How Not to Manage the Edge: Washington Post Case StudyLet me try and illustrate for a sec (more) why Media 2.0
isn't a simple subset of Web 2.0.
WaPo ombudsman says something egregiously not true. Commenters have a field day pointing it out on a
totally unrelated blog.
Post's response?
To delete the comments. That doesn't stop commenters, who keep commenting, and point out the deletion. Post restores the comments.
Ombudsman responds in a different blog, commenters
point out the intellectual bankruptcy of her response.
Post's response? To
"shut off" comments, and claim a technical error has led to the deletion
all the comments on all the posts of all the blogs that were critical of the ombudsman. Note that retrieving these comments is technically trivial; the net has a long memory - they're
mirrored here.
There are deep lessons here. Forget about whether you agree with the politics of the situation.
1) The value's in the conversation.
2) If you can't have a conversation, you can't create much value in the attention economy.
2.5) Pretending a conversation never happened isn't just kind of infantile, it's actively destroying value.
2.75) Now, I'm not saying that lunatics should be given free reign to comment. But neither should editors and execs think they have, anymore, totally free reign to dictate how the resources of the firm are used. In many cases, they're much better off thinking of those resources as common resources - in this case, editors are much better off thinking the paper belongs to both readers and writers.
3) The lines between public and private are necessarily blurred in a conversation. It's not rigidly controlled business meetings that takes place in communities, markets, and networks, at the edge. It's raw, sometimes a bit brutal, often full of crap conversations - but from an economic point of view, they're hyperefficient.
3.5) Not to learn how to leverage this is going to be fatal - you can't fight an economic discontinuity. What you can do is find new strategies which dominate it.
4) Let me put this in context. Imagine a DJ who plays a really, really
crap track. Everyone stops dancing. What does the DJ do?
The point is that the old information asymmetry that dominated media is gone. The connection between the internal and external is live, real-time, and direct. You can't run away from it, or "manage" it. The DJ can't say (insert beancounter voice here) "folks, let's have a meeting, and figure out how to manage your dancing".
You have to
join the conversation - not kill it. You have to not be (how can I put this nicely) so beancounterly. You have to be willing to overturn the orthodox assumption that firms talk, and consumers...well, simply consume.
This is not wishy-washy management advice. This is razor sharp strategy. The basic economics of consumer industries are being inverted; new market leaders are learning how to create value at the edge, by innovating how they manage the universe of value external to the firm.
Postscript: the Post.com's exec editor later
held an online chat to discuss, which is admirable. But I don't for a second buy the claim that comments were yanked because they were nasty - I read them, they weren't.
In fact, it's the opposite; the commenters did more fact-checking and research collaboratively than the Post's ombudsman did - that's the power of coordination economies.
Let me simplify some of these thoughts to crystallize some further key points:
1) Newspapers need commenters (read: connected consumers) more than commenters need newspapers. The simple economics of attention scarcity dictate this. The same equation holds true across consumer industries (esp media).
2) That is, you have to leverage and co-opt your readers, audience, etc, before your competitors do. Competing for their attention is a zero-sum game.
3) The big problem with the Post's move is that it's a barrier to learning: it stops it from learning how to leverage connected consumption - which is exactly the force that's hypercommoditizing media. Learning to leverage the edge is a kind of judo. But if you're not in the ring, by definition, you can't learn how to play.
4) Imagine a Post that did the opposite: highlighted in big letters on it's front page the raging discussion, actively driving attention to it.
Would the result probably have been a flame war? Sure. Flame wars mean your market, community, network,
is working.
Would the Post have learned a
lot more about how to leverage the edge? Absolutely.
