Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

An individual who aligns themselves with a larger organization and has established a reputation, let’s say in a niche is no longer representing themselves, they represent themselves, and the organization they work for. In other words, they become ambassadors for both.

Now here’s the challenge: being a visible ambassador which connects the internal with external means drawing attention to yourself—a role which has traditionally been limited to a select few, such as a CEO, or formal spokesperson. In either of these roles, visibility is expected and it’s part of the job.

Today’s corporate ambassadors can be anyone and the really good ones build bridges to multiple kinds of valued stakeholders (just like traditional ambassadors). But, despite becoming a more common role, corporate ambassadors face huge challenges. Colleagues will justifiably question the motives and contributions of ambassadors. In fact, less experienced ambassadors often make the mistake of either putting their wants and needs before the needs of their “embassy” (the organization). Even if this isn’t the case, often times the perception of self promotion can be difficult to manage. So how does one manage corporate ambassadorship in a networked economy? While I’m still growing here myself, I have a few thoughts:

Co-Brand

Be generous with your equity. If you’ve decided to work with a larger organization instead of being in business for yourself, be sure to send the message that you are proud to represent the organization and align it with your own identity.

Share

Ambassadors are often well connected, networked and plugged into a number of communities which may be valuable to the organization they align with. Like traditional ambassadors, they can establish trust and build equity by leveraging their networks to the benefit of the organization. In other words, connections = wealth and sharing that wealth creates value for all.

Work

Corporate ambassadors carry the weight of an interesting burden—they have to prove they are willing to put in hard work, just like everyone else. Be sure to get the basics of your job description done and done well, then pursue ambassador duties after business is taken care of (hint, I’m writing this on a Saturday evening).

Represent

Ambassadors are expected to represent and to do it well. When given the opportunities to engage in public in both digital and offline venues, be sure to balance individual personality with corporate responsibility. Be yourself, but be a representative because you’re both.

Engage

With power comes great responsibility and a really good corporate ambassador is willing to engage, to make themselves accessible both internally and externally. Ambassadors don’t live in ivory towers, they go out into the world and connect. They listen, and then engage in ways that are mutually beneficial.

If this post resonates with you, then it’s possible you’ve stepped into this role either purposefully or accidentally. Or perhaps you’ve lived it in the past before deciding to go off on your own. In either case, I’m fairly confident that it’s something that will become more norm than exception and above all a delicate balancing act to say the least.

Despite the Internet being around for quite some time, the FDA has never issued specific guidance to pharmaceutical companies on how they can communicate about and market their products online, instead stating that the existing guidelines for print and television should be applied. However, there is difficulty in interpretation: if providing the prescribing information on the back of a print ad is acceptable, is that equal to having the information one click away? Instead of official guidance and directives, we learn what is okay – and what doesn’t fly – through the warning letters that are issued to companies. I always compare this to walking through an obstacle course blindfolded. When you hit a wall (get a warning letter), you learn not to go that way.

Social media has created even more gray area and more potential for warning letters, as we saw with the recent letter Novartis received. This HDCU covers some recent news about the FDA and those much-anticipated guidelines.

Last November

As a reminder, it was last November that the FDA held a public hearing for companies, advocacy groups and individuals to weigh in and provide their suggestions to the agency on what the guidelines should entail. Many ideas were put forth, including ways to present risk information in a shortened format. The FDA also accepted written testimony through February of this year; however, the ultimate decision is in their hands.

Crack Down

Despite an overwhelming case load, the Division of Drug Marketing, Advertising and Communication (DDMAC) at the FDA has been busy this year: they’ve already issued 45 warnings through August 28, compared to 41 letters for all of 2009 and only 28 for 2008.

On the Record

In a recent interview with Reuters, Thomas Abrams, who leads DDMAC, said the agency aims to release a draft later this year. “We are developing separate guidance that are issue-specific and can apply to the various mediums used on the Internet,” he told Reuters.

Mobile App Gets Approval

In early August, the FDA granted clearance to the health software firm WellDoc to begin marketing its DiabetesManager System, a mobile phone application designed to help patients and health care providers manage Type 2 diabetes. It will be interesting to see if this sets a precedence – should all health-related apps be approved by the FDA?

