Downfall

March 13th, 2009

ITV, C4 and 5, the UK’s major commercial terrestrial broadcasters are in merger talks and the New York Times front page told us that, over America local newspapers are closing down or shutting down their print operations

The history of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stretches back more than two decades before Washington became a state, but after 146 years of publishing, the paper is expected to print its last issue next week, perhaps surviving only in a much smaller online version.

And it is not alone. The Rocky Mountain News shut down two weeks ago, and The Tucson Citizen is expected to fold next week.

At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.

And in The Johnston press the UK’s largest regional newspaper group is part of the same tale

The shares of Johnston Press, the regional publisher, declined over 25% while the group cut their dividend and posted a £429.3 million pretax loss. After a write down of the value of their newspapers at £417.5 million, the troubled group began to fall into the red. Revenues dropped 12.4% to £531.9 million for last year. The year before, Johnston Press had a £125 million pretax profit.

So we are witness to the wholesale disintegration of the mass media. This is due process in the communications revolution that is being driven by a hunger and need by people to be part of culture and society – who want something more than being spoonfed their media consumption.

In Communities Dominate Brands I wrote with Tomi the following

Now, the Age of Connectedness and its newly active communities are altering the way all businesses will market, promote and sell their goods and services. The very first cases are emerging simultaneously around the world, and they clearly give an answer to what the marketing industry has expressed for several years already. Traditional methods of marketing, advertising and branding are increasingly ineffective. Something new is happening, only we could not put our fingers on it. Not yet. Not until this book.

Phillip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster state in their book Blown to Bits that digitalisation is “deconstructing” traditional industries such as home electronics, business, broadcast, retailing and banking, while at the same time creating new commercial opportunities such as Google and eBay, the low cost airline industry, on-line banking, or Closed Audience Networks. These are trends echoed time and again by experts analysing the individual phenomena such as digital convergence and disruptive technologies.

Today, central to young people’s discussions are music players, mobile phones, enhanced bluetooth technology, digital cameras, robots, plasma screens and laptops. From Tokyo to New York these are the digital generation, brought up on generating their own content or consuming the content they want, digitally. So profound is their impact that the Financial Times writes that companies like Time Warner, Sony and Walt Disney are being forced to rethink their business models. Yes we know the young are digital, but that is only half the story. There was a digital generation a decade ago, with Playstations, personal computers, digital calculators, portable CD players and nintendo. Digital is not what is different this time; digital is not the key. The change is something deeper and more profound. The new digital economics has removed the need to decide between whether one has richness or reach. Today, you can get both. This changes essentially everything. It changes the way customers can access information and changes the way they use it. It changes the way business can communicate with their customers and it also changes how a business might go to market. It changes the linking between channels, that link businesses, customers, suppliers and employees. It offers opportunity and it offers your once helpless competitors the chance to radically rethink their business strategies and attack vital parts of your business model. New and hungry players are taking every opportunity to enter the value chain, hoping to disintermediate you and your brand promise.

We go onto say

A key development that has been monitored and noted in numerous instances is the emergence of digitally connected communities. Mostly these have been seen in isolation, as a new “market space” opportunity to harness and harvest, to exploit if you will; to make money from. Communities like eBay’s online auctions and shopping, or communities like online dating, music and movie file sharing, friend-finders and job recruitment, etc. These are significant developments by themselves. But they are the earliest visible symptoms of a massive development in human behaviour and change in society.

And new technologies do not come out of nowhere. As both William Powers, and Carlota Perez argue. They are indeed human creations in the first place and they succeed, or not, to the extent that they meet human needs. In other words, as much as communications media influence the way people of a particular time and place live, the reverse is also true: People have tremendous influence over how technologies evolve.

Perez points out that at a certain point in a technology life cycle, we the people take that technology and direct it towards very specific goals and purposes, like the tools of web 2.0 and its moniker social media. Marshall McLuhan argues in the Gutenberg Galaxy that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the process of re-invention from feudal man to reformation man.

We as a species are on a quest to rediscover our role in society. Because as individuals that are part of, and belong to a bigger whole, we wonder; why? Or in other words… I+WE= WHY?

I also believe that we are witness to a structural and transformational change in society. The toxic tail-end of our industrial era is producing/consuming units of capitalism, education is battery farming our children for industrial production, staff are human cogs secured in place and time whilst serving the feudal needs of the company. Unfortunately; meaning, passions, interests and socialising are things for your free-time not your work-time. Worse, we as a species are cut adrift from a personal and collective sense of belonging, identity and community. The atomization of society has literally left billions of us as atoms in a no-mans land, noisy ghosts in the machine called life.

No wonder we see the downfall of a media designed for a purpose that we no longer want nor need, our question is today what is enough? And what does more really mean? For businesses wishing to communicate with their potential customers this has a profound affect on how they develop their business and communication strategies.

I predict we will see companies in the communications business soon to keep good company with their mass media broadcast brothers and sisters . As they are unable to cope with the new rules and logic of the networked society which is becoming the primary form of organisation. The economics of attention, identity creation, the need to belong and the desire for co-creation are redefining the rules of not only marketing but society.

A medium of communication is not merely a passive conduit for the transmission of information but rather an active force in creating new social patterns and new perceptual realities. Wrote Marshall McLuhan.

So, we need to rewrite those rules, for so many reasons a job that needed to be done that was obvious to me and Tomi nearly 7 years ago. Those rules are defined by what I call Engagement Marketing and Social Media Marketing

Sadly it is only when companies bleed cash to the point of almost total destruction that they are prepared to sit down and listen. Often enough one finds that there is not enough time to educate, redefine, and execute.

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