Think Quarterly is a case study in how to become a media company

Google’s Think Quarterly magazine is the latest example of a company recognizing that, regardless of whatever else it is, it’s a media company.

Google, of course, is a media company on a number of levels. Its primary business helps people find stuff. Its YouTube operation is all about letting people share video. The company produces scads of media, from apps (like Google Earth) to the videos it produces to help promote and explain its various offerings. There are Google blogs, which are media, as are the doodles that frequently replace the logo on the Google.com page.

But until Think Quarterly, Google hasn’t been known as a print… Read More »

Are we overvaluing real-time feedback?

Warning: Lost post follows

Back in 1995, “Snow Crash” author Neal Stephenson teamed up with his uncle George Jewsbury under the pseudonym Stephen Bury to produce a potboiler titled “Interface.” The premise: A presidential candidate suffers a stroke and has a chip implanted in his brain. The chip features a wireless connection to feedback from thousands of watch-like devices distributed to a representative sample of Americans. These devices gauge the wearer’s reaction to political speeches, allowing the candidate to make mid-course adjustments and bolster public reaction to his candidacy.

To me, this bit of speculative fiction defines… Read More »

Too crunched for social media? Use it to save time

When companies lay off employees, the work they performed doesn’t magically evaporate. Those left behind are expected to take up the slack. The stomach-turning phrase usually associated with assuming the work of your now-unemployed colleagues is “do more with less.”

Finding yourself in this position was bad enough 10 or 15 years ago. After all, few of us were strolling into the office at 9 a.m., leaving at 5 p.m., and taking no work home with us. The stress and pressure of having to assume even more responsibility when you’re already pedal-to-the-metal, jamming to get everything done in 14 hours a day, can be overwhelming.

But today,… Read More »

The social media manager debate: Can’t we get the fundamentals right first?

Steve Rubel and Jeremiah Owyang are at odds over the future of a job labeled, “Social Media Manager.” The job description of a social media manager revolves around the coordination of a company’s activities in the social media space.

Steve believes the job will be extinct in short order:

Who should “manage” these sites? Is it the social media specialist or someone in PR with specific vertical sector expertise who also gets digital? My strong feeling is that it’s the latter.

Owyang—who held a social media manager position with a previous employer—disagrees:

While I agree that social media skills will eventually become a normal…

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Clinton’s Fact Hub a model for rapid business response to rumors and inaccuracies

Business can take a lesson from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The presidential candidate has launched a new website called The Fact Hub, designed to provide an instant response to misrepresentations and misstatements of fact. According to an article in The New York Times, even Republican strategists are applauding the move:

Steve Schmidt, a former political strategist for President Bush who helped oversee his 2004 campaign war room, said the new Clinton site was ???the next evolution in rapid response.???

The site is built on a blogging platform (but without comments), enabling quick responses to inaccurate media reports and… Read More »

Print vs. online: Don’t compare apples to apples

I’m a big fan of print and a believer that old channels like print can adapt nicely when new channels come along. It follows that I’m usually pleased to see studies that reinforce the value of print. The new study from the Poynter Institute, however, doesn’t do much for me.

Touted over at the newly content-intensive Ragan.com site, the study is the latest in Poynter’s “Eyetrack” research series. (The study isn’t new—results were reported back in March.) The study—which used eye-tracking lenses to see where the eye went on various kinds of print and online pages—found that people learned better when reading the print version of an… Read More »