In the Interim

Given the current environment, it may be tempting for pharma companies to hold off on any new initiatives, especially social media, until the official guidance is delivered. However, there is a serious risk in NOT being involved: it opens the door for someone else to define your brand. We are counseling our clients on how to get involved in social media, following the existing guidelines and applying them to this medium in a responsible way.

HP has come a long way from a tiny garage on Addison Avenue in Palo Alto where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard took $538 in working capital and a Sears-Roebuck drill and built what is now the largest technology company in the world. When HP tasked Edelman Digital to build a website for its passionate tech enthusiast community, we looked at our own entrepreneurial heritage for inspiration. After all, Edelman came from humble beginnings as well – Daniel J. Edelman transformed his company from a one-man PR business to the leading independent global PR firm in world.

In 1949, Dan Edelman accepted his first public relations job for the Toni Company (now a Gillette division) and launched the first-ever product media tour with 12 sets of identical twins asking the question, “Which Twin has the Toni?” The campaign achieved unprecedented success. Why? It was creative, personal and told a story. Those are the cornerstones of great PR and now, the essentials of online engagement, such is the case with HP’s The Next Bench community.

HP’s new Tech Community website, called The Next Bench, was named for Bill and Dave Packard’s approach to product development. The idea was simple: if the guy on the next bench wanted the product you were working on, chances are it would be a success. Just as HP continues to look to customers for input on what kinds of product ideas to pursue, The Next Bench strives to carry on that tradition as well.

Today, in an era of information overload and mass personalization, telling the story and integrating customers into that story is more important than ever. Therefore, Edelman and HP agreed that The Next Bench site must [not only tell a compelling story, but also be a place for people to connect, engage and continue to come back ] The Next Bench does just that. It’s a new kind of online media channel – it’s a central hub that serves the function of part newspaper, part blog, part broadcast medium and part corporate newsroom that reinvigorates the way HP delivers news and engages its community.

As Mark Budgell (Twitter.com/MarkatHP), Social Media Lead for HP’s Personal Systems Group explains it, “Story telling is a really valuable way for us to establish lasting relationships with our customers. Our goal when we redesigned The Next Bench was to make it easy for them to find, comment on and share the stories they liked. The new site takes on a simple news blog format that immediately serves up the content and information our customers want.”

Check out the site. Share it with others. Connect with HP. And, we’d love to hear your thoughts, opinions and how we might make this site better for you. www.TheNextBench.com

Originally posted on Campaign Asia.

Edelman and Brandtology’s Digital Brand Index (DBI 10.3) offers insights into how brands are being discussed online in China, tracking over 518,000 conversations to identify the most active channels and the most interesting subject areas.

Here are the key findings:

Offline drives online. Online drives offline. The impact of product launches and the World Cup demonstrates the opportunity for brands to proactively engage and measure online buzz.

518,028 online conversations were tracked, with references to 89 large technology brands, which were contained within 736 influential channels from April to June 2010. This represents one major technology brand mentioned every 15 seconds, compared to one brand mention every 42 seconds found in the DBI 10.2.

The major consumer electronics brands in China, Samsung, Sony, Nokia, Cannon and Asus, continue to rank on the list of the top 10 most talked about technology brands amongst the online channels, as they expand their drive in the social media field.

Canon made DBI’s top 10 ‘buzziest’ channels list for the first time with 15,098 online conversations, and Google, which dominated previous DBI results, dropped to sixth place on the top 10 ‘buzziest’ channels list.

The volume of online buzz for technology brands increased sharply this quarter, partly due to technology brands’ online marketing campaigns around the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which helped drive a record amount of social media traffic. Both consumer electronics and telecommunication carriers including China Mobile and China Unicom launched new products and services around the World Cup through online news portals and video sharing channels.

Samsung worked with three major news portals including Sina, Sohu and Tom.com to launch social ads and initiate online competitions. China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom partnered with phone makers on intensive online marketing of new phone models and services that enabled consumers to watch The World Cup on their mobile phones.

