After trying to digest Scott Karp’s latest post on bridging the gap between Media 1.0 and Media 2.0, I took a look at Umair Haque’s commentary on a recent shutting down of comments on a Washington Post blog, which spoke to other aspects of this transition. Umair cited the WaPo move as an example of “how not to manage the edge.” Among the lessons he extracts from the episode:
1) The value’s in the conversation. 2) If you can’t have a conversation, you can’t create much value in the attention economy. 2.5) Pretending a conversation never happened isn’t just kind of infantile, it’s actively destroying value.
Umair acknowledges that conversations at the edge can be “raw, sometimes a bit brutal, often full of crap conversations.” But he contends that “from an economic point of view, they’re hyperefficient.” And “[n]ot to learn how to leverage this is going to be fatal - you can’t fight an economic discontinuity. What you can do is find new strategies which dominate it.”
You have to join the conversation - not kill it…You have to be willing to overturn the orthodox assumption that firms talk, and consumers…well, simply consume…New market leaders are learning how to create value at the edge, by innovating how they manage the universe of value external to the firm.
The big problem with the Post’s move is that it’s a barrier to learning: it stops it from learning how to leverage connected consumption - which is exactly the force that’s hypercommoditizing media. Learning to leverage the edge is a kind of judo. But if you’re not in the ring, by definition, you can’t learn how to play…Imagine a Post that did the opposite: highlighted in big letters on it’s front page the raging discussion, actively driving attention to it. Would the result probably have been a flame war? Sure. Flame wars mean your market, community, network, is working. Would the Post have learned a lot more about how to leverage the edge? Absolutely.
To extend the bridge-building metaphor, (perhaps a bit clumsily), it seems that the Post found itself partway across the Media 1.0/2.0 chasm, but without a bridge in place to take it safely across to a reasonably controlled landing on the other side. And then, when it found others (its readers) starting to build what it may have viewed as a wildly-swinging hanging bridge to some unknown (and potentially dangerous) destination, the Post tried to make an abrupt stop halfway across. According to Umair and others, the result may have been a painful and damaging fall, and one that could have been avoided.
While Post editors and managers may respond to Umair’s urging to “learn to manage the edge,” with “easy for you to say, but how,” his advice does seem on point.
But, at the same time, Scott Karp also seems correct in arguing that successful Media 2.0 strategies are not just about conversation, but also about “filtering and “synthesis.” The message here is that while some of us may be active commenters and online conversationalists, more of us remain—at least most of the time—relatively lazy media consumers.
It seems that in this case, the Post found itself with an unexpected and hard-to-control surge of conversation, but lacked tools and a strategy for filtering and synthesizing it, and for editorially and economically leveraging this rapid influx of community-generated content and the potentially valuable “attention” it might attract. But, not realizing that you often can’t safely turn back on this bridge to Media 2.0, it slipped, fell and probably hurt itself.
Mitch Shapiro at 12:58 PM|Comments(0)
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