This morning, WIRED magazine’s Alexis Madrigal and Michael Kanellos of Greentech Media joined W2 Chairman Larry Weber in a panel discussion co-hosted by Racepoint San Francisco and Digital Influence Group on “Powering Clean Tech with Social Media.” Despite the early hour, the panelists jumped right in, discussing hot topics including green washing, alternative fuels and funding.
Alexis, who is writing a book on the history of the greentech movement in the U.S., called for a new sense of “Manifest Destiny” in relation to clean tech. He reasoned that since we have to transform systems on earth, we should acknowledge up front that its going to be hard, messy and part trial-and-error. Both Michael and Alexis agreed that the innovation needed to transform the space has to come from innovators from within and outside the clean tech industry. They cited the Gates Foundation’s work in health as a prime example of this type of collaborative innovation — working together the industry can achieve the changes needed to make real strides in clean tech.
As for social media, both panelists agreed that blogs, twitter and social networks can serve as effective conduits for organizations to get their messages to businesses, and that few organizations are successfully using social media to reach consumers. All is not lost on the social media front, though. This just means organizations have a lot of room to grow in their communications with consumers.
All three participants cautioned companies to participate in social media with a thoughtful approach and, above all, a clearly defined strategy. They noted that one of the biggest social media mistakes companies make is to engage without first learning the community’s standards. Overall, they expressed a sense of excitement that people are using social media more and more to communicate about clean tech and other issues of shared interest. It is, after all, a much more normal and personal way to communicate than traditional types of media.
Here is an interesting part of their conversation on how Meacham is trying to create a sustainable revenue model for Newsweek by cutting its circulation numbers in half and following in the footsteps of the Economist with an intellectual and deeply analytical approach to reporting:
CHARLIE ROSE: Chapter one of the new “Newsweek.”
JON MEACHAM: Chapter one. What we have to do is go to our base. As you will feel there, this is better paper. It’s a more handsome magazine. We have been doing this for 76 years, and I want to say quickly, we stand on the shoulders and in the shadow of all the folks who have put this out, put this out week in and week out. And this is not a reflection on what we have been. It’s about what we have to become. We’ve been at 2.6 million subscribers for a long time. Mass audience. Costs a lot of money to print that many magazines, put them on trucks and deliver them. We’re going to bring that down. We’re going to charge a little bit more for it. Still less than $1 dollar a week, I think, for most folks, which is much less than a cup of coffee in most urban places. And ask people who care the most to pay a little more, and then be able to take that demographic, that audience, and tell advertisers this is who you’re reaching. You want to reach these people, because they’re people who watch you. They’re people who watch “Meet the Press.” They are people who hopefully buy hardback books about history.
And our calculation — our research shows that there are about 28 million people. I sometimes think of it as the virtual Beltway. You may not live in Washington, but you are part of that sensibility. And you read a lot, and you check into the electronic kinds of conversations.
CHARLIE ROSE: Let me read your page about this. “A new magazine for a changing world. As we see it, ‘Newsweek’s’ role is to bring you as intellectually satisfying and as visually rich an experience as the great monthlies of old did, whether it was Harold Hayes’s ‘Esquire’ of Willie Morris’s ‘Harper’s,’ but on a weekly basis.
“In our interview last Wednesday afternoon on Air Force One, President Obama noted one of the key lessons he had learned. Americans not only have a toleration but also a hunger for explanation and complexity and a willingness to acknowledge hard problems. ‘I think one of the biggest mistakes that is made in Washington is this notion you have to dumb things down for the public.’ That was the president. You say we could not agree more.”
And I say I totally believe that. You know, in terms of the response that you get when people find interesting things done in an interesting and intelligent way. You know, there is — it lights up the human experience.
JON MEACHAM: Yes. And it’s about character, and it’s about people, and it’s one of the reasons we wanted to start with Obama, who is the, agree or disagree, the most fascinating figure of the age.
How bad could it possibly get? As BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine wrote, people are currently more satisfied with airlines and even their cell phone providers than newspapers. In fact, Even Burger King, Comcast, and the U.S. Postal Service had higher scores then newspapers.
For an industry that is struggling to survive right now, this is not a good sign. How are newspapers going to be able to increase revenue when their customer base is unsatisfied and shrinking? Will consumers really pay for online content that are not happy with, then they can go to industry-specific blogs instead? For an industry that primarily based on providing news, a lot of the major news these days has been focused on the industry’s inability to make money and/or stay in business.
So why have people become unsatisfied with newspapers? Here are a few reasons:
Less Content: Over the weekend I was talking to my father and he remarked at how thin the Boston Globe has become, saying that it used to take him the whole day to go through the paper, and now he can read everything within an hour. With thin papers comes less content – not an appealing trait.
Old News: Thanks to the Internet, blogs and Twitter, by the time an article reaches the newspaper it’s old news. Unless a story has additional information and analysis, then it doesn’t provide the reader with anything new or unique.
Increases Prices: Let’s face it – almost everyone under 40 is not going to pay for a newspaper when they can get more relevant content online for free. With increased prices (for less content and old news) newspapers are not exactly attracting customers, and are likely turning off some of their current ones as well.
With that said, last time I was on a plane I bought a newspaper for the flight, and found it to be much more enjoyable then the flight itself.
