Media Relations

If Everyone's A Celebrity, Who Is The Audience? Do All Social Media Dreams Come True?

Disclaimer:  Don't get me wrong.  Social media is amazing. I love it and respect those who've harnessed its power. 

When you meet a high-level blogger, Tweeter, FBer, etc., can you see the stars in their eyes?  They've tasted the drug of celebrity.  Addiction levels are off the charts.  Visions of speeches at conferences, their books sold at the back as the audience exits. Webinars, Amazon orders & profits rolling in.  Attorney level consulting fees and the joy of the freebies.  It's a heady rush.

When Seth Godin spoke in Salt Lake several years ago, an audience member cried out, "we want to be like you!"  For some reason...that made me sad.  It seemed to bother him a bit, too. 

The slice and dice of once powerful media into cell sized morsels has brought power to the people.  May we use it wisely.

Can this be sustained?  Some questions I'd like you to ponder with me.

1. If we can all get our 15 minutes of fame, who will be our audience?
2. If we each publish our own newspaper, blog, have our own TV & radio (podcast, YouTube) outlets, how many followers can we attract before the excitement levels drop?  How much information can one human consume in a day, let alone generate? 
3. And now that we have all written and published a book (or plan to), who will read it?  What profit, if any, will we see as our copy joins the thousands of advice books outdated within mere months?

Online activity resembles a blur of swarming bees, all buzzing around each other, all frantically trying to give each other attention....and asking the same in return.  Pedestrians, drivers, people on dates, kids at the dinner table...eyes locked on mini-screens as their latest Google alert, Alexa rank, and online analytics confirm their new star status.

So it has come to this.  A country that strives to be so respectful of individual rights is now packed with citizen celebs.  In the anxious grab for audience...any audience...whatever audience is out there, to what lengths will people go?  Balloon boys?  Crashing presidential dinners?

Digital Exhaustion: My Scary New Diagnosis

Was it Steve Rubel who predicted it?  A coming “attention crash?”  Well Steve, I think a new superbug hit me today:  Digital Exhaustion.  

Are you at risk?  Read on.  This morning, a glorious Saturday full of sunshine, I choose to skip a walk and stroll to my computer, determined to make my first blog post in several weeks.  I couldn’t do it.  My heart was heavy.  My back, my wrists were limp. Brain fog did not respond to caffeine.  So I wrote this instead (sick sick sick).   

The information in my daily workload has been sliced so thin…my brain and the splintered messages it receives feel pulverized like Jamba Juice in a blender.

Don’t get me wrong.  The digital world is a blast.  I love it…to my own detriment.  I think we call that “addiction.”

 

Here’s my story:

Each morning….

1.  Hundreds of daily emails arrive.  Scanning to find the urgent ones in record speed is mean to the mind and the eyes.

2.  My email software informs me I send 3,000 – 4,000 emails each month.

3.  The social and new media world grabs me by the throat asking me to acknowledge new friends on LinkedIn and Facebook or come up with “30 things about me...”

4.  I hit the brakes to visit Twitter, TweetDeck and others…just getting a grip on a new world of communication spinning out-of-control.

5.  Dozens of online industry newsletters with the latest research and great advice scream for my attention…and I really do try to read a few of the stories.

6.  Incredible free Webinars tempt me to log on and use my lunch hour for more digital education.

7.  More Google alerts arrive….more than I can manage.

8.  Oh yeah...the news.  I remind myself it still exists and pay a visit to my aggregator, hoping my community and the world survived the night.

9.  Rigormortis sets in.  I give myself the luxury of holding a newspaper in my hand, resting on a couch.  New blood pays a visit to long-numb body parts.  An ergonomic work space can't perform miracles.

10. Clever and highly professional phishing has forced me into regular and unwelcome investigative duties.   Precious free time ticks away.  I must make sure those emails warning me of breached and compromised credit card, stock investment info, etc, ARE NOT REAL.  “Just ignore them you say?”  Impossible.  Sometimes I’ve found that a phish isn’t a phish.  Spooky.

11. I can’t contain all the passwords in my head.  “Write them down,” you say?  I once had my password lists stolen.  I’m too paranoid to do that again.