The social networking phenomenon continues.

Social networking websites, especially Sina, Weibo and Kaixin001, have become important channels for IT/ technology brands to effectively reach and engage consumers. So far, 56 percent of all the surveyed IT/ technology brands have launched their own local Sina Weibo brands.

While Twitter dominates in other regional markets in Asia Pacific, Sina Weibo is building a social media phenomenon in China which is reshaping the way technology brands contact and engage consumers. Sina Weibo not only provides a platform to directly listen to and engage consumers, it also dwarfed other channels at promoting events and generating conversations. Sina Weibo generated 31,019 tweets that mentioned Nokia, compared with a total of 16,760 online conversations generated by other channels.

BlackBerry’s official Sina Weibo account has gained more than 7,000 fans since its launch on 16 June this year.

Disclosure: Edelman represents technology brands around the world, many of which are included in the Digital Brand Index.

Edelman Digital’s latest London recruit is Robin Hamman, Director of Digital. Robin’s career has seen him work in mobile, as an Executive Producer for Granada at ITV and as a head of social media. As well as this, Robin has worked for the BBC (twice!).

A Non-Residential Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Journalism at City University, London, Robin has had articles published in several books which focus on community and social research.

Matt Churchill: How did a former Non-Residential Fellow at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society find himself in leafy St. Albans?

Robin Hamman: The project I did, as part of my non-residential fellowship, was aimed at raising the awareness of how libel law could potentially impact upon bloggers and other users of social media. It seemed the natural thing to do after I finished a part-time law degree whilst working at the BBC, where I saw hundreds of examples of participants in online discussions posting content that could land them with a massive legal bill – which would be a real quick way to get a legal education. Thankfully, there are now moves to rationalise libel law in the UK which is tipped much more in the favour of the person or organisation making the complaint than it is in many other countries, leading to the rise of what some have termed “libel tourism” – basically, people who normally reside in other countries coming to the UK to file libel claims.

MC: You’ve worked twice for the BBC in different roles, what did you do and how did each job differ?

RH: The first time around, I was one of maybe 50 people who worked online at the Corporation and was one of the first two “online community” specialists – this was back in late 1998, before we called it social media. The BBC, like most organisations getting their toes wet in social media at the time, or even today, was very nervous. Our editorial policy team, for example, took quite a long time to be convinced that not everyone who posts should have to use their real first name and surname when they did so. We were able to, however, find out way through the nervousness and launched a range of massively successful propositions, including message board based communities and a live chat service. There were no platforms or policies in place before we started, so it really was early days.

I left the BBC for a few years, first to join a wireless start up that had a service very similar to Twitter but many years too far ahead of it’s time, and later at ITV. Eventually I ended up back at the Corporation and, in terms of internet and social media, it was a dramatically changed place. There were nearly a thousand people working on the website, for example, and at least a dozen people with jobs almost exclusively related to social media – and that’s not including the large moderation team that helped keep things safe and legal. There was still some nervousness about social media, but also pockets of innovation that would spring up out of nowhere. In my final act at the BBC, I ended up growing the BBC’s initial trial with blogging into a full blown service, with around 100 blogs when I left and unique visitor numbers of around 7 million a month. That was hugely exciting.

MC: Given the close ties you have with the BBC’s digital offering, what have you made of the recent website layout changes which incorporate more sociable features?

RH: There were, even as far back as 5 or 6 years ago, those of us within the BBC who thought that, rather than always trying to provide social media spaces for audiences, sometimes we should simply monitor and reflect the best content people were creating on the web. This sort of aggregation approach came with reduced costs and risks for the BBC, but also made a lot of sense to audiences, some of which preferred to participate around a programme brand away from the branded, and fairly heavily controlled, environments we could provide. I love seeing more linking, aggregation and opportunities to share on BBC websites – it’s what audiences want and, to some extent, helps validate what some of us pushed for, for a long time.

MC: What motivated you to become part of the Edelman team?

