New media

Media and technology make for an exhilarating mix.  The new media has allowed companies and organisations to engage with their customers in new ways.  Business sectors known to be traditionally conservative now have blogs and podcasts.

The technology used does not replace the age old media requirement for good content.  A good demonstration of the importance of content can be found by considering the BBC.  The BBC uses technology as the tool with which to deliver its content.  The BBC website provides more than just news it also provides online radio, video and podcasts.  Recently it was given the green light to put television content online by the Trustees. The BBC has an awesome archive of content and the potential revenue streams that could be generated in the future from this new media property are enormous.   

The SME doesn’t have the BBC’s content (or web hits), but it still needs good content to attract its  target audience of customers and potential customers.  That may sound obvious, but how many website projects concentrate on graphics, layout and the technicalities of how to load content without much thought to the content itself?  Very often the content is the customer’s job.  Unfortunately, it turns out that the customer may be an excellent distributor (say), but is not such a wonderful writer.

Writing good content is hard work even with professional help.  Why bother?  Isn’t the cost of writing the content greater than the benefit?  Absolutely not!  Writing good content for SME’s is about finding out what customers value and care about.  Anytime spent understanding your customer and demonstrating the fact is always going to be time well spent.

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Comments

[LJ]

I wonder what you think about the new roles that are going to have to be developed in order to aggregate and filter all this information on the internet, so that companies can make full use of all this 'free' knowledge.
https://blogs.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/02/its_all_about_the_connections.html

[Philip Woodgate]

Hi Laura-Jane

Thanks for pulling me out of my unintentional sabbatical. This is huge question. In particular, how do individuals and organisations stop from drowning in the flood of information?

One way is of course to ignore it, but given we are living in a technology revolution that could have dire consequences. If your business is about to be damaged by disruptive technology it is good to be forewarned and understand the consequences as best as possible. The music industry is an obvious example of an industry where some of the big players have suffered through lack of understanding of how their business and the world is changing.

However, this is SME blog so I'll concentrate on the SME's. Here's how we deal with information overload at my firm GJ. We have trusted partners in fields outside and inside our industry who are acting as our 'filters'. This is a two way process we're also contributing knowledge back. The result is everyone benefits.

We're a mid-sized firm so it practical (and affordable) to do the above. For the individual in business by themselves that isn't necessarily practical. However, you can find some really knowledgeable people on the internet giving good free advice. It is just a case of finding the quality over the quantity. In practice that's not as difficult as it may seem. Once you find one good business blog it links to another good one. In addition, there are the traditional site like BusinessWeek that provide some great content for business owners. In short the individual themselves is doing the role of filtering from trusted quality content providers themselves.

Looking forward the internal/external online networks and enterprise RSS solutions such as Newsgators give rise to a bottom up approach where knowledge is shared and more transparent in any organisation. Again the question will be one of quality over quanity. There will be an awful lot of business online networks, but very few will provide that quality. The good business online networks will actually have members that that they pay to contribute. Why? Because these people will acting as the filter you describe adding real value to the community with the added benefit that they engage with the other members.