Whiteboard

If there is one thing that is driving us up the wall about the new media, it is the hysterical over-enthusiasm of its evangelists. Yes, these tools are useful. No, they are not going to change humanity.

Our approach to anything new is playful. One of us goes in and just works the system. After a while, we assess the new toy on a few very basic criteria:

• how much time it takes up, and at what level within the company – we assess its opportunity cost against any other things that we might be doing with the time
• whether our friends and followers provide sufficient critical mass (and are interested enough in the tool) to make the effort worthwhile
• whether what we say is even going to be noticed by our audience – the speed of Facebook and Twitter in turning over information means that you have to have a reasonably sustained presence (which is a time cost).

There is a significant investment in time required to set up channels and to keep up with developments (we like TwitterTips for Twitter) and a very significant commitment to relevant content but entering links, once all this is done, is generally a matter of minutes at most. A link can be delivered to multiple destinations within seconds using tools like Ping.

Whether you should bother at all requires a fairly cold and clinical analysis that will weigh up an unsatisfactory present, where the benefits often seem less than obvious, against a possible future when the early user phase is over and the technology has integrated itself far more effectively into the marketing process.

At the moment, it is chaos out there. It can be fun but the truth is that a multiplicity of eager-beaver consultants are trying to sell what amounts to an edge based on personality, and some special skill that cannot easily be summarised in 140 characters, to a lot of other suppliers competing for the attention of purchasers who are actually not there at all!

The social media that impacts most on business tends either to be a world of journalists, business intellectuals and competing and hard-to-distinguish coaches, trainers and other flotsam and jetsam of late-capitalism or a gateway to highly specialised and focused groups of ‘linked-in’ professional specialists or business communities who are merely making their personal networking much more efficient.

In addition, something decidedly odd is happening in another sphere – the media sector. The official print media are being undermined at their point of maximum vulnerability by the way that these new networks enable the public to gut the internet for free information and then link it to their friends without a single penny changing hands. The ‘hit’ necessary to build online advertising revenue will only happen if a ‘friend’ goes behind the headline and clicks.

The most productive use, for example, that we have found for Twitter is as a free-to-use intelligence gathering system. Our account picks up in one place all the latest news on communications, public relations and the media sector.

An associated account covers international affairs and the bits of British politics that are not covered by a free visit to the BBC or Guardian websites. Yet another picks up the latest from the new media and associated technologies. Private accounts catch up on friends and personal interests.

We have now slashed our own print media purchasing budget – after all, the material now arrives long after it is interesting, has usually been placed for effect by someone like ourselves and takes up far more time to study than a swift morning review of Tweetdeck or a click on one of the web’s better aggregators.

This is getting seriously scary for the official print media because we are in a transitional phase when the marketeers, already under financial pressure, are pulling cash out of traditional channels but are not yet competing sufficiently with each other in diverting that cash into the new channels.

Online rates are holding up but they are not creating revenue streams anywhere near the level required to keep the lumbering elephants of print production going. The arrival of e-books (expected en masse within the next two or three years) will create expectations that all media will be digitally received.

At every level it is hurting: journalists are expensive and can’t do their job without adequate resources just as low cost new ‘amateur’ blogs are beginning to outclass them in investigative work; opinion is free on the internet and is often more insightful than the regurgitated spin of Government placed through a commentator; online entertainment and specialist information channels are now far more immediate than print in their analyses; and news aggregators (and the best of the online offshots of the conventional media, the BBC and Guardian) and mobiles mean that you can get the basic news anytime and anywhere for free once you have the hardware.

And do not underestimate the degree that the ‘fun’ of playing on social networks by mobile or at home can displace almost entirely the ‘fun’ of settling down and reading the newspaper. Remember – you are interacting with others where you choose the terms of the interaction.

The new social media may be displacing the conventional single print newspaper far faster than we may think, acting as mid-wife to a new, more specialised and audience-focused online media offer.

But they are at their best now as either suppliers of access to free information in an easily managable form from trusted sources or as enablers of existing personal and business networks to cohere better in order to trade – again, the theme of trusted networks.

These distribution channels also place a premium on the interest of the purchaser rather than the opinion of the seller. Before too long, where there is no personal interaction, a form of Darwinian selection may weed out the ‘evangelists’, happy clappies, flotsam and jetsam (except as a closed group who talk to each other) and replace them with bridges to serious and timely content production.

It is at that point that the new social media become a powerful marketing tool – when you know who is at the other end and your creative endeavours are directed precisely at the emotional and intellectual interests of your target. Hence, the intensity of the struggle over online privacy – total victory for the extreme privacy lobby could kill off the new media completely.

Assuming that Western culture does want to finance this transformation, the catalyst may be first news of Britney’s latest look or insider information on a change in a pipeline route. Whatever it is, the ‘punter’ will be driven, in less than 140 characters (the old ‘headline’), to come to you whether you provide the story for free or for a subscription.

Our calculation? – two to three years of living hell for the old system and then we are into a new ball game with the new.