RH: Social media is rapidly moving towards the centre of forward thinking businesses and organisations. Whereas it used to be a fringe activity, perhaps a small viral advertising campaign or an attempt to monitor and engage with key influencers on third party social media websites, it’s increasingly becoming possible to align social media with wider business processes and practices. That is, social media is now making it possible for customers and stakeholders to become involved in business processes, such as product and service innovation, co-creation, and customer service.

There are great opportunities for those at the centre of this revolution – people with strong communications skills – but it also requires great business acumen, with a deep understanding of the strategy, goals and ambitions of the business. Reading through some of the thought leadership pieces, such as the Trust Barometer, and writing by David Brain and Robert Phillips, made me realise that Edelman was observing the same thing I was – Communications becoming more central, and increasingly driving organisational change. That’s exactly what I’d been doing with social media so we had some conversations and here I am today.

MC: What does your day-to-day job involve?

RH: I have the pleasure of working out how to align social behaviours online with the business objects of our clients. I say it that way around, putting the behaviours first, because I think it’s important to understand how audiences, consumers and stakeholders wish to be engaged with online before it’s really possible to come up with great ideas to help harness that. Getting it right in social media requires the deliberate creation of meaningful participatory frameworks that help people, and businesses, achieve something together. Their motivations and goals might be different, but that doesn’t mean the engagement can’t be positive for both.

MC: What do you see as the main opportunity for brands as social media and digital culture evolves?

RH: I think there is a massive opportunity for organisations to improve the way they communicate internally, and collaborate behind the firewall, using social media – and then linking this up with the social media engagements they’re having with customers and stakeholders.

MC: In your recent Reputation Online guest post you said that “Not everyone is a natural communicator, nor can every member of staff be expected to feel comfortable participating socially online.” Do you think this is likely to change over time and what do you perceive to be the impact on the comms industry in either case?

RH: We’re still in the early days with social media, although increasingly, people entering the workforce have social media skills that will be useful in their professional lives in future. So yes, I think more people can be expected to understand the value of social media to businesses, but I don’t think we’ll ever see a situation where it’s something that absolutely everyone wants to do. Compelling people to do something they don’t want to do is rarely a good idea, regardless of the industry.

MC: And finally, what’s your tech tip for the next 12 months?

RH: People have already spent time and effort building a presence on social networking platforms, so engaging there, rather than trying to build awareness of, and audiences for, entirely new propositions is going to become increasingly difficult for a lot of brands. For this reason, I think the idea of “digital embassies”, where brands and organisations set up shop on third party networking platforms where there are already large audiences, will gain a lot of traction this year.

I’m also starting to see a lot of businesses thinking about how they can create a wider interface between consumers and stakeholders outside the business with people inside the business. There are already some great examples of crowdsourcing initiatives, where audiences get involved directly in business or organisational processes that were previously hidden from view. We’re going to see a lot more of these over the coming year, with measurable results.

Image credit: Lars Plougmann

Making the transition to fatherhood can be difficult for many guys. Women seem to have a built-in support system that creates a well-worn path to motherhood. Guys, on the other hand, have a journey and a role mostly neglected by society.

This disconnect has been reflected online as well. But fathers are starting to realize this, and in recent years, men have been working hard to create resources online for other dads, both new to fatherhood and expert diaper changers. In honor of the Modern Media Man Summit happening in less than two weeks, this week’s Friday Five focuses on highlighting some of the best resources for dads around the web.

Digital Dads

As C.C. Chapman searched the web in 2009, he noticed that there were few sites writing about being a dad, and the ones writing about men’s topics rarely included content for men who were also parents. As a result, he and some other involved dads started Digital Dads, which strives to be an honest view of what it’s like to be a dad in today’s world. C.C. has been a huge advocate for dads online for some time now. He also recently launched Digital Dads TV, a partnership with the Pulse Network, where he’ll be streaming live discussing all kinds of topics related to being a guy.

The Good Men Project

The Good Men Project seeks to start a national conversation about what it means to be a good man. Although this online magazine, book and documentary isn’t for dads alone, much of the content focuses on issues to which dads can relate, including a section of the site dedicated to fathers. I’ve had my eye on this project for a while and I love how they are striving to make men out to be more than the media portrays us to be.

