New Media

I’ve been travelling the country for the ICT Hub talking to local organisations about the potential of the new Live Web of Blogs, podcasts and Wikis. One attendee told me she had been asked to come up with a ‘new media strategy’ for her charity. Did I have any advice, she asked.

My immediate response was to suggest that she reject the idea of a ‘new media’ strategy and instead concentrate on a ‘network’ strategy. To put the focus on ‘new media’, I argued, was either to get bogged down in technologies – it’s to do with computers, or instead get blinded by the ‘new’ – it’s about putting video on our website. Rather the new Live Web, the place where kids are creating their own music, communities are publishing their own ‘magazines’ and older people are sharing family snapshots and catching up on local news, is about networks. What organisations need, I suggested was a systematic look at how to harness those new networks and more importantly join in those conversations. This is not ‘new’, we’ve been having conversations and sharing stories since we gathered around campfires. This not media, developed and delivered from the top. This is content creation and sharing.

I told a story about someone working for a charity... in the not too distant future

He opened the laptop at the breakfast table. He just wanted to put a quick thought on his Blog about that item on Today. As his machine blinked into life, his Bloglines page told him his colleague had responded to his question. A fairly useful pointer to a piece of case-law that might help, he’d del.icio.us that. More importantly he noticed a response from a lawyer who’d been searching Blogs for entries on the case and had found his posting. The lawyer gave the same legal reference but also said a pressure group in Australia were working in the same area. He’d cut and pasted something from their Blog.
After he’d finished visiting that Blog and leaving a comment, he looked at the young fundraiser’s Blog. The poor girl, she’d been there until 10 again last night. The flyers had come back from the printers with the wrong date so she’d been dealing with that. How she managed to keep such a cheerful attitude, he couldn’t imagine.

The kids on the estate had updated their MySpace and YouTube sites. New music videos and a hard-hitting poem. They were getting lots of other kids linking to them to. The council looked like it was set to face more than just the original three.

The CEO’s blog was thoughtful. She too had posted about the Today item but hers was a quieter piece almost melancholic, remembering why she got into this area and telling a story of having met a family for whom that issue wasn’t abstract or news fodder but real. He was glad he worked for someone for whom this was also real.

And it seemed others had seen the charity in a new light too. When he checked Technorati’s listings of Blog entries on the issue, his was there, so was the lawyer’s but the CEO’s was at the top. Seems many people had already linked to it. Further down there was a Blog entry from someone saying that it was good to see a charity with its heart in the right place, and staffed by people not robots. He wondered whether he should visit the Blog and comment or leave it to the CEO.  He felt he had to say something so dashed off a comment saying that was why he worked for the charity and inviting the person to contact him. The Skype phone rang shortly after.

Just another day networking.

Paul Caplan is the New Media Trainer for the Media Trust. His blog can be found at www.theinternationale.org

'To book a new media seminar please go to www.mediatrust.org and click on 'Events booking' or call Lucy Mason on 020 7874 7620.

Glossary:
Blog – regularly updated website built around conversations
Bloglines – www.bloglines.com, a site to keep track of multiple Blogs
del.icio.us  - http://del.icio.us/ - a site to upload store and share bookmarks
Technorati – www.technorati.com, a Blog search engine
Flickr – www.flickr.com, a photo-sharing service
MySpace – www.myspace.com - a social networking site
YouTube – www.youtube.com - a video sharing service
Skype – www.skype.com - a free telephone over the Internet service.

Paul Caplan
The International

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