Taking Down the Big Guys
Emerging online media continues to deal body blows to traditional media delivery systems. Word came this week that media stalwart Newsweek is on the block. And while the purveyors of new media dance on the grave of fallen giants, the struggle to somehow make new media ommercially viable for more than just a few rages on,
Seth Godin weighs in on how that might come to pass in the foreseeable future. He makes some great points. There's no doubt that Social Media is exploding in terms of sheer numbers of participants and that tribes really do matter. But, how does Social Media Marketing become economically viable if the audiences keep segmenting smaller and smaller and receiving the bulk of their goods for free via the internet. How do new ideas (and Markets) emerge from among a group of people who all think alike or share the same interests? How does the benefit of differing perspective help shape the final product in this paradigm.
Scale seems to offer some hope. That is to say, doesn't need many in a community to support enterprise if can sufficiently shave the costs of production and delivery. But that doesn't leave much of an upside and the key to innovation has always been the promise of an upside.
The genius of Henry Ford was not so much the Model or the introduction of assembly line production, but in creating the buyers for his product by allowing them to participate in and profit on the means of production and delivery of a tangible good.
An economy only works when there are o sell at a profit and there are buyers willing to pay the price. The business of Production and Delivery is still key to creating buyers within the tribe because if we were all just thinkers and thought leaders, nothing would ever get done.
