Put down the shotgun and build a bridge

Business owners should spend more time looking at what's on the horizon, instead of wondering who moved their cheese. The new media builders are coming and they know where the gold is.

•Your news, tomorrow.
Many old media business models are still alive today but are continuing to die a slow death. Lately we've begun to see some major cracks in their foundations due to the advent of the information age.

In case you haven't noticed, big media channels such as radio, television, print media, music and the film industry have all taken a major hit in the past decade from you and I - the mouseclickers.

Why would anybody be surprised that newspapers are dying when we have an easier, more efficient (not to mention more eco-friendly) alternative at our fingertips?

For example, if your brand is known for delivering the latest, relevant news and fails to embrace the internet, clinging to the hope that people will eventually go back to wanting their news tomorrow, is foolish. It's like the local bakery trying to sell solid loaves of bread, while the community is embracing the invention of the sandwich.

Each media industry is comprised of major money-making corporations, but they also used to be the distribution channels for virtually the entire advertising industry and their clients too.

The shift away from this model has been dramatic and swift -  we shouldn't be surprised to see it have a ripple effect on the economy overall. We are at a crossroads where the businesses who understand this change can harness an opportunity that can propel them into the new era, but it won't come from passive selection.

•Build a better gun?
Our new culture of open source business and shared information demands a lot more from the media channels that we choose. All of this came from a boom in consumer choice.

The shotgun approach used to be effective when crowds of customers congregated on specific media channels. Back when everyone had a few television channels or a handful of media streams at their disposal - business and marketing was a lot easier.

Our options were narrower, so we were limited to what each media channel could provide. Location mattered much more than it does today. The music or television industry and their advertisers would simply need to shotgun blast their marketing to the user base on a particular channel and business happened. Choices were easily trackable and measured to provide the necessary feedback.

As marketers found more efficiency, they realized that customers were becoming harder to track because they had more channels (and thus more choices) and so the 'targeted' approach ushered in. Marketers celebrated because they had built a better gun. This worked for a few little while, but it quickly became impossible to continue to improve the targeting relative to the increase in selection for the customer.

For once, technology favored the consumer because it gave them more control and left the advertisers scrambling. Agencies today have an unbelievable about of information about consumers, but their conversion rates are dropping. We can easily conclude that it's not about knowing every detail about your customer anymore. Why is this happening? The answer is that the laptop crowd is faster-moving and their interests too broad.

•Bridge the gap
Today we have an iPod generation of choice, people don't congregate in the same way because we have a smorgasbord on their laptop. Therefore, it stands to reason that a shotgun isn't gonna get you many ducks when they're spread out all over the horizon. Marketers are lucky to even find an audience, let alone one that will convert.

The new era is less about shotguns and more about tollbridges. The cloud computing and software-as-a-service model is all the rage because the open source, shared culture is growing out of the new Long Tail consumer.

Toll bridges are great snap-ons for social networks and the shared internet. All of these factors will effect how information and money is transferred...so yes, it will effect your business. It's now more important not to hit a specific target, so much as it is to build a platform as a utility that takes them where they want to go.

Put down the shotgun and build a bridge.

How has this change effected your business? Are you prepared for more change?

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