Every Business Is Now A Media Business (and vice versa)

Way back in 2008, Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everyone hit the shelves. That’s where my copy has been sitting collecting dust ever since. But I’ve taken it down and been re-reading some of the chapters this week. Even though the book is barely three years old, it’s like looking into a time capsule–an archeological dig to discover how our ancient ancestors in Social Media lived. This passage from Chapter 3 about how “Everyone is a Media Outlet” triggered a realization of the convergence of two trends I’ve been watching:

Our social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.

What Shirky observed as mass amateurization in 2008 has now evolved into a mass professionalization in 2011. Every business is now a media business.

Shirky also gets credit for that line, as it too is in his book (I added the word ‘now’). As prescient as that insight was in 2008, it would have sounded much more like an abstract theory back then in contrast to the 2011 competitive imperative many businesses now face to sustain an ongoing social media content strategy that continuously engages the customer. Something that is still easier said than done.

But that seems to be changing after years of struggling with the notion. The best solution comes in the form of empowering many more employees to solve the business’ new content problems, says Social Media Explorer:

Doesn’t it seem odd that folks who work for you are expected to answer the phone, greet customers when they walk in the door and handle customer service issues, are somehow not trustworthy enough to tweet several times a day on behalf of your brand? Do you trust them to post to the company Facebook fan page regularly? What about shoot and edit a video or write a blog post?

…As business owners and managers, we can’t add on more tasks for employees to do without letting go of something else. We must analyze some of the crazy things we think they should be doing (that have little to no impact) to allow room for building our branded media assets. (Hint: Once you begin to view your digital footprint, your digital reach and your  branded media as an asset, its overall priority rises exponentially.)

Simply put: an increasing number of employees must now become “media professionals”. But what does this mean for the true media professionals?

If brands are the new broadcasters, then it stands to reason that, conversely, the old broadcasters (newspapers as well as TV channels) have to learn to sell something other than advertising space or, worse, the content itself.  However, the media industry has been struggling to find something to sell, just as goods & services businesses have struggled to create content.

That struggle may too, finally, be at an end — thanks to the fastest growing business of all time: Groupon.

Media businesses are suddenly racing to adopt the group buying model. Early examples include Cox Media Group’s DealSwarm, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Steals, the TorStar chain’s—which publishes the Toronto Star and a series of regional weeklies—WagJag. Other’s like McClatchy group (MNI) have chosen to partner with Groupon instead of reinventing the wheel.

The only question is: Why has it taken so long to figure this out? GigaOm had a great piece of analysis on this:

But if anyone was in a position to [take advantage of group buying], it should have been the newspaper industry; after all, who else already has relationships with hundreds, or even thousands, of local merchants and businesses? The problem for newspapers was seeing those relationships in a different way: not just as a static provider of banner ads and full-page color spreads for the advertising salespeople to harvest on a semiannual or quarterly basis, but as a resource the papers could connect directly to customers for a fee…

The problem now is that Groupon and LivingSocial have become such behemoths in the email-marketing business that they can offer a size and scale newspapers can’t hope to compete with. There’s arguably still an opportunity for the NYT to target its own niche readership for high-end offers, but it’s a much smaller opportunity than it might have been if the paper had launched TimesLimited a year or two ago.

Both sides, media businesses as well as goods & services businesses, are racing towards a social media middle ground. Two different sets of problems with social media solutions that are driving a convergence of business and media.

Yes, Mr. Shirky, finally, here comes everyone…but they’re now in their business suits with pockets full of coupons.