Two years ago I wrote an article about my personal daily media consumption which was in response to a meme that Jeremiah Owyang began three years prior. So much has changed in the past two years that I thought I’d revisit the discussion, talk about my own morphing media consumption patterns, and ask you about your daily media consumption. It’s a topic that’s near and dear to Intertainment Media, because they distribute a communications and content application, KNCTR, which pushes content daily to your desktop.

Since my last article, I believe there have been three significant changes in my media consumption:

I’m forcing myself to go paperless

I made it a plan for 2012 to go paperless. The obvious thing to change with a paperless strategy is to scan all your receipts and then throw them away. But paperless also has to do with removing all the other paper junk in your life such as manuals, books, newspapers, and magazines. I now trash manuals and download the PDFs. I only purchase eBooks to read on my iPad. And I read newspapers on digital devices and my favorite magazine, Wired, cover-to-cover on my iPad. Oddly, Wired doesn’t have a way to turn off the paper magazine subscription, and just get the digital subscription. Every time that magazine shows up, I just throw it in recycling. An unfortunate and unnecessary waste.

By going paperless, and consuming my media in that manner, it’s forcing me to better organize my digital media. That means I have to have a system for bookmarks, storing digital files, and finding the media.

Reading a lot on my mobile phone

I can now actually read text, and lots of it, on my Android phone. The screen size is large enough and my favorite media sites either have a mobile application or a mobile optimized web site. The latest news in the areas I’m most interested is always with me. I don’t have to wait for it to be mailed to me or go pick it up at the newsstand, nor do I need to deal with the physical disposal of the media, which is a pain in itself.

The downside to all this media consumption on the mobile device is that batteries die quickly, rendering their primary use, communications, useless. Luckily, Android phones have removable batteries and you can purchase plenty of extras. I always have three extras charged in my bag at all times. This isn’t true with the iPhone, but there are plenty of portable iPhone chargers.

Reading everything on my iPad

I’ve become a huge fan of my iPad for reading PDFs, newspapers, blogs, magazines, and purchasing and reading eBooks. It’s a fantastic media consumption device. I don’t ever plan to purchase another physical book again. I’m so tired of packing them up in boxes and moving them to just adorn a shelf like it’s artwork in my home. Yes, there is something very comfortable about a physical book, but in quantity they’re a sheer pain in the ass to manage. Also, when I want to read something new, I can just select it and have it on my device within seconds.

The next obvious stage is textbooks to go digital. It’s no surprise that Apple is targeting the education market and will be making an announcement in NYC next week. I wish I had all my textbooks on an iPad when I was in school. My son is going to have it so easy.

How has/will your daily media consumption changed in 2012?

How has your media consumption changed over the past five years, or even just last year? What are you doing now that you’ve never done before and what have you given up?

Creative Commons photo attribution to leondel, zandwacht, and BenSpark.

This got me to thinking, “Why do we consume media?”

I ask you readers this question (please throw in your two cents in the comments), but here’s my viewpoint to launch the discussion.

There are obviously many different kinds of media that all serve a different purpose. To simplify, I break all media into serving three purposes:

• Inform - It heightens our own knowledge and context. Gives us points of discussion, learning, and discourse.
• Educate – Some of the most popular content is “how to” based as people are using for pinpoint ways to learn.
• Entertain - We’re looking for any kind of story to get sucked into, or to be amused.

There’s often a bleed between these three, and if you can produce media that marries two or more of them together it can heighten the value of the content, as they’re serving multiple purposes. And obviously a piece of content’s ability to serve its intended purpose is mediated on the quality of the content.

In all cases of media consumption, the next step is to engage, which cycles back to more media consumption. We want to debate about something we saw in the news, or share the story we heard. If we learned something, we want to connect with experts who can teach us more. And if we heard a good story we want to share it, or point to something we saw that was funny.

We didn’t need the Internet to begin engaging in “social” media.

This all seems so ludicrously obvious, but it isn’t until you realize this is the purpose of media. While content has these initial intentions of informing, educating, and entertaining, its greater goal is to connect individuals and communities. Conversations happen around content.

This circles me back as to why we have these endless discussions about content and then later engagement. That’s the hope for a piece of content, but often content is instantly forgettable and there’s no desire or need to engage.

Is media’s purpose to generate conversation and connect people? If I consume a piece of content and I don’t share it with anyone, is it a bad piece of content? Did it not serve its purpose? Does media have a greater purpose that we should always strive for?

Your thoughts.

Creative Commons photo attribution to IceNineJon and roland.

What the Hassel Map implies is that a focus group of 1 isn’t necessarily a bad thing, look – as Adrian notes –how Netflix got kicked off, but what’s really important is that once you’ve had that selfaware ‘a ha’ moment you need to action it and grow it out beyond the one person group and truly experience what your customers are going through…at every point of contact, and make sure that its living up your brand’s promise.

