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The Paine
of Measurement

What is New Media?

A client recently asked me for my take on New Media: How I would define it, what does it really mean, and how could she measure it?

My immediate flip response was: "It's everything that old media isn't." But then I started thinking...

It's not like "old media" or MSM (Main Stream Media) is going away. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Sunday talk shows still wield a lot of clout. It's just that now, everyone else has a little bit of clout too.

New media is...

• ...citizen journalists blogging and YouTubing about the war in Lebanon.
• ...using email, and living rooms and word-of-mouth to convince 67 percent of independents and all the local Democrats to vote for you.
• ...a major PR agency (Edelman) being hired to blog on behalf of a client, and then being outed for producing a fake blog ("flog," which of course brings a new twist to "flogging" a product) and having its reputation destroyed in the process.
• ...me being able to influence opinion about PR measurement through my blog while I'm in Wichita, Dallas, LA, Warsaw, or Islamabad.
• ... having fans of measurement in Singapore follow your blog and invite you to speak.
• ...shutting down the student riots in downtown Durham, NH by shutting down the cell phone system (because text messaging via cell phone was how the word was getting out).
• ...being who you are and seeing who is pleased, rather than seeking approval for every word you try to publish.
• ...being able to create the definition of PR Measurement on Wikipedia, and then watching it evolve as more and more experts chime in.
• ...being recorded giving a speech in Wichita, and knowing that the podcast will be available before you board your flight home.
• ...you, me and every other citizen journalist sharing your experiences – pretty and ugly – on YouTube, Shutterfly and Flickr.
• ...consumer-to-consumer marketing with no middle men, no spinmeisters, no corporate speak in between.
• ...product placement in everything from main stream movies, to YouTube, to blogs.
• ... Loco Sports, sending their amazing running shoes to an A-list blogger, not just because they want him/her to write about them, but because the care passionately about their product and want to share it with the world.

And, in the end, that's what differentiates New Media from old. In the bad old days, we wrote and published what was approved, condoned, signed-off on by 40 people, whitewashed and spun. In the New Media world, we follow our passions. If I'm passionate about running or biking or kayaking, I Google the topic, and find other people who share my passion. I start conversations with them.

I happen to be passionate about PR and Marketing Measurement, and I happen to be a breast cancer survivor. So I write about what I believe and other people pick up on that and join in the conversation, and I have conversations with amazing people that I would never meet if it weren't for this New Media.

So what is New Media? It is, as someone said to me today, reality TV come to every aspect of communications. It's real people, doing real stuff, using real language to talk about it, and being heard by the real live people that care about what you're saying.

To echo our theme from last July, it's the death of scream marketing and the start of a whole lot of conversations.

Wishing you large measures of success,

You know you need to measure your results, but chances are there’s never been enough money in your budget for evaluation. Until now.
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1. You’ll learn how to use hard numbers to prove the results of your PR efforts. (Plus, it's free.)

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