Keep your eye on a promising event coming to Southbank, London Wednesday. We recommend you follow the event here, and here, or here (Lolly always has something to say). The premise of the event is to bring together a diverse group of online personalities to discuss the impact of microblogging on mainstream media, pr, etc. If it lives up to the billing you should be able to follow the event in real-time from the comfort of your laptop.
photo courtesy: media140.com
These are some of the questions expected to be answered: Will professionals and amateurs alike provide an unfiltered, real-time account of news events? Are 140 characters enough? Will anyone be listening? Since our invitation to participate on a panel was lost in the mail, we summarized our answers below.
Yes. Amateurs and pros already committed to microblogging as a new news medium. In the 90’s a upper level journalism course titled, “The Death of Newspapers”, predicted today’s reality. Where newspapers failed, microblogging seems poised to grow and grow and grow. However, the demon that will kill all but the strongest newspapers–a solid revenue model–threatens to undo microblogging before it reaches full potential.
Microblogging fails to serve as an information destination. One hundred forty characters is a narrowcast that only gives one perspective to filter and process in real-time. Brevity does play a role in bringing topics, events and issues to the forefront just as above-the-fold headlines have done for years. Maybe that’s enough, for now, but there is danger in limiting your world view to those you follow.
Listeners, watchers, and readers supply the fuel for news media coverage, because they pay the bills. The advertising model used over the course of a traditional news cycle remains largely unchanged and no one seems to have an answer. If news becomes bifurcated and readership dispersed, advertisers have an opportunity to pounce. People may be listening in fewer numbers to more sources, but this presents some very real opportunities for the savvy direct marketer to deliver ads with surgical precision.
VLG believes direct marketing will play a huge role in the delivery of ads to these information cliques. Readers gravitate toward the news they want to hear and the issues they care about, which leaves the door open to one-to-one and one-to-several marketing. Microblogging feels a lot like another step in the evolutionary life of news media. We’re trying to take the next on the Dialog Marketing front.
