Quiver & Quill

CBS chairman Leslie Moonves is speaking with Google video to explore new opportunities on the internet to boost his reach and bottom line. His statement to Reuters’s this week pinpoints why content providers like CBS, and the Citizen Media – or consumer generated media (CGM) – is becoming an increasingly more powerful and pervasive force.

“They need our content, we need their technology,” he said, referring to broader discussions with Internet companies. “We argue about which is more important. I think ultimately my content, no matter how you get it, content is still the most important thing,”

While I agree that content is king, I argue that the scope of this kingdom is defined by the way in which we discover the media. While search continues to enjoy fresh content from blogs, online posts and digital media, other ways of finding information are rapidly gaining attention. Tagging, for example, is one of them. In online communities, ranging from Facebook and Flickr, consumers indicate nature of their concepts through particular keywords.

The keywords provide many functions. They label the pictures, and they also provide a scent by which others kind find them. Now we can not only search by keywords ranked by search engines, but we can also utilize how ways in which we describe websites to one another to discover them.

Try this exercise. Search http://www.google.com/ and http://del.icio.us/ for the same term. Which did you find more effective? The latter utilizes popularity and consumer tagging to discover your results. Others sites which do the same are www.revver.com, http://www.flickr.com/ and http://www.blinklist.com. While tagging presents many exciting opportunities, it also is open to an advertiser’s agenda. This brings us back to the initial point. While content is king, our internet can be hijacked by savvy advertisers promoting their own agenda and exploiting tags. Kings are a dying breed, as citizen media has replaced them.

Relevance, inevitably, rules. How we discover authentic information, distinguish it from irrelevant content and parse through the surplus of ideas to find the ones which relate to us will determine what becomes of the CGM model. I would like to see the king, traditional media, usurped to be replaced by a natural aristocracy where consumer generated media competes with its traditional counter parts to improve the quality of both.

Resources worth reviewing:
http://www.clickz.com/experts/brand/cmo/article.php/3515576
http://www.consumergeneratedmedia.com/

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