News agencies around the world are constantly challenged with finding and keeping consumers of their published content. Content is certainly king, but the business model has been stressed for many organizations over the past decade based on the advancement of technology and changing consumer habits.

It’s still about getting the attention of readers, listeners, and watchers. But now, your news source wants you to consume their content through digital media and share it within your friends, family, and professional circles.

Consider that the traditional subscription model is based a one-to-one relationship. A consumer subscribes to a publication, and the agency pushes their content to the subscriber at a specified interval. If you want a newspaper delivered to your driveway each day, then you can have that with your paid subscription. You might share that printed paper with a single friend. But it’s not likely that you would share it with more than that one friend. In many ways, you are limited by the physical copy that you have.

Paul Grabowicz, of the Knight Digital Media Center, writes about the transition to digital journalism, stating there has been “a steady decline in print circulation and a precipitous drop in advertising revenue” in recent years. News agencies that have not adapted to technology that consumers use have filed for bankruptcy, closed their doors, or merged with competitors.

Consider that the print subscription base for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Monday through Friday circulation was 183,415 in May 2011 down from 318,350 in November 2007. That’s a 43 percent drop in a 3 1/2 year span.

All those print subscriptions of yesteryear have been replaced with different types of digital access such as mobile applications, Internet browsers, tablet applications, podcasts, and YouTube videos.

Traditional news sources relied on an intentional decision by the consumer to receive the content of the publisher. It was an individual decision between the consumer and the news source. With digital media this can still be true. But evolution of technology and tools is leading to a new change in consumer behavior.

In recent years, social media sharing and linking has become mainstream, and the average consumer has access to share their favorite content with many people just by clicking a button. In contrast to the subscription model, that’s a one-to-many relationship and it’s beginning to have a changing effect on the mass media industry.

The consumer has become a free marketing engine for the news agency by sharing, liking, and commenting on publications. This very act replicates the content of the publication in a way that was once impossible.

Andrew Phelps, of the Nieman Journalism Lab, describes the sharing habits of consumers in his post news shows up in the least expected places. Phelps states that “A lot of readers get their news just like this — incidentally — according to a growing body of research. That is, they don’t turn to the web seeking news. The news finds them. And that has implications for how that news gets produced and distributed.”

So, just as with any industry, news and media companies will have to adjust to consumer behavior. AOL, parent company to Patch.com, understands this. A note in the management discussion section of the 10-Q report filed with the SEC on 11/2/11 states “As the behavior of internet consumers continues to change, a migration on the internet towards social networking could adversely affect usage of AOL products and services. This trend may have an adverse effect on our ability to rely on traditional sources of traffic and revenues. We seek to mitigate these potential competitive pressures by leