Business Insight Zone

You may recall from last week’s post that I’m the speaker for tomorrow’s Social Media Breakfast here in Austin. I’m stoked as can be, and I’m looking forward to seeing familiar faces and new ones in the audience.

As I go back over my notes, I’m struck by how much we normally talk about “the media” in ways that excludes anything but the mass media. There’s no room in our usual implicit definitions for personal media (a handwritten letter between friends, say) or narrowcast media (the PTA president giving the budget presentation in the school cafeteria).

To some degree, this makes sense: movies, radio, television, the Internet — they’ve all changed the world in ways that would have been impossible to imagine in 1900. The mass media have led to massive changes in society and in the business world.

But we run aground when we try to shoehorn social media into mass-media definitions. The social media are largely about narrowcasting — a phenomenon that never went away, but that doesn’t fit into a conception of the media business that focuses exclusively on newspapers and television networks and so on.

Food for thought — and part of what I’ll be discussing over coffee and pastries at the Breakfast tomorrow.

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Related reading:

• Social Abacus: media, medium, me
• Chris Brogan: Cafe-Shaped Conversations

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Photo by flem007_uk.

Category: Media, Social media