Seth Godin: First, organize 1,000
What's difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don't find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.
This is a monumental challenge for public broadcasters.
You already have donors, but are they in your tribe? Do you have a tribe?
Are you ready to lead the tribe and not just find folks that want to give you money because they feel good about your broadcast schedule?
I know lots of folks think it's the same thing. But it's not.
GigaOM: 1999-2009 - How Broadband Changed Everything
From 1999 to 2009, the world changed dramatically. We destroyed an unprecedented amount, and yet thanks to technology, built an unprecedented amount, too. Indeed, like a man obsessed, I cannot help but look at our modern lives through the lens of broadband. Thanks to that technology, the world today is more closely knit than ever. From 9/11 to the Asian tsunami to the election of Barack Obama to the terror attacks in Mumbai to the uprising in Iran, broadband enabled us to experience such global events together.
A great look back at the past 10 years of Internet time. Well worth reading in full. And this is just the first of 3 parts.
Twitter at the top 100 U.S. newspapers
We were able to find multiple Twitter accounts for all of the top 100 newspapers using common sense searching techniques. However, only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website. In many cases, these links were buried on the site and difficult to track down. In addition, this means 38% of the newspapers are actively using Twitter, but haven’t yet integrated their presence with their website in even a minimal way.
56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website. This directory from the Los Angeles Times is a good example of the form these listings usually took. Many of these directories were quite extensive, listing dozens of accounts.
I wonder what the numbers would look like for the top 1,000.
Good to see some innovation in this space.
Seth Godin experiences the IT pro's nightmare
I just set up a friend's PC. I haven't done that in a while.
Wow.
Apparently, a computer is now not a computer, it's an opportunity to upsell you.
First, the setup insisted (for my own safety) that I sign up for an eternal subscription to Norton. Then it defaulted (opt out) to sending me promotional emails. Then there were the dozens (at least it felt like dozens) of buttons and searches I had to endure to switch the search box from Bing to Google. And the icons on the desktop that had been paid for by various partners and the this-comes-with-that of just about everything.
The digital world, even the high end brands, has become a sleazy carnival, complete with hawkers, barkers and a bearded lady. By the time someone actually gets to your site, they've been conned, popped up, popped under and upsold so many times they really have no choice but to be skeptical.
I passionately hate consumer-focused computers and even "small business" Dell machines. I have a standing order for my IT team to erase every hard drive that enters the building from Dell or anywhere else. We load Windows manually, load drivers manually, load our apps manually (well, not "manually," but it's all done in-house).
I cannot trust Dell. Or HP. Or Lenovo. Or Sony. They sold out long ago and they prey upon the ignorance and gullibility of average users. Sleazy doesn't begin to describe their deals.
Local TV ad revenue down 27% in Q1-3 of 2009
For the first nine months of 2009, network TV was down 10.7%, syndicated TV was down 2.8%, and local broadcast TV was down 27.4%, producing a total broadcast TV loss of 15.7%.
Leaders are lame, Builders rule. / The Builders' Manifesto
Matt Taibbi & Nick Kristof vs Tom Friedman & Maureen Dowd. Tom and MoDo are textbook examples of leaders in journalism; churning out column after column that challenge the conventional wisdom and set the agenda. Yet, that's not nearly enough to save journalism — let alone the New York Times. Matt and Nick, in contrast, are (re)building the institution of journalism for the 21st century, by utilizing the power of the Internet to reconstruct relationships with readers, publishers, and sources.
Tons of great thinking in this new Umair Haque post. The snippet above is a mere taste -- the full article explains what's wrong with leadership today and why we need to encourage buildership to create a new and better businesses, communities and even politics.
Public media "leaders" need to give up the leadership role and take on a "buildership" role. Or find people that can do it.
Citadel Broadcasting bankrupt, part of commercial radio decline
Citadel Broadcasting Corp., the nation's third-largest radio broadcasting company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday in an effort to restructure its hefty debt load as it continues to face declining advertising revenue.
Citadel owns and operates 224 radio stations, including KABC-AM in Los Angeles, WLS-AM in Chicago, WABC-AM and WPLJ-FM in New York and KGO-AM in San Francisco. Citadel's WABC is home to several syndicated hosts, including Don Imus, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough and Mark Levin.
Another commercial radio corporation is restructuring debt and other costs in a desperate attempt to survive. They're taking $2.46 billion in debt and stiffing the creditors; they'll end up with about $763 million in debt and their ownership will shift to the creditors.
Declining advertising. Declining relevancy. Greater competition from disruptive technologies. Lack of strategic vision. Inability to change.
No surprise.
Google: The meaning of open
Open will win. It will win on the Internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. The future of commerce is information symmetry. The future of culture is freedom. The future of science and medicine is collaboration. The future of entertainment is participation. Each of these futures depends on an open Internet.
I'm not sure Google is necessarily the best representative of "openness," but it's a pretty good one -- certainly better than most media firms, including public media.
This is a long article, but it's worth looking over. Rosenburg does a great job of laying out the case for openness in business, politics, technology and more, and he makes a lot of outbound links for reference.
Telegraph companies missed the news business opportunity
telegraph companies had a sudden, technologically driven monopoly on news, yet it was one that they failed to exploit. The mantle of news had, in an instant, passed from the newspapers to those who controlled the electronic telegraph. They could have exploited it and we might be reading The Western Union Journal… but we aren’t. That is because businesses and businessmen tend not to see very far beyond the part of their business that they understand.
They also missed the telephone opportunity. They figured the phone business was too unrelated to their core business -- the telegraph.
These are the kinds of historical anecdotes that make me wonder whether public broadcasting can ever make the leap to public service media. It may be too late already.
Wary Book Publishers Are Fighting the Future
The publishers seem to be picking a fight with the wrong team: their customer. They are punishing the people who buy their content instead of making it as simple as possible for those customers to hand over their money, instantly, from any location in the world.
I just got my wife an Amazon Kindle last week. She's a big reader and LOVES it.
But this policy of delaying books by 4+ months from hardback to e-book is nuts. Yet another media industry is fighting with its paying customers.
Morons.
