Social Media Club in NYC: Content Nation Meets Silicon Alley, Madison Avenue and Wall Street

The Social Media Club meeting this week at the offices of Business Wire in New York City was an excellent venue for my talk on "Content Nation" that featured a good crowd of folks (photos on Facebook) from the key arenas of content commerce in the New York area: the "new media" crowd (can we really call it that, still?), traditional publishers, PR and advertising pros and a smattering of people with exposure to the financial community. The meeting was held at the 40 East 52nd Street offices of Business Wire, which just happens to occupy space formerly used by Reuters when I was working there. It was kind of interesting and in a way ironic that in the conference room that used to be just a few feet away from a major real-time financial information data center we were talking about how social media is becoming the real-time publishing phenomenon of today's world. Here where some years ago I was working with the Reuters tech team to market real-time data feeds I was handing out Content Nation flag lapel pins. Things change.

Howard Greenstein, the Director of the Social Media Club and President of the Harbooke Group, did a great job moderating a typically energized and engaged SMC crowd through an initial open discussion of ideas and then turned the program over to my presentation on Content Nation. If you're interested, I have the slides embedded via Sliderocket at the end of this post, including a slide that I pulled up during the discussion when people were talking about the definition of content - seemed logical to pull up that part of the book for folks to discuss.

The presentation went very well and, in the typical style of the Social Media Club, I paused several times to discuss comments that came up during my talk. You really do have to come to SMC meetings, they're by and large very free-wheeling people with really good ideas who show up at these events. The interesting thing about this crowd, though, is that it also included a fair amount of people oriented towards traditional media who appeared to be grappling with the impact of social media on traditional publishing and traditional ways of doing business. I think of the ideas in Content Nation as pretty much the here-and-now of today's publishing, but I forget sometimes that for many in the media industry social media is still a very bold frontier that is at the same time both challenging and threatening to many. One person called Content Nation's vision of the far future that I outline in Chapter 10 of the book "chilling," which was surprising to me, given that it was from someone who is very much on the cutting edge of social media.

This uncertainty about a future built on Content Nation's increasingly pervasive influence was also echoed by more traditional media hands, who were insistent, among other things, about the fundamental goodness of traditional media's approach to the truth in news gathering. Well, there were many easy examples of less-than-objective news stories and reporters to toss against that idea, but clearly the idea that everyday people are pretty good at digging up and publishing the truth also is something that is still sinking in to many minds.  As a former employee of Reuters I have nothing but the deepest respect for journalists who risk their lives every day around the world in search of the truth, but, as the recent stabbing of the prominent blogger Xu Lai should remind us, press credentials are not the true borderline of danger for those seeking to publish the truth. Social media seems to imply that, like scientific research, the truth is something that we all seek together over time. It's great that some people are able to do it professionally, but Content Nation has expanded the borders of that tribe into a global community of millions.

There were quite a few questions also about the impact of social media on marketing, the future of print, and who's doing best in mainstream media with social media. I must admit that I forgot to mention some of the better examples of mainstream media using social media that are highlighted in the book, including the Houston Chronicle's great local blog community, and probably should have also highlighted recent aggressive moves by CNN to use Twitter and Facebook to build their brands and engagement. Many major media outlets are learning to embrace social media as a way to build relationships with their audience, but in general it's a slow go for them. The monetization model for social media is quite different from a typical television channel or magazine, although if you think of many social media outlets as events I do think that it lines up very nicely with many traditional publising revenue models.

I think that these conflicts are probably best illustrated by the slide that I had in my presentation of a stadium full of people at the recent SuperBowl game holding up their lit mobile phones recording the event and sharing with others. In a sense the publishing by individuals is beginning to dwarf traditional publishing, a factor that has huge implications for global economics and society as a whole. This is the essence of the challenge that Content Nation puts out there for people to consider, both the best practices that we need to use to survive and to thrive today as well as those that we will be needing to face a world that is in the process of changing far more radically than even many cutting-edge social media enthusiasts may imagine. I look forward to mapping out these changes here, at future meetings of the Social Media Club and wherever else that people are ready to learn about what it means to be a citizen of Content Nation.

NOTE: Fonts from original slides were mangled a bit by Sliderocket from originals, sorry about that.