Oh Media, My Media

I just read a great blog post from the Online Journalism Review about NBC's Olympic coverage (Robert Niles is the only writer I tend to like on OJR, by the way). I found this really interesting because of some things the newspaper advisor has been telling us at the campus newspaper about trends and changes in journalism.

He's taken a lot of time to point out the changing media due to social networking sites, inventions like the iPad and Kindle, and citizen journalism (as if journalists were soldiers of some kind?). Essentially, news is being spread in so many ways these days that are beyond the control of the media.

We had a speaker, David Rathbun, come in to the newspaper and address us last week. You can read his blog here: theotherdrummer.com. He was a pretty entertaining and educated guy.

Point being, he gave us a few examples of companies making the wrong moves to deal with the changing media forefronts. Here are some suggestions he gave to make the right moves:

• Enter the dialogue on social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter especially)
• Act like a business, not like someone's friend (if a business acts like a friend on Facebook or Twitter, then starts trying to push deals on them, a trust barrier is violated)
• Pay attention to what customers are saying online and respond to advice
• Hire some people to follow the dialogue online and get in touch with the customers

I would be pleasantly surprised if I encountered some companies and media sources doing this online. I probably won't, though, because of my opinions on social networking sites, which you'll have to remind me to post about later.