I'm enjoying reading Seth's new book, All Marketers are Liars. It's about stories. Only problem is it's still all about the corporation's story. Where are the customers' stories? MSM is starting to glimpse the value in real people - the guys and gals on the other side of the newspaper print or television box - telling their own stories.
[W]e may want to experiment with the concept of using bloggers to supplement our daily coverage of news on the net. There are of course inherent risks in this strategy -- chief among them maintaining our standards for accuracy and reliability. Plainly, we can’t vouch for the quality of people who aren’t regularly employed by us – and bloggers could only add to the work done by our reporters, not replace them. But they may still serve a valuable purpose; broadening our coverage of the news; giving us new and fresh perspectives to issues; deepening our relationship to the communities we serve... - Rupert Murdoch (via Jeff Jarvis)
Meanwhile, most businesses intepret blogs' potential as an effective corporate mouthpiece (albeit a tad more informal, like a fireside chat with the CEO) and an amplifier for word of mouth marketing, or a viral message disseminator. Big Yawn.
Since my 'accidental' foray in citizen journalism, I've thought a bit more deeply about writing, reporting, and storytelling from the grassroots (and human) level.
Rather than maintain a private and unwieldly Word document collection of reference material, I've created a new linkblog to keep sources of information that are relevant to a new project (with a non-profit component as well).
I thought I'd share the grassroots media and marketing project linkblog as it may be of general interest and it's already up and running. I'm hoping to get volunteers - especially university students and faculty involved - so it also serves as backgrounder and educational fodder later.
BTW, if anyone has good suggestions for a non-hosted blogging software package that aggregrates multiple contributor's posts easily (especially if some of them are non-tech savvy), please let me know.
Bonus backgrounder links:
Hi Evelyn,
Check here for OSS blogging and content management systems. If you help installing, lemme know. Jim
http://opensourcecms.com/
Posted by: Jim Wilde | May 04, 2005 at 05:23 AM