The Art of Manliness

Another resource focused on overall manhood as opposed to just fatherhood (although again, they do have family focused content) is The Art of Manliness. The site attempts to provide men with the resources they need to live virtuous lives. Don’t let the name or the moustaches fool you – this site isn’t frivolous or for entertainment only. Brett and Kate McKay, the founders and editors, are serious about helping men recover some of the skills that used to be associated with being a man. I mean, come on – “How to Make a Corn Cob Pipe?” Not your typical guy-related content.

Dad Blogs

Started by Pete Janelle and Joe Schatz in January 2009, Dad Blogs has been slowly growing into a serious resource for dads to connect with one another online. Although it is a self-described “social networking site primarily for dads and dad bloggers”, Dad Blogs doesn’t discriminate, and has actually seen moms come in to participate in the conversations. Members can contribute blog posts, discuss topics in the forums and network with other dad bloggers.

GeekDad

This last resource is for dads as geeky as I am. Wired magazine’s highly popular blog is for those who are unafraid to pass on a little geek to their children. Covering everything from Comic-Con to games to the latest geeky toys for your little ones to play with, GeekDad takes father/son bonding to the next nerdy level. How often do you get to create your own edible clone trooper army together?

Only a few months ago we were in Austin attending panels, interviewing amazing social media entrepreneurs and hosting AllHat2 at SXSW. Once again, the time has come for us to get ready for Interactive geek week, which starts by selecting the panels we’d like see at SXSW by using PanelPicker. The SXSW PanelPicker allows the community to have a 30% voice in programming for the Interactive, Film and Music festivities. Show your support by voting before August 27 and hopefully your favorite speakers can present at SXSW 2011.

We gathered the best and brightest panels from our employees and clients and we’d love a few thumbs up if you think the panels below might be interesting to attend.

Health: Is There Really an App for That?

Steve Rubel (Edelman Digital, New York) and Jane Sarasohn-Kahn (THINK-Health)
It seems like there’s an app for everything nowadays. There’s even apps to make people healthier! Steve and Jane will discuss the impact health related apps are having on the consumer and how to develop more effective tools.

Dr. Wikipedia: Can We Trust Online Health Information?

Emily Downward (Edelman Digital Health, Austin)
Crowd-sourcing is great for a lot of things online, learning new things or coming up with a great collective idea. In this panel, Emily will discuss the evolution and management of medical information in this corner of the online world – and how even the wisdom of the crowd (a.k.a., Dr. Wikipedia) may still be missing the right credentials that would ensure accurate information about health is being shared.

The New Frontier of Social CRM in Healthcare

Earl Whipple (AstraZeneca, an Edelman Client)
Social CRM is a discussion happening in almost all social media planning conversations today. Earl will cover the roles that Social CRM plays in online health engagement and how healthcare brands can use social CRM to share information.

Take Two, Don’t Friend Me in the Morning

Libby Pigg (Edelman Digital, New York)
Consumers are talking to companies and brands daily through social media but one major group is missing out on the conversation: health professionals. Libby will talk about the appropriate level of online interaction we should expect from the healthcare industry and will cover the benefits in participating in online conversation.

Hacking the Future

Phil McKinney (HP, an Edelman Client)
Phil will share his predictions for the future of technology. He’ll present on the “must have” technologies for consumers in 5 years, 10 years and even 20 years! Beyond sharing his predictions, he’ll also cover the ways you can capitalize on these trends today.

Why PR’s Future May Not Look Like PR

David Armano (Edelman Digital, Chicago)
The face of PR is changing and the focus is shifting to engagement. David defines the new future of PR and how companies can leverage social media to benefit from online communication.

Sky-Rocketing Popularity of Social Media in Latin America

Thiane Loureiro (Edelman Digital, Sao Paulo)
Latin America is a growing social media market and the audience and tools vary from those in the US. Thiane will talk in-depth about the regional differences in social media in Latin America and the opportunities that are available to companies.

