You are in the media business.

It doesn't really matter what your business does - make things, do things, sell things - you are also in the business of creating and disseminating knowledge. Your business exists and runs, at least in part, on a globe-wide network that holds and moves numbers, words, images, video, and sounds everywhere. Even if you ignore it, knowledge about your products or services will be created and disseminated. Those 'chunks of knowledge' will have a direct effect on your business - on your brand, reputation, customer behavior and ultimately your profitability.

The word 'media' is intentional. There was a time when the free-floating knowledge about your business was sparse, consisting mainly of a few words, a few numbers, and (maybe) a single image. We used to call it the Yellow Pages, and it was about the closest thing to a public directory for a few decades. The Yellow Pages is a good point of comparison to understand this shift.

Twenty years ago, a Yellow Pages ad was a fairly big deal. Ad listings cost money. Production of ads cost money. Strategizing on what to say, and how to say it, cost money. And all of that expenditure got focused into a few square inches of black ink & yellow paper. The ad was likely to sit right next to competitor's ads. And you basically expected someone to be looking for businesses like yours - Yellow Pages ads were kind of a "at the moment of need" medium - that was the basic term of engagement. Known need, unknown supplier.

In the network economy, space (ad space, media space, media richness) and time have swapped places. You now have (for all practical purposes) as much media 'space', and as many choices of medium, as you could want. Words, numbers, pictures, video, animation, sound, music - means for producing these forms are getting cheaper by the minute, and distribution has become basically free. But people spend an average of 2 seconds scanning a Web page, and less than a minute watching YouTube videos. 'Space' is free, time is scarce.

There are two fundamental ways to attack this problem. One, you can try to get more of the customer's time - which fundamentally means competing by making your media more "grabby" and attention getting. Or, two, you can try to get more of the customer's mind - which fundamentally means competing by understanding the knowledge needs of your customers more deeply, and by meeting those needs at more points of engagement.

Let's say (for example) that your company makes boats. You probably focus a ton of attention on your sales channels, and on getting new customers to buy new boats. There's nothing wrong with that, but you're leaving a bunch of attention opportunities on the table. What are the points of engagement for people who own your existing boats, just to pick on one example?

This is where "you are in the media business" starts to get interesting.

Boats always need maintenance - it's their nature. And 'maintenance' is a dandy point of engagement, a point where your customers are more than willing to invest some of their precious time. Does your company know more about your boats than you're sharing? Probably. One strategic use of that knowledge asset is to make it easily available in return for customer's time and attention (and ultimately, mindshare and brand loyalty.)

To put that concretely - if someone at your company knows the best way to change the oil on last year's model, capturing that knowledge is now a pretty darn low-cost "publication" job. You can shoot video footage of the oil change with a cell phone, upload it to YouTube, and publish it on your customer forums, without no substantial expenditure. You can't stop there, and there's more to it than that - but many companies haven't even taken these small, easy and low-cost steps.

There are many such points of engagement, and many opportunities to be in the "media" business. Do you have a clear strategy for media and relationships? Your organization and your customers will start taking you this direction - or the market will take business to your competitors instead.

We've been working, studying and understanding digital media for nearly two decades. Give us a call and let's talk about what you can do to get started.