Any time I want to be reminded of what the Internet space was like when we launched our Company back in 1995 I visit Terry Heaton. With a background in television news and local media, Terry has been a pilgrim of new media at the community level, doggedly preaching the tenets of citizen journalism and distributed media to station Managers and Dealer marketing groups one DMA at a time. I’ve been to Shreveport, Louisiana thanks to Terry, who invited me to participate in a new media day there a couple of years ago that had been organized for area businesses. The place was packed with eager minds that wanted, first, to know what a banner was and, second, the importance of counting clicks (“Not important,” I said). They don’t serve as much shrimp on the local Internet ad circuit as they do on the national tour, but the Shreveport experience (as well as a visit to Nashville, also courtesy of Terry) told me back then that the Internet rubber had not quite met the advertising road yet. You see, until any new media life form takes-off locally it’s just another nice marketing concept brought to you by the fine people at corporate. Ask the Cable TV industry.
Anyway, this is apropos of an interesting piece titled, “Is the Mainstream winning?”, published by Terry Heaton this week in his blog. It looks at the steady advancement of traditional media companies online, which have figured out how to leverage their considerable offline reach into building reach online. But does the result constitute new media success? I have a couple of hundred Facebook friends and I know all of them. National TV personalities use their broadcasts now to roll-up thousands of Facebooks friends and Twitter followers, and they don’t know any of them – nor do they ever plan to. Is that new media?
It’s a good question. The hoped for advantage of new media - the cure after decades of mass marketing - was better connections with prospects and customers. I suppose broadcasters and other mainstream media types are figuring out how to harvest Facebook friends and Twitter followers to some added-value advantage, but with what amount of nuance? Trust me, I’m not a big believer in one-to-one marketing arguments. The powdery base of so much Internet Kool-Aid over the years has been ”one-to-one marketing.” As a consumer with abiding brand loyalties I have no desire to carry them to a more personal, here’s-my-number-let’s-talk-later, level. But, still, does having countless Twitter followers you don’t know make you institutionally different from long-standing media institution?
If mass media moves to the web and remains mass media, nothing is gained. The web becomes a couch potato. Not active, not truly engaged, awash in artificial program ingredients and dispensing audience from a carton that’s cheap but lacks flavor. This is fine if the status quo is fine. But, we keep hearing it’s not.
Read Terry’s piece.
