Media Rules! Or does it?

So, on about 2 hours notice, I'm sitting today at the National Press Club to hear Brian Reich talk about it.

(Editor's note: I talked to Brian after the presentation, and I believe he was the victim of bad questioning. He's got far more of a clue than the following makes him out to have, so read the  remarks below as live impressions of his talk as prompted by the moderator on the left side of the picture, not as a reflection of my opinion of him.)

Brian starts by saying that he was once warned "never do things while you're angry..."

But as a consultant, he felt frustrated always telling his clients that the world is changing and expectations are greater for them, as well as his expectations as a customer that is "constantly being marketed to." 

So, after being frustrated and angry about being told things, he decided to do the writing and tell the marketers what to do and how to market.

Reich says that most marketers struggle in today's world because there are "rules" for new media technology, but those questions should come "later on" in a conversation that an organization is having about a new media strategy, and that the same conversations keep happening with every new innovation in publishing.

He's also convinced that the rapid innovation of technology is changing society, not because of the technology (very smart!) but because of what the technology does.

3 main themes:

 - Everything is blurred and fragmented

 - Small things can be big (long tail theory)

 - We are all connected (but not to Kevin Bacon - my words)

If we can deal with those themes, than we can realize that the sheer volume of information can be dealt with. Reich interviewed 35-40 "innovators or leaders" in new media.

Interesting quote from a focus group member at NBC: "if the news is important, it fill find me."  Meaning, the anchor is obsolete. We don't expect to have our news read to us at 6:30pm every night duh?)

Apparently, everything is being marketed. Howard Schultz (of Starbucks fame) vehemently denies this because to him, advertising == commercials. In reality, what we all have is marketed by understanding how people get to know brands. NBC news gets it, Starbucks doesn't. Shocking, right?

Now, if we incorporate social networking into marketing, we can say "thank you" individually. This is revolutionary apparently, and his book is filled with these stories.

When it comes to the "business relevance" of social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, etc), he (rightly) realizes that you need a strategy for dealing with them. He calls this "shiny object syndrome" when businesses jump into formats because they see them and feel like they must be on those formats without understanding who is on them and why they are there. Shiny Object Syndrome...brilliant. I'm going to have to steal that term. Reich argues that a big lesson of business (and this can be applied to politics, too. I'm looking at you, Hillary Clinton) is that social media does not and will not solve all your problems. What it can do is make person-to-person contact easier. 

Reich works for EchoDitto now, a company that was founded by some of the original Howard Dean Internet team by "flipping the 'net on its head." Now he's parrotting a million others by repeating that politicians view the 'net as a gigantic cash machine (where are you Patrick Ruffini?)

Too many candidates, in Reich's words, take signing up for a mailing list as volunteering to give money. He sees a few campaigns doing things right (Obama) in that they recognize that grassroots (he says bloggers, and he's WRONG!!!) will determine the nominee. On the other hand, he says that Obama hasn't done anything significant by raising money from ONE MILLION INDIVIDUAL DONORS and that it's not changing anything. 

He's talking about the idea that the Internet can change how people look at policy. He's wrong. Politics is still very, very top-down. I don't understand where people got this idea that social networks solve problems or can change politics. It's still a cash machine, and if anything, it's only automating things. He wants "meaningful, measureable results" about how a candidate operates, ie how many people who agreed to go to a "meetup" showed up to vote? 

This guy wants to apply neilsen-style ratings to politics, obviously. Plus, he thinks that things will only change if say, President Obama installs a Wiki for the budget process. Wrong.

One thing he does correctly, is refer to Facebook as a "glorified rolodex" (sorry Dr. Adam M. Conner, Phd). Yet, he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. How can he say that social networks should be changing the world of politics (and haven't yet), but on the other hand describe one of the biggest as a "glorified rolodex?" I'm a bit confused.

Interesting point - he says that Major League Baseball has the best marketing operation in the U.S. Are they on Steroids? He says that they run 32 local advertising operations extremely well. I'm not sure I agree, but Baseball exercises an incredible amount of top-down control. They control everything that comes in and goes out. They don't even allow live-blogging of games, as far as I know. Imagine if someone wanted to use Twitter! Actually, that's a killer app for Twitter, pitch-by-pitch stats. Who wants to code it? 

I waas going to ask how he can say MLB is a good operation when they're so top-down and control freaks? Someone beat me to the punch, and he admitted that MLB doesn't like blogs, or bloggers, or live blogging. They must hate Twitter.  Another example, Baseball stats are quite expensive. They're obsessed with controlling them. Very top-down. Totally unlike a political campaign, but they have a different product because of the sheer number of stats.

(Editor's note: Who thinks a service where MLB would Twitter games pitch by pitch would be the coolest thing ever?)

He says that the few people who aren't online are those we'll never get (ie, the very elderly). So, there aren't generational differences as opposed to what each generation expects of their media. Example - Boomers still like watching TV when it's on. Social networks for boomers (Have you ever heard of Eons/Eonz?) focus on topics like...death and estate planning? I'm glad there's niche marketing, but this seems a little insane and I think he's off base. He thinks that they're looking for death help and he's looking for social connections. 

He's also not going to build his schedule around the 6:30 TV news. Neither are boomers, if ratings are to be believed. I wonder where he's getting his numbers. 

One important point he does make is that it's not the size of your audience, but the effectiveness of how you use that audience. 

(note: I think he's being interviewed by Sara Lacy's mother. She's asking about generational differences in multitasking. *groan*). Of course, his problem that he sees is the generation that can multitask versus the generation that "can't." 

Another thing he gets wrong: email is declining in effectiveness. Oh, yeah. Games are the new "learning opportunities." Um...right. I'm 25 and still use email constantly. I'm getting email while I write this. Am I some kind of freak? Where is he getting his data?

When I asked him about his thesis that social networking hasn't change politics (I think, like Patrick Ruffini does, among others, that it lets the message get spread, just not controlled as tight, think Clinton versus Obama ) he replied that there with "very few exceptions" politics is still about money because...they run TV ads? He does praise Senator Obama for running a "decentralized" campaign but doesn't think things have changed. I asked him what he would consider a change, short of a total 'net-centric campaign? The "true change" he wants to see is "open source" message development. Less TV, more "trickling down." He also notes that he's maxed out to Clinton. No wonder he keeps dissing Obama. 

He's missing something: campaigns may be the same, but voters have changed (Julie Germany pointed this out to me) and that even if the campaigns still air TV ads, they're reaching voters who can fact-check the ads, and generally have better "bullshit detectors." 

I'm still confused as to what his point is, and as he finished his reply to me, he said "we can argue about this later." I'm sure we will.

In response to a question about why people expect everything on the 'net to be free, he notes (correctly) that people will pay for good content. Didn't I already hear this from Robert Scoble in Texas a few weeks ago? I'm still very confused. I haven't heard an original or correct idea yet. What's the point of his book? I note that I'm sitting at the National Press Club, a bastion of old media. I feel like he's totally discounting the impact of new media by holding it up to an impossible standard that two-way interactive media can never reach in comparison to old-style, "push" media like TV. 

Oh, here's a good one. "What...social media should be about..is facilitating real action offline..." Where does that come from? He also says that social media should "raise awareness" of people on the other side of the globe. 

This is an old media guy who thinks he gets new media. I'm going to stop writing before I throw up into my clean MacBook Pro's keyboard.