A since long (business) friend of mine is a co-founder and partner of the Swedish advertising agency West Kommunikation. They in turn are members of the MAPP group, whose members also include agencies in Germany, Austria, France and the United Kingdom. This day they will meet in Stockholm to share insights, experiences, and opportunities. My role is to give a presentation about ”Internet and Social and Technological Movements”. We plan to also record an informal discussion and publish it here as a podcast. Thus sharing some love of the trade with you all.

[Upate after the gig] I have uploaded my presentation slides (pdf) and published our ending discussion as episode 005 in weconverse pod. For me it turned out to be a challenging task, as the group were very insightsful and relatively well acquainted with the developments of social media. Nevertheless, for all of us it turned out to be a very interesting meeting. I believe we all learned a lot. Thank you all!

We older people (say above age 25) was educated with the idea of what Steve Rubel refers to as ”a strict ’church-state’ wall” that separates the editorial and advertising sides of the house” in the ”media biz”. I have reasons to suspect that younger generations have neither heard of that idea, nor seen the point with such a wall. Furthermore, in my view that wall does not really exist (anymore). Of course there are established (and formally educated) journalists who believe in, maintain, and never climb over the wall. Likewise some main stream media ad sales representatives mindfully stay on their side of the fence. And PR folks, like Steve I presume, play by the rules of the wall-idea game.

The things I bring forward here has occupied my mind ever since I discussed e-media with Svenska Dagbladet in the late 1980-ies (at that time a major Swedish daily morning paper). I was frustrated because exploring non-print distribution required the co-operation of  people from both sides of the wall. A no-no, they simply did not want to talk to each other. Steve’s post finally triggered me to share some of my thinking around the issue.

What if that wall idea is not?

First of all, I am one of those who advocate full transaparancy. This remark is my response to Steve’s question that ends his post. In other words, I believe for ethical and commercial reasons that anyone (blogger, podcaster, msm journalist, consumer, etc.) should as much as possible state, explain, and be open about why we say things. For example because somone paid me to say it, or because I like a product and not is paid for stating that. Full disclosure. Always.

Second, we have to realize that when we talk about this ”wall” a lot of people does not understand the issue. This goes beyond those who understand, but does not care. Or to put it in a different way, imagine the extreme that there are people who think that everything media contains is of course there because someone paid for it. At best there is a semipermeable membrane between the people who bring in the money from advertisers and those who create the editorial content. Perhaps we can lean on all the research that says that younger generations are experts in seeing through commercial intents. Although I am not so sure about that the kids always do. And if the do, they might not really care and buy into it anyway.

Third, because the advertising methods (print ads, radio spots, and TV commercials) that have been developed in mass media in the last 50 years now increasingly become less effective, advertisers and mass media are turning to new/old alternatives. These range from a program format totally developed for a particular advertiser, to product placement. Buzz marketing belongs here too. And by the way, a lot of free ”trade magazines” has for many many years contained only articles written by professionals in the trade (with the clear purpose to sell the stuff they write about).

Fourth, I have a real hard time with the term ”media” (or ”media biz”), because it is always extremely unclear what ”media” means. If You is media, then where is the wall?

The big issue here is not loss of trust in particular media brands or their journalists, but the loss of your trust in your friends. When You is the media and everything you say is a result of direct commercial influence – then I do not trust You.

Another fruitful path is early training in source criticism. But that is another issue.

Integrity, openness, and criticism. Please.

Kristine Lowe brings up a valuable (and old :-) question – to which I would like to add my perspective. Or, rather re-position the thinking around it. In her post Monetising Blogmonitoring she asks: ”why would I spend a lot of money on something I can do in a few minutes for free with the help of technorati, google, newsreaders etc?” Then she provides well worth reading arguments regarding that issue, with a couple of supporting comments from her readers. The ”something” was blog monitoring services announced by Cision (formerly The Observer group). Interestingly enough, a long time friend of mine posed similar concerns yesterday, albeit from the other side. She was afraid that the abundance of data available on the Internet would in worst case make her firms (not Cision) information services obsolete.

So, here is my stand on it. Why does not any given person, firm, organization, etc. do everything themself? Take a comparison as a starting point. Why do people pay for bottled water when they could get it for free? Simply because there is something added to the water. A brand, a nice bottle, even a particular taste. For the (Web) historically interested, John Perry Barlows The Economy of Ideas – Selling wine without the bottles on the Net offer an interesting reading. Then, why do companies buy cleaning services when they could do the cleaning themselves. Or, why do I pay for a dinner at the restaurant when I can cook? One reason is cost (compare Transaction Cost Theory). Another is interest. Another is Core competency. Regarding the restaurant it is experience – including company. Barlow early on noted that the Grateful Dead let their songs go for free, and instead made money on concerts and merchandise. That is, a different business model.

