July 20th, 2004
New world for journalism, PR and marketing
Pioneer blogger and Silicon Valley journalist Dan Gillmor’s We the Media (O’Reilly, July 2004) is an enlightening and instructive look at how the Internet and new electronic tools are challenging traditional notions of media and influence. In fact, the horse has left the barn. As Gillmor points out, "grassroots" and "citizen" journalism are already having dramatic effects in areas such as politics, corporate governance and event coverage. For businesses, the implications are that you cannot hide or depend on command and control systems to spin the news.
"Newsmakers of all kinds–corporate, political, and, I’d argue, journalistic–need to listen harder, and in new ways, to constituents of all kinds, whether voters, customers, or the general public. They need to learn from what they hear. Marketing and customer service no longer work as simple lectures. Businesses need to engage in the conversations that are already taking occurring about their products and practices. Using weblogs and other information tools, such as discussion forums, companies can engage customers, suppliers, and employees in a dialogue in which everyone learns from each other….And companies need to realize that being open and truthful is not just the right thing to do; it’s the smart thing. In the emerging world of Internet-enabled communications, obfuscation and lies will work even less well than before."
We the Media will give you a fresh perspective on what it means to live in the information age…
