Fools Rush In ... to new Social Media Sites

At the BPCC event, hosted by Cisco, and the keynote is Dan Scheinman. Dan started that the ubiquity of media is coming, that it has changed from the Web 1.0 of us going to sites, to the Web 2.0 where the Web goes out to the right communities.

I'm no Eric Savitz - he wrote up his views of the talk here - but here I go.

The Web is no longer just We, but We and Me - it's a personalized experience. What you want, and what the group wants: it's a sea change, with how the media is getting consumed, and it is a big event for our lifetime.

Part of it is the explosion of broadband - all media is becoming digitized, and it is changing the landscape. It is about empowering users, and no more silos.

So, how does content find you? How does the global IP network find you?

It is about the rise of community. Currently, we all look at the same thing - it's the We and Me. We are not exploiting the power of what exists, but making people come to what is there. If you and I go to the same site - such as ESPN - we both see the same thing. Going to MySpace, though, is a different view for each person.

At the end of the day, every company is becoming a media company. The News@Cisco experience is doing that, and the disruption impacts companies directly.

We are seeing that the community is at the center of everything - look at Facebook. It is a cultural shift - it's about being in the mass phenomenon. It's the We/Me Generation.

For Cisco and the Media Solutions Group, we started it five months ago. We made a bet on community - communities for third parties, the publishers demand to have these things on their Website. And, what is happening is that media doesn't get their audiences. There are the twin sins: demography and Nielsen. Hollywood has never had a direct connection to the audience (the movie makers go through the movie theaters and the large networks go through their own or other's owned channels). Cisco is bringing tools to publishers to help them build community - and it goes to where content finds you. [To me, this is just like the Quincy Smith quote.]

Traditional marketing is very challenged, because the tools - print, tv, radio - are all challenged. The early adopters are not participating in traditional media as much as they used to. PR is the new vehicle for companies to speak to the audience - we are media / content providers / developers, and we can speak directly to consumers.

Increasingly, corporate PR and media production are going to integrate. But there is the budget question - right now, $72B is spent in TV advertising. And, we know that there is a high percentage of wasted dollars in advertising and marketing. There is the desire to integrate - take risk and do more things, but there is going to be little "adventure" budget. It's not going to be big budgets, but a big enough budget to do things that are going to get it right.

The alternative is to do nothing.

Tags: Cisco, BPCC, New Media Summit, Dan Scheinman, Social Media, PR, Public Relations, Advertising, Community, Communications, Marketing, Marcom, Marketing Communications