Personalities, Policies & Problems: Companies and Employees 2.0

Dave Fleet (Edelman Digital, Toronto)
Dave will help answer the question everyone is asking nowadays…what is the best way to structure social media within a company? He’ll cover topics from policies to censorship and everything in between.

Habbo Hotel: Developing A Successful Virtual Economy

Sulka Haro (Habbo, an Edelman Client)
Over the last 10 years, Habbo Hotel has made multiple fundamental changes to the virtual economy in order to accommodate competition and end-user expectations. Sulka examines how Habbo Hotel’s economic system has evolved and answers questions about how valuable a virtual currency should be, how many currencies make sense for a virtual world, what users are looking for in virtual goods when making purchasing decisions and the future of microtransactions.

We hope you find these recommendations helpful. Happy voting!

If you’re a woman interested in blogging and social media, you have your choice of events that cater specifically to you. But so far men have gotten the short end of the stick event-wise. Enter the Modern Media Man Summit.

The M3 Summit is an attempt to give men that space to learn and connect with other “media men” in a setting designed with us in mind. As a blogger and a father, I’ve been looking for an event such as this for quite some time. And with great speakers and an awesome lineup of sessions (including a meet and greet with Cal Ripken, Jr.), M3 promises not to disappoint.

But the M3 Summit represents much more than a great event. I’m hoping this will be a watershed moment for dads online, when brands finally start recognizing the important role that dads play. I’ve stated before that I believe this shift is coming. And as dads get even more connected and have a more cohesive voice online, companies are beginning to recognize that working with dads – not just moms – is in their best interest.

I’ll be speaking about this exact subject at M3, and I’d love to get your ideas and your feedback in person. As if this wasn’t enough to wet your appetite, you can listen to an interview I gave where I chatted with the folks organizing the Summit about some ideas to get this process started.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been wanting to meet some of the amazing men bloggers out there, and connect with other guys making a career out of social media. So let’s all get together in Atlanta on September 9. Modern Media Men: Assemble!

Originally posted on Logic + Emotion.

Several weeks ago I delivered a 16 minute TEDx talk titled “reinventing social media.” Typically I like to frame topics outside of the social media bubble, but in this instance the topic itself and the purpose of the talk was designed to get us all thinking about things a bit differently. You see, businesses, brands and organizations are truly struggling with the disruptive nature of social technologies. In fact, the term “social technologies” is part of the problem—we are all fixated on the technologies and meanwhile the real action lies in harnessing the change brought about by human behavior enabled by technology. I used the simple story of how a colleague shared a book with me. The book itself (media) is not social—the interactions, communications, stories and conversations that involve the book are.

But to say “it’s about people” is too simplistic. Toward the end of the talk, I made my case that in a couple of years it would be unlikely that I would even be talking about “social media.” This thesis based on the belief that “social” translates into the conversion of an organization which requires shifts in culture, technology, process and ultimately behavior. If an organization does not empower its people to behave in a productive and beneficial social manner than can we actually use the word “social” to describe it? If the organization has not begun integrating these changes across several functional groups as opposed to leveraging just one (such as marketing) then is it really taking advantage of some of the changes I discuss in my talk?

I believe that the answer is no. It means that one part of the business is behaving a certain way while the others behave differently. This would be like your head looking at the person’s face who you are having a conversation with while your body is walking away from them in mid conversation. So in order for “social media” to become reinvented, to go with the theme of the TEDx discussion, it has to change (or we need to). And change as we all know always begins with people—so our focus needs to turn here. Hope you like the talk and as always feel free to share your own thoughts.

Originally posted on 6 A.M.

At Edelman’s fourth Annual New Media Academic Summit, we convened a superb group of senior media executives who offered insights into the future of the sector. They included Raju Narisetti, managing editor of the Washington Post; Greg Coleman, president of Huffington Post; Gerard Baker, deputy editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal; Jonah Bloom, CEO and editor in chief of Breaking Media; Mark Lukasiewicz, VP of NBC Digital Media; Mike Oreskes, senior managing editor of the Associated Press; David Carey who has just joined Hearst as President of the Magazine Unit; and Jon Miller, CEO of Digital Media at News Corp.

