A Media Story

Cam over at ChaosScenerio has done a nice little comic strip depicting what many of us have gone through or are currently going through.  The process of consuming traditional media, then moving on to emerging media—getting overwhelmed in the process and figuring out how to apply our personal filters to decide on our terms how and where we want to spend our time.

For those of us who have made it past the "overwhelming stage", I'm sure you'll agree it was worth it.  But what about the ones who dabbled in social media only to see no value in it?

Remember the post about the Wharton Marketing Professor who said:

"Blogs are the latest forum for people who have nothing to say that others actually care about," states Wharton marketing professor Xavier Dreze. The mode of a distribution, explains Dreze, "is its highest point. What this means is that there are more blogs with 0 subscriptions than blogs with one subscription or two or three or four. There is a reason why the modal number of subscriptions to a blog is 0."

So what does that comic look like?

Comments

[Cam Beck]

Hey David,
Thanks for the insight. I had forgotten about your post about Msr. Dreze. If I do a cartoon on his experience, it will have to take a critical eye toward the pampered self-congratulatory culture of academics like Xavier Dreze. But I digress.

What I find particularly disingenuous about Dreze's comment is his focus on the mode. Most businesses fail within the first five years, too (which results in a mode of 0 successes), but here we are living in a prosperous, capitalistic country that has output that ultimately resolves to higher education that supports people like Professor Dreze.

No one suggests that all blogs are created equal, and unlike in Dreze's world of tenured professorships, credibility has to be earned and continuously maintained. It is not handed out like he suggests.

[stefan]

Cam, I agree that Dreze has too much of an academic perspective which doesn't match up to reality. I think what is critical here is that "blogs" are a method of publishing, which shouldn't be confused with the people who use it. As the saying goes, "guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people". In the case of a blog the ability of the author to say something relevant is the same as the marksman's ability to hit the target. If we are to find fault with blogs, we should be educating people on how to use them.

[Cam Beck]

I thought swimming pools killed people. No? ;)

Building a mainstream blogging audience is difficult because, I think, the lack of understanding about how enriching they can really be, ignorance about how to search and find useful, relevant information on blogs (perpetuated by people like our good professor, whose credentials are mistaken for expertise), and the lack of a concerted marketing effort that would publicize blogs.

Most blogs are marketed virally, but some are helped by more traditional mediums, such as magazines, books, and television, which captures the attention of -- probably not so much the residents of Main Street U.S.A. -- but at least the others in the blogging community, who become greater advocates for the medium through their enrichment, and whose sheer passion for their subject of choice and the medium in general invites the participation of others.

I'd like to say that all we need is time, but in reality, we're working against time almost as much as it's working for us.