Lessons from the new media masters
The social media revolution has come to a disappointing anti-climax and mass media organisations are gradually re-establishing the old order. Or so says Tom Foremski (@tomforemski), one of Silicon Valley’s most influential journalists. He argues that social media would now be better defined as “social distribution of mass media.”
Foremski’s point of view is always interesting, and certainly provocative, but it was a response from Matthew Bologna (@mattbologna) that really caught my eye:
Social media is about the people who harness the new platforms and, thereby, are able to disseminate their content, whereas before social platforms, they would have been middle-manned by bigger media sources.
And that’s the point. Today the printing press is free. The distribution system, equally free. All individuals, organisations and brands now have the opportunity to behave like large media organisations. And, as Foremski argues so well, it’s content from exactly these large media organisations that is getting liked, shared, retweeted and generally disseminated all over the current social web.
Foremski highlights the oligopoly on content doing the rounds in tech industry social circles held by a few ‘big’ tech media organisations including Techcrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat and ReadWriteWeb. So why have companies such as these eclipsed the competition so spectacularly?
They all (with the exception of RWW – 2003) started up in the last six years. To go from zero to – according to Foremski – tech industry social media oligopolists in just over half a decade certainly says something special about the people involved. One thing is for sure – they knew what they were doing.
It also shows that the approaches they have taken to build their organisations have worked. Infrastructures with editorial teams and processes are best equipped to manage the demands of building a media business in this brave new digital world. It’s not so much that they’ve succeeded and have now started to look like any other media company, but more that they’ve succeeded because they set out looking to become successful media companies.
But most importantly, it tells us that great content gets audiences. For all the Techcrunchs, there are thousands of other tech blogs that haven’t achieved such success. Consistency certainly plays a huge part but the reason these companies have succeeded is that they know how to craft fantastic content time and time again that works for their target audiences. Why else would they be getting so many likes, shares and retweets?
10 years ago Michael Harrington, Om Malik, Matt Marshall and Richard MacManus, the respective founders of the companies mentioned above, hadn’t even started their ventures. Today their creations have become part of an elite set of tech media firms. They didn’t inherit Murdoch-style media legacies. They built their organisations around knowing how to create and deliver consistently great content in an increasingly scalable way.
All brands should take note.