12. A nice organized email no longer exists.  Now it contains things like “yes,” “no,” and bit after bit of a major assignment.  My daily job?  Piece 5-10 emails together to discover what they want me to do.  More time, more work.

13. Those who can't cope with managing minuscule email threads ask me to do the searching and resend it all to them….more work.

14. As I write this piece, my blog host, Typepad, is uncooperative and irritating with my format attempts!  It loses my posts so easily, I must remember to "save" at least every minute while writing.  Better hit save again....excuse the interruption.

And then there’s the personal absurd stuff that further raids personal time:

1.  The phone rings.  An automated voice warns me someone has stolen my credit card number…saying: “For more information please press any key.”  I press any key.  Nothing happens.  But the calls continue, so I call my credit card company and find out that yes, my card has been stolen.  Weary fingers reach for the keyboard to go online immediately and create a new account.

2.  The phone rings.  It’s an automated voice from Delta Air Lines.  A voice reminds me of an April flight and coyly encouragesme to go to the Website for further details.  I think that means there’s been a flight change…but the company is vague.   Once again, I’m forced to go online.

3. I receive five airline emails about flight changes for one trip.  I can’t keep track of the data. I set up an airline and trip change filing system - on paper for safety.

Have I said enough?  Way too much.  I bet no one makes it to the end of my rave on Digital Exhaustion.  Not even past the first paragraph.  

Why hello!  You did hang with me and read this entire email – congrats!  There’s hope for you.  You believe in living for the moment.  You refuse to scatter your attention as I have.  You are not the adrenaline junkie I seem to be.  You, my friend, have a healthy immune system….sure to fight off Digital Exhaustion.

 

A New Age...The Attention Crash

About 3 years ago, a colleague sent me a link to Steve Rubel's incredible blog: Micropersuasion.  Every morning, I got up a little earlier and studied his posts and went to his links.  I learned to blog (I have five blog sites) and I quickly became breathless, with the speed of information in my life, in my job and on the Internet.

Now, Steve writes of a coming "Attention Crash."  I'm so glad someone so eloquently wrote about this topic.

"Though the current global financial crisis grabs all the headlines, there's another storm quietly brewing - a crisis of attention scarcity. The inputs we have into our lives - that which we allow and those that are forced upon us - are exceeding what we are capable of managing.

The Attention Crash is here and it will only get worse. There will always be more content vying for consideration. In fact, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said 'By the year 2019, it's going to be possible to have an iPod-like device that will have 85 years of video on it. So you will be dead before you watch the whole [thing].'

This is a wonderful post.  Read all about it, and thanks, Steve, for articulating it so well.

51 Newbie Reporters to Cover 2008 Election

Imagine being a teenager, given a free laptop, a video camera, a mobile phone and special Adobe software, and told to go forth and cover youth issues as "street reporters" in the 2008 presidential campaign.

A total 51 youth journalists - each representing a state and the District of Columbia, will act as newspaper, radio and TV reporters and their work (blogs, videos, photos, podcasts, animation) will be featured each week  on MTV Mobile, ThinkMTV (a social network) and in the Associated Press Online Video Network.

What a colossal step in citizen journalism!  According to a post on the blog The Social, a $700,000 grant will fund this effort as part of MTV's "Choose or lose" campaign to encourage youth to get out and vote.

And we all know this youth news coverage will turn viral.  What an incredible challenge to the presidential campaign teams and political strategists. 

Also, according to the post by Caroline McCarthy, MTV - owned by Viacom- claims this will be a neutral, non-partisan project.

Salt Lake City ranked #1 in Movies and DVDs

Guess who took the top spot in the nation for the most avid movie goers?  Salt Lake City...my home town.  Second place was Miami/Ft. Lauderdale and third, El Paso.

And Salt Lake City is also number one for DVD purchases.

Source: The Nielsen Company

Both of these categories are part of a larger story in Editor and Publisher, containing a number of entertaining year end categories including:

Top TV show: American Idol

Top Search Engine: Google (finally won the numbers battle with Yahoo)

Top Markets Using Text Messaging: Houston, Austin, Washington D.C (in that order). 

The product showing up the most in product placement advertising:   Coca-Cola, with 3,123 "occurrences."