True, some services that firms like Cision used to offer can easily/seemingly be done by anyone at a lesser cost today. Yet the flux of media development, fluid conversation patterns and (currently ”free”) services like Technorati create new needs, problems, and business opportunities. I guess Cision would like to provide value in that arena. The same holds for many of us. As a founder of Podenize I am very well aware of that anyone can produce podcasts at a low cost. In fact, we tell our customers exactly that. At the same time I bet on that more (potential) customers of ours prefer to get help creating podcasts – and are willing to pay for that service. In the end, the market will decide if enough paying customers will emerge (line up at our web site :-). As a matter of fact, I personally prefer an economy where customers pay for vaule with their money. I simply do not subscribe to the growing, and illogical, idea that ad revenue is the only possible stream of revenue.

Finally, just for the fun of it. I will not tip Cision about Kristine’s post. I like commenter Kevin Bourke’s Kristine’s ending ”For one, let’s see if Cision’s wonderful blog search engine picks up on this post…. ”

(Disclaimer, I have recently done four gigs for Observer/Cision but have no other commitments for them).

[update 21:50] correctly credit the ending ”picks up”

[update 22:50] Scott Bourne, president of Podango productions, says in his Podcasting Tricks ”with 92,000 podcasts to select from on almost every subject known to man”…”with very few exceptions, it [charging for podcasts] isn’t working now”. I agree, but the problem is not the free stuff. Rather, the challenge is the virtually total lack of an efficient market infrastructure for monetary transactions on the Internet. It is soooo easy to buy a bottle of water almost anywhere. The day we can pay equally convenient for a particular piece of digital content, then things will change.

A lurker can be described as someone who just looks at social media stuff, for example Second Life, Friendster or in this case Twitter. I post this as a reflection on what just happened. A few minutes ago I realized that Fredrik Johnsen, one of the attendees at the Cision gig here in  Oslo sent me a tweet and a friend’s invitation. The tweet said ”Gatarski did however talk about both Twitter and Jaiku… But he has less Twitter updates than me… ;-)”. Furthermore, Fredrik is (according to his Twitter profile) a ”Communications advisor with GCI Oslo, Web 2.0 enthusiast, sports and trivia nut”. No wonder he did not learn much at todays event. I would be surprised if a person like him found novel things at a seminar with the ambition to introduce poeple to the social media sphere.

True, I do not really use Twitter. There are new services, products and social media things popping up virtually every second. I select, play with, analyse and talk about some of those for various reasons. Sometimes just becuase they are hyped all the way into MSM (main stream media), in which case I feel obliged to know a little bit about them. My ambition is alwasy to try them out personally before I put them on my speaking/blogging agenda. With Second Life as one of the few exceptions (more about that later).

There is no way a single person, including me who after all socmedialize as a part of my profession, can do it all. With respect to Twitter I decided from the start just to register and do occational tweets in relation to my gigs. That I made ”friends” with Fredrik was just to pay him back for inviting me and credit him (for good or bad :-) as the ignition for this reflective post. In a similar fasion i only registered with Linkedin just in order to get some practical experience. Consequently I turn down requests to befriend Linkedinsters. Sorry, but I have decided to focus my attention and interaction on other things than keeping up with ”friends”.

 So, Fredrik -thanks for the invite, but unless something dramatically happens I will not do much with Twitter. And, as I said on the gig, Jaiku is much cooler the saying goes (listen to What’s Next’s interview with Andy Smith from Jaiku). Not there yet, probably will – but my sons schooling currently has higher priority.

As most of contemporary web sites, weconverse is in a steady beta. I have finally found Mandigo, a design template that I like both in terms of aestethics and functionality. I really appreciated WP-Andreas09 (originally designed by the prominent swede Andreas Viklund) which I used first. But I have used that template for customers and wanted a more soft feel to the site. Given that I seldomly visit other blogs, just read their feeds, the looks of weconverse might be important only for me.

It will probably take a couple of weeks before I have had time to sort out some problems. These are currently mainly related to the RSS-feeds. I thank all of you that already subscribe and apologize for the mess you probably see. To my knowledge the worst issue is that Swedish characters disappear in the feeds. I still have to do some experimentation and I ask you to bear with me until I get that fixed. Furthermore, the presentation of the feeds on the site needs to be sorted out, including the hidden URI:s. Eventually the feeds addresses will probably have to change in order for me to manage useful statistics. I will let you know if you need to change something.

As you may have noticed I have also added some functions to weconverse. I know offer videos, both from sources on the weconverse server and from a growing body of third party video sharing services. The weconverse pod podcast is up and running. It will soon be registered in iTunes too. For fun I threw in a mobile version of weconverse with the help from Feed2Mobile by Kaywa. Mainly because their service supports QR-codes. I guess many of you do not know what that is, simply because we are so behind Japan. Check out the Wikipedia entry for QR code and listen (in Swedish) to episode 5 of QritiQ if you want to know more (which you should).

There are a couple of other ideas I would like to realize here. Future will tell if that happens. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Meanwhile I wish everyone that celebrates the Easter holiday a happy one.