the FT article

Some media buyers and analysts are more concerned about the structural and behavioural changes that wiill affect the company long term. Teenagers are spending less time in front of the television, playing more games on their consuls or on their mobile phones and MP3 players

This is substantiated by the Morgan Stanley report The Age of Engagement which charts the meteoric explosion of digital content on all platforms as the power base of traditional media erodes.
Back to newspapers, the migration Preston says is not to other print rivals, but to the net. Naturally Murdoch gets a look in with his recent comments on being a digital immigrant vs. being a digital native.
Preston charts the paradigm shift thus

So there's the chain of change, one damned thing after another piling in as the British press settles down to digest the gains and losses of yet another election. There is perceptible movement from print news to digital news. There is a new world of electronic searching and sourcing out there that can't be denied. And if readers head in a fresh direction, advertisers are bound to follow.
One authoritative source – Forrester Research – sees US online advertising rising to $14.7 billion this year, 23 per cent up on 2004. Nearly every ad agency surveyed planned to cut print and direct mail spending to make room for the net. It's a cliff with a jumping platform in place.

However, Preston then goes to use the Guardian as a fine example that has embraced the digital age with great success. And argues that a walled garden approach to historical content is a mistake and some serious headscratching needs to be done to ensure that a digital strategy sits at the very heart of what traditional newspapers do.
Even the BBC is opening up parts of its vast audio-visual archive for private use . Its a great move.
By engaging, allowing two way-flows of information, the Observer will often invite comment on a particular article online in its newsprint edition. It shows a smart, well informed strategy about how to survive in times of change. The guardian Unlimited has a blog too.
And remember Jonathan Schwartz COO of Sun Microsystems said in an interview with Robert Scoble + Shel Israel

The perception of Sun as a faithful and authentic tech company is now very strong. What blogs have done has authenticated the Sun brand more than a billion dollar ad campaign could have done. I care more about the ink you get from developer community than any other coverage. Sun has experienced a sea change in their perception of us and that has come from blogs. Everyone blogging at Sun is verifying that we possess a culture of tenacity and authenticity.

Its one example of many case histories out there that demonstrate growth can be achieved, but one must be prepared to embrace the world of business and marketing in a different way. We describe it as the 4C's – Connectivity, Commerce, Culture and Community. It is about aligning these that gives clues to the future opportunities vs. threats.
One comment is that bloggers do not only get their news from the printed page it can happen the other way around – and this post is a combination of blog sources, online sources and newspapers.
Briefly the 4C's can be described thus, Connectivity provides companies for the very first time the opportunity to generate two-way flows of information, feedback and engagement.
Connectivity, enables us – via the internet and the mobile phone – to identify who are prolific connectors and social networks that could be key distribution points to viral contagion and sharing word of mouth messages. But connectivity alone is not enough, there must be good content (culture) and a population of interest (community). If this can be combined with a genuine business enterprise (Commerce). One is looking at a powerful business and marketing model.

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