These media leaders are addressing challenges head-on, and are optimistic about their future. Here are a few of the most important insights:

1. New Readers & Channels—David Carey, Conde Nast group president cited the incremental revenue and readers for its relaunched Gourmet food magazine and Wired’s completely reimaged iPad app (they sold 95,000 digital copies at $4.99 each in June), as only the beginning as people are willing to pay for mobility and engagement. Baker described the iPad as a potential game changer, noting that the WSJ has sold many subscriptions at $208 per year for this platform, and the Washington Post charges $1.99 for iPhone application for a year.
2. New Revenue Options—Bloom believes Media will integrate eCommerce directly into content so “media will sell stuff directly.” So, right beside a book review will be the option to buy the book. Access to the archives, conferences and direct access to journalists via email are also being considered viable premium paid options.
3. The Pay Wall—Narisetti offered a strong defense of the Washington Post policy on free access to content. “Subscription revenue has always been a tiny part of the newspaper business model. We have 30 million unique visitors each month to our site.” Baker went the other direction describing the Wall Street Journal pay model, “In the beginning of the web, there was optimism that we could focus advertising so ad revenues would suffice. Now it is clear that we need other revenue streams.” News Corporation is bringing in paywalls for its British newspapers and Miller emphasized that will keep investing in quality content to get people to pay.
4. Trust in Content—Baker noted that the decline in trust in establishment institutions (business, government) extends to mainstream media. “We often fail to properly represent the views of the majority of our readers.” He quoted Oscar Wilde, “The parts that were original were not true and that which was true was not original.” Jonah Bloom noted that “there is not enough originality in stories being tackled.” Lukasiewicz said that “transparency is the new objectivity. We will have a point of view in stories.” Oreskes took a strong position on “Journalism being distinguished by its higher standards for quality, not by ownership of the printing press.”
5. Narrow-casting—Narisetti wants to get away from the single “front page approach” so that a reader can focus only on specific more narrow interest (politics or sports). “We need multiple front doors to the house, such as PostLocal.com, PostSports.com, PostPolitics.com.” He said that “we link to other sites on stories they break (Politico as example)—we need to offer everything that is relevant.”
6. Value from Conversation—Coleman said that the Huffington Post gets three million comments from its users each month. “Our content model envisages 1/3 from each of bloggers, original reporting and aggregation.” Narisetti added, “Comments may reflect the market’s view but those who comment represent a narrow slice of readers—but we keep comments as open as possible because these are the most engaged readers.”
7. New Measurement for Reporters—Narisetti said, “Newsrooms have never wanted to measure how they are performing—specifically how many readers look at each article. We now do a daily report to 120 editors, with page views, time spent, unique visitors, which photos are preferred—metrics that are key to the business.” He said that his reporters must use meta-data to be sure they use words that “help readers to find your story…people search for Republican Party, not GOP, so use that term in stories.” Bloom added that reporters must be able to market their stories via Twitter and Facebook.
8. Power of Visuals—Oreskes noted that while the AP may have 50 reporters on the coverage of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the most powerful content has been visual. “People remember the pelican photo or the AP photographer donning scuba gear to get unique video.” He quoted Walter Lippmann, media pundit, “The world outside, the pictures in our head.” At our dinner, key note speaker, Tom Cibrowski, Good Morning America Executive Producer, ABC, also mentioned they are rapidly adopted new hi-def video cameras to reporters to report more quickly and cheaply with video.
9. Importance of Local Market Dominance—The Washington Post reaches 45% of Washington area households. You need 30 ads on local TV or 60 ads on cable TV to achieve the same reach as one ad in the Washington Post. Of the 18-34 year olds in the area, 62% use the Washington Post on-line. This is group most easily monetized in advertising. Note that 86% of the Washington Post web traffic comes from outside of the DC area.

Those of us in PR would be wise to adapt our business model to reflect the new demands of immediacy, visualization, conversation and localization.