What also struck me when reading this is the notion that we can’t simply lump consumers into one bucket, we need to dive a little deeper and understand consumer types versus only consumers.  The argument here is that your customers are at different points in their, and your, life cycle and understanding this and adapting your offering to it can only lead to good things.  Mr. Slywotzky closes with a great thought that there’s a gap between what consumers buy and what they want.

Ok so what’s the net takeaway here…at the risk of repeating myself, the net takeaway is that you need to listen to your audience, consumer, customer, user, agent or whatever word you like to use, just find a way to listen to them and more importantly, put yourself in their shoes and see what they see when they interact with your brand.

So will you be Hassel Mapping anytime soon?  Drop us a note and let us know what you think.

We would say “What’s the value in having a million unengaged impressions? Wouldn’t it be better to have a hundred thousand conversations?”

Well its great to hear someone else taking up that charge, I just read this great post by Jason Rosenthal, CEO of Ning, in Forbes – http://onforb.es/qcznoQ – and he completely nails it when he says that its better to have 100 intensely engaged individuals versus 100,000 likes.  He makes a few other really key points but it all centers around the notion of moving from broadcast to conversation.  I know that I have a bias with this, especially given that one of our products/apps (www.knctr.com) was really built on the notion of social conversation and entertainment, but that notwithstanding, the premise having a conversation with and not at the consumer has always been at the core of what we believe.

So what do you think, Social Depth or Social Breadth?  Drop us a note and let us know.

This great article by Drew Neisser in @FastCompany (http://bit.ly/q0iOF2) should make you question whether your company is simply waving at social media as the blogs, articles, posts and tweets float by you, or are you truly committed to making your enterprise a social business.

The subject of the article, IBM’s Ethan McCarty, asserts that the time has come to move from social media to Social Business and that Social Business is the future even for companies, like IBM, who are aren’t even selling to consumers anymore. My takeaway…inherently you need to be committed to being social to have a successful social strategy. You can’t farm it out, you can’t set up a page and call it a social strategy. You, and your company as whole need to be engaged, and engaging, in a social dialogue, hey if IBM can do it….

So what do you think, are you a Social Business or a Social Bust? Drop us a note and let us know.

If it’s on TV, the radio, the web, or in newspapers, people have a strong tendency to believe first and ask questions later. There’s an inherent truthfulness to the apparatus, no matter the medium.

A recent example of this ability comes in the form of a racist sign apparently placed in a McDonalds window. A picture of which went viral through Twitter [see below].

Hoax McDonald’s Sign

To anyone who would have taken 5 seconds to think it through, the sign was an obvious hoax. Even the associated hashtag alluded to this – #SeriouslyMcDonalds – no, of course not seriously.

Although this was one of the week’s top Twitter trends, it’s actually been around for some time, initialy appearing on the website McServed back in 2010 – the type of forum where everything is either totally fake, or radically obsurd.

Yet after being picked up by Twitter users this past week, it’s distribution went from minor to nuclear, at point being recirculated (or Re-Tweeted) over 30 times a second. That left McDonald’s with an awful PR mess to clean-up.

It’s clear that social media has an ability to affect brands in ways that were never before imagined. Although amazing resources for sending information quickly, the flow of information runs both ways. The message cannot always be controlled.

Online hoaxes have real world consequences. Recent incorrect Tweets about a crashed Qantas plane negatively affected the airline’s share price. And this won’t be the first or last time. How many celebrity death hoaxes even from the past year instantly come to mind?

One of the most classic examples of a media-driven hoax was the Orson Wells “War of the Worlds” radio drama aired live on CBS in 1938. Just as in the McDonald’s case, they key was an illusion of authenticity. The first 45 minutes were presented as “news bulletins” that people actually believed.

The next day’s New York Times headline read, “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama as Fact”. Groups of people were terrified, literally running wild into the streets. And why? Simply because it was on the radio, and it had to be true.

The public needs to better challenge what they see, hear, or read. With the amount of hours put into Re-Tweeting the McDonald’s story, people could have actually done some research, and easily found the original posting on the McServed website.

Just as in the case of US congressman Anthony Weiner, where many did. He hoped the public would believe his offside Twitter messages to a Porn Star (amongst others) were a hoax, when they were in fact quite real.

Ask yourself – what is the last rumor that you Re-Tweeted, or shared on your Facebook wall? Did you know it may not have much basis in reality, but went ahead anyway? Stop asking yourself the question, “It could happen, right?”, because you know it probably didn’t.

Even the legitimacy of where the President of the United States was born has been one of the biggest stories of 2011. Although every attempt has been made to officially rebuke the story – for many that doesn’t matter, a rumor means truth.

And for everbody a grain of salt, please.

It’s Friday, and Aldous Huxley is turning in his grave…

In Brave New World, the author dreams a dystopian vision of the future in which man’s “limitless appetite for distraction” renders him passive and incapable of self-reflexivity. Media-theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman echoes this sentiment by drawing parallels between Huxley’s fictional world and the state of contemporary media consumption; in a scathing critique of the current media-ecology, Postman declares that “Huxley’s vision – not Orwell’s vision – has become our reality.”

