In the new media space, we use a lot of terms fairly confusingly:
Old media
Broadcast media
Mainstream media
New media
Social media
Personal media
Citizen journalism
Citizen media
Here’s a summary of how I think some of this stuff breaks down. Not authoritative by any means, just a perspective that helps me classify what is what in my own head.

Old media is stuff [...]

How To Monetize Your Social Media Outlet
In a variation of a Financial Aid Podcast blog post this morning, here’s a brief economics 101 explanation of how you can monetize your blog, podcast, Twitter lifestream, or other social media outlet.
Economics 101
Supply and demand are inversely related. When demand exceeds supply, you have to pay others to [...]

Imagine for a moment that your industry, that your specialty, is a single post, a single beam. It represents your vertical, everything you’re good at, and also everything that’s wrong with your industry’s growth. It’s fishbowl. It’s vertical. It’s a silo, an echo chamber in which no new ideas flow in or out.
You keep struggling [...]

Media is not marketing
One of the greatest mistakes folks in media - old and new - make is to mistake media for marketing, to mistake product for promotion.
Media is not marketing.
Media is the product.
Marketing and promotion are entirely separate from media, the product.
Consider: if media were marketing, radio and television stations would never need to [...]

The Death of Brands
Something is killing off brands in America.
Perkins.
Uno’s.
Marie Calendar’s.
Fresh Mex.
Bennigan’s.
Steak and Ale.
Who killed these brands?
Private equity. Over the past decade, private equity funds have bought up popular brands and essentially stripped them of assets by issuing debt, borrowing heavily against them, then keeping the proceeds.
Imagine dating someone, maxing out all their credit cards, [...]

The challenge is on. If you want to MAKE something useful as part of a new media experiment, join Rich Meals for Poor Times, a project we’re doing as part of the practical application part of PodCamp Philly. Contribute recipes, ideas, resources, etc. and let’s see if we can’t achieve some amazing results!

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” - Stan Lee
If there was one takeaway that Chris Brogan and I wanted you to have from PodCamp Boston 3, it was this - you have superhero powers, and it’s time to use them.
One of my slides in the opening remarks showed this list of superpowers that 50 or [...]

The Most Dangerous Part of Social Media
Chris Brogan points out recent issues with race, hate speech, and the not so happy part of social media in a recent blog post, but doesn’t go far enough.
The most dangerous part of social media is this: you don’t have to see, hear, or participate in anything you don’t [...]

What’s the ultimate search engine optimization?
The same thing that everyone has been saying for years - content. Good content rules all.
One of my Student Loan Network coworkers came back from an SES (Search Engine Strategies) conference yesterday with an interesting tidbit:

Search engine algorithms are getting so sophisticated now that they’re starting to mimic [...]

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My CEO, Joe Cronin, had a very interesting question as a follow up to the recent post on social media leaders.
At what point do you need to go back and relearn the fundamentals? Things have changed so much in the last 10 years – the fundamentals are completely different. Anyone who [...]