Lacy’s Gnomedex conversation and the state of social media
Interesting account of Sarah Lacy’s presentation at Gnomedex – not really a conversation at all, but a conversation with the audience about blogging. I wouldn’t have assigned much credibility to Lacy after her smarmy public interaction with Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW Interactive, but her approach with the Gnomedex crowd about “the growing blogosphere angst” evidently worked to engage the audience and produce a kind of creative tension – wish I’d been there.
From the account linked above, oddly appearing in CNet’s Gaming and Culture blog:
Her theme was that because of that co-opting, blogging as a medium has become less and less distinguishable from technology journalism, as bloggers and traditional reporters alike find themselves too worried about pumping out content to focus on meeting people and finding good stories.
My perspective is that the blogosphere has become an intensely competitive space for some, especially those who hope to make real money with their blogs. Blogs are truly “social media” with a low entry barrier. Anyone can play. There are so many articulate people with stories to share, and so many of them are blogging away. Because there are so many compelling sources of content, rather than the relatively smaller number of periodicals and newspapers (and television and radio channels) we had in the old media world, mindshare is fragmented, it’s hard to build a sustained audience. There’s a huge strain if you’re trying to monetize attention in this environment.
There’s also confusion about “blogging” as a medium: “while the architecture of blogging is fairly standard, what people do with it can be quite different: Some may write a small personal blog and TechCrunch may be a large media company, but both use similar tools and are therefore lumped together to the detriment of the terminology.” “Blog” is a format, not a kind of content, and not a kind of operation. We probably need new a new terminology (or a retooling of old terminology) to speak clearly about the new world of media. And we should get away from old-media models of thinking – that seems obvious, yet it’s not happening, partly because the PR world has within the last couple of years embraced social media, and the initial embrace is smothering.
In this conversation that Lacy structured, Robert Scoble – who’s been very successful, partly because he picked up a large audience as Microsoft’s blogger but mainly because he’s a good guy, smart, and articulate – “said that working with an ever-increasing number of unprofessional PR people has turned him off.” The operative word there, I think, is unprofessional. I’m not sure what Robert was thinking (because the post I’ve linked doesn’t expand on it), but it’s important to think about the impact of social media scale and character, the fact that professionals and “amateurs” are all stewing in the same juices, and the line between them – as well as the line between the publisher and the audience, is a razor-thin blur. This is clearly true in content production, but it’s also the case in PR. True PR professionals, like journalists, sit on a foundation of study and professional standard that informs their work. We see more and more folks who lack that foundation but are more or less serious players, because they’ve managed to get and leverage attention on the social web. I suspect those are the people Scoble’s talking about. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, but it’s the world we’re in and we have to make sense of it. How we do that will shape the future of social media, which feels like a frontier at the moment.