Barely a week into virality, this music video from untalented aspiring teen pop-star Rebecca Black, has 16 million+ more hits than 2011 Grammy Winner Esperanza Spalding! This is a problem – not the actual video, but the social construction that permitted its virality. We’re at a precipice where even the unofficial “authority” on all things social media, Mashable, can’t stay abreast of the growing factors/variables that would permit a video like “Friday” to go viral. It’s remarkable how a “definitive” guide to going viral, published only months ago, needs to be revised to accommodate the phenomenon.

Times are a-changin’.

Here we are, on Friday, March 18th 2011, in a world that allows the spawn of the Arkmusic Factory to flourish in the digital-coliseum of the internet. With every Rebecca Black, are we losing our appreciation of true art? Are we eroding our collective and individual attention spans? Will there come a time where we’ll be incapable of watching such important works as Randy Pausch’s renwned TED Talk?

Media critic and entertainment lawyer, Bob Lefsetz (@lefsetz), certainly thinks so. In a recent blog post, he reiterated his perpetual rant of how “the rules have changed” – against the topic of Rebecca Black’s inevitably fleeting-fame, he states: “Real music requires inspiration and dedication and tons of practice and it lasts.”

We’re not in a homogeneously controlled media landscape anymore. We’ve made gatekeepers irrelevant; we spread the content. Let’s take ownership of our future. Before we completely devolve into a culture obsessed with spreading mediocre and trivial content like teen-sensations, Hollywood train-wrecks and LOLcats, let’s take a step back be critical of our media consumption. As with our nutritional diets, let’s demand better content, or at the very least, strive for balance. The disproportionate number of views between Rebecca Black’s and Esperanza Spalding’s videos are disturbing. There’s a real concern here that if left unchecked, we will desensitize ourselves into a jaded stupor where everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy.

Demand better content.

Techmeme was launched by industry friend Gabe Rivera who has also launched WeSmirch for tracking hot celebrity gossip stories, memeorandum for political news, and Ballbug for baseball news.

Now, for all us media fiends, Rivera has launched Mediagazer which is for tracking media news. Prior to Mediagazer I relied on PaidContent, which is a meta aggregation site on all news about the industry of making money from content. They provide an editorial touch, but they don’t let you know which are the most popular stories. Mediagazer will do that for you. And what I like most about Rivera’s sites is that not only do you see the host story, but he also provides links to some of the hot blogs that are talking about the story as well.

And just recently added to all of Rivera’s “meme” sites is an easy to share button. Click on the icon next to the media outlet and you can share the original or the Mediagazer link with others through Twitter, Facebook, or just copy and paste the link. I prefer the Mediagazer link because it comes with a summary and all the other links of blogs that are participating in the discussion.

It’s no surprise that none of those media players are around today.

Apple at that time had already proven the successful marriage of device (iPod) and application (iTunes). It was truly simplicity. I remember when I installed my iPod for the first time, I was blown away at the simplicity. It just found all my MP3s and sucked it into the device without any difficulty. It was the best consumer product experience I had ever had. Many competing products claimed, “Oh, you can just bring all your music into our device,” but it was far from simple.

Hey tablet PC makers, don’t let software be an afterthought

Lenovo Ideapad U1 Hybrid

While I’m still suspect of whether the iPad will be successful given how we’ve become so accustomed to inputting information through keyboards (see Will the iPad Follow the Failure of Voice Dictation Software?), I am buoyed by the fact that they’re continuing on their tradition of simply acquiring and managing media. Their online bookstore is just an extension of the iTunes experience. While Amazon has successfully simplified the content gathering experience with the Kindle, I’m not seeing the same with other tablet computers.

If everyone knows what it takes to be successful against Apple, why do manufacturers of media consumption devices continue to ignore the content input experience? We saw it with MP3 devices, then video devices, and now we’re going to see it again with iPad competitive tablet devices. Take a look at PC World’s round up of Tablet PCs from this year’s CES. The obsession over the mechanics under the hood and not the actual experience using the device just points to the impending failure of all these competitors.

Yes, the current version of the iPad is hamstringed severely and I’m not going to jump out and get version 1.0. But they’re definitely creating a new type of media consumption (to a lesser extent media creation) experience. And while I was down on it in my Technologizer article, I want to be proven wrong. I want to see people adapt to a new experience of consumption and computing in somewhat the same way they’ve done with the iPhone.

MSI Tablet PC

Except for the Kindle, the competitors are just trying to slam technology into a device. They’re not focused on creating an experience. Yes, these tablet PC manufacturers will sell a few units, but they won’t capture grand mind share like Apple can.

Prior to the release of the iPhone, I received a competitive handheld computing device from Nokia, the Nokia 810. It was a painful computing experience. After toying around with it for a few hours, I gave up and it sits in my drawer. If I could recognize how annoying it was to use, why did they release the device? Don’t you sometimes think the manufacturers don’t use their products first?

If you don’t love the experience, guess what? We won’t either.

Creative Commons photo attribution: ndevilTV / CC BY 2.0