Federated Media's angle on new media is to invite UGC-style bloggers who have attracted an audience into similar-subject Federations, and to provide those authors the vetting, channel and money they need to become highly valued professional content creators. Many of the authors at Federated had already enjoyed some success and money, but without the shared infrastructure and unique approach of FM, it wouldn't amount to much. As my earlier post points out, this is a new path to success. In the traditional, mainstream media, the bureaucracy controls who can join the elite and who can win. FM provides the endorsement, safety in numbers and true path to professionalism for those who have earned an audience with user-generated content.
Is the approach working? Let's look at the results:
Just building the Federations and the shared infrastructure would be a substantial contribution to paving a new path to media success that isn't bureaucracy-ridden EGC or thankless UGC. But FM has gone beyond that achievement, adding a new way for sellers to reach potential buyers that is culturally compatible with the new media type: "Conversational Media."
Advertising in the traditional media world is part of the culture of that world: smug elites telling the rest of us what to think and do. Advertising in the world of elites has an attitude, and the attitude is "sit down, shut up, listen and watch, and then do what I tell you to do!" A one-way broadcast of information fits right in.
I'm not about to claim that big advertisers with products to sell suddenly are truly interested in what you and I think. But if you spend some time in the world of blogs, you hear new kinds of voices -- voices that are creative, credible and authentic, but not elite. Pioneer Woman is a great example. You notice another thing: readers are active and engaged, something you'll see right away by looking at a typical post and the comments on it. Surely there is a kind of promotion that is similarly active and invites engagement -- that's FM's Conversational Media. A surprising number of big names are catching on to this.
Conversational Media takes more time and effort (and costs more money) than just putting together some copy and images and blasting it out broadcast-style. But you get what you pay for. The beauty of Conversational Media is that it fits into the blogs more smoothly than old-style stuff, and it pays the way for people like Pioneer Woman to be appropriately rewarded for her creative PGC. This is a path to success that simply did not exist in the old world of EGC, and we're all better off for it.
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