(a wordle cloud of the blog post)

The new media scene is full of buzz and buzzwords. After all, the term “new media” itself is buzz.

It is also full of agencies, consultants and companies which claim to hold the truth with respect to the path that you should take to take advantage of the new shifting landscape. But is it really shifting? And what should you do as an individual or an organization?

1. Divergence through convergence.

We all know about the technological convergence of media, tools, platforms and its effect on the ways to consume and use media and information. We need to grasp the nature and effects of this convergence process which nevertheless has a positive but also disrupting flip side: Divergence of cultures. Emergence of micro-communities and micro-trends that enrich our cultures but also disrupts long-standing business practices which were based on uniformity, the law of averages and mass audiences. One needs to grasp both convergence and divergence and adapt to this new reality.

2. The “First Principles” principle.

Whatever you may hear and read – and you are probably overwhelmed by the buzz around web2.0, social media etc – this is not the first time that society undergoes significant changes due to some kind of technological innovation which alters the ways of doing business and communicating. Landline telephone, TV, radio and the like also created a buzz in their time and promised to change or revolutionize society for ever. And in many cases they did.

However, two things stand out from these experiences.

Firstly, not all effects are immediately recognized for what they really are. The historical long view is always a correcting lens. Undoubtedly all these developments left a mark at the end but it was not necessarily the one envisaged at the time.

Secondly and most importantly, what makes humans “tick” shows a remarkable consistency through time. People need to feel secure, loved and respected for what they are and for what they can accomplish. They need to lead creative lives, they need to have a voice and control their own lives and they need to communicate.

It is all too easy to overlook basic truths about what people need, how they think and behave. These basic truths are still a guiding light in today’s landscape. You can’t really miss the mark by following it.

3. The end of “lone rangers”

One cannot stress this enough. Today, probably more than ever, we need a multidisciplinary approach and the coexistence of different skills in order to harness the power of the new media. Be it designers, web developers, marketers, communication experts, writers, plain visionaries, software developers, all these people need to have one thing in common: Be creative. Creativity is the cornerstone of progress, entrepreneurship, human endeavor. Creativity is found in individuals but is unleashed in full force through collaboration and open communication. This is the lesson learned through the open source movement and the crowdsourcing models increasingly adopted by previously fortress organizations (be it IBM, the Associated Press, the pharma industry or the government community of Gov2loop).

And this lesson applies equally well for your internal organization (employees) or your external environment (stakeholder groups).

4. Beyond lines

Increasingly, the new media takes centre stage within the marketing or wider business strategy of companies and organizations. In many cases, it is the starting point from which offline communication activities or new business models spring up. Thinking along pre-determined lines miss the whole point.

Many innovative ideas fall within more than one category whether this is branding, HR, PR, customer care, CSR policy and so on. For example a CSR related online project apart from its reputation building potential, can have a definite side effect impact in customer loyalty, product branding, knowledge building etc. Cross-sectoral approaches are increasingly needed to ensure maximum impact and ROI.

Also, in the marketing field, the days of clear cut lines between “above the line” communication (ATL: TV, radio, print, outdoor) and “below the line” (BTL: promotion, direct, PR) are gone and a single “conversational line” cuts across the marketing mix and CRM strategies.

We witness this in many cases and this year’s Cannes Ad Festival showed exactly that. The Titanium Grand Prix and Integrated Grand Prix that went to the Obama/Biden campaign was a testimony not only to the brilliance of the campaign itself. It was a testimony to the fact that we should stop thinking in silos like, online vs offline, social/political vs commercial, ATL vs BTL.

Is “The Best Job in the World” campaign by Tourism Queensland a PR campaign, a promotion or a web campaign? Obviously all of those and it rightly took away both the Cannes Cyber Lion Grand Prix and the PR Grand Prix.

This is why Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran believes that, “the market [of interactive agencies] is now ready to take a big step to join, and in some cases even replace, traditional agencies in leading marketing strategy for top brands”. This is mainly due to the fact that digital agencies now have the advantage of “seeing the big picture”, therefore of being in a better position than their full media powerhouse rivals, to integrate online with offline strategies. The recent ackquisition of Razorfish by Publicis – an agency which already owns Digitas – is an effort by a traditional agency, to consolidate an advantageous position in a changing marketplace.
The Financial Times, in an article titled “Out of the box”, quotes Mary Beth West, chief marketing officer at Kraft Foods, saying in a panel debate in Cannes: “In the old world, agencies were way out in front of clients. Now . . . clients are ahead of the agencies – and the consumer is ahead of all of us.”
And this probably describes better than anything else the constantly shifting larger picture that we all need to grasp before we can effectively design and deploy new social business communication models.