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Web 2.0 and online consumers affect journalism yet again….Crowdsourcing tests yield mixed results, PR Week

“But the masses of the Internet, always eager to improve or destroy a well-established practice, have deemed "crowdsourcing" the journalism technique of the future. The wisdom of crowds, the theory goes, will allow large numbers of disparate people working on different parts of various assignments to come together in a quasi-journalistic fashion to produce material that is richer and more varied than what the mainstream media can turn out.”

Validation is always nice. “What's Plaguing Viral Marketing. Sorry, Malcolm, but the Tipping Point Might Be More Myth Than Math,” by discusses the same topic I posted about- targeted marketing vs. mass marketing. Here is a good snippet from the AdvertisingAge article.

“The crux of Mr. Watts' argument is that even if influentials are several times as influential as a normal person, they have little impact beyond their own immediate neighborhood -- not good when you're trying to create a cascade through a large network of people, as most big brands do. In those cases, he argues, it's best to skip the idea of targeting that treasured select group of plugged-in folks and instead think about that group's polar opposite: a large number of easily influenced people. He calls this big-seed marketing.“

With web 2.0 changing the landscape for the way advertisers, marketers, communications professionals, industry analysts and consumers interact on the web, and sites battling it out for the top spot it becomes harder and harder to determine where and if our brands should be represented on these sites. Most communications professionals participate in some form of social media- whether it be blogging, social networking sites, video sharing, social bookmarking, etc.- so we’ve probably all noticed a difference in the types of people each medium attracts. “Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace” by Danah Boyd infamously describes these differences. But regardless of the validity and taking into consideration of audience segmenting/targeting the question on which social media to engage brands in is still the same. Should marketers ignore what’s being said in the media and amongst analysts and solely use the mediums which their target audience already uses, or should we go for the medium that has the biggest audience? Should you sell your product via Walmart or the niche hat shop on the corner? Would a pr person pitch USA Today or the women’s health magazine? There’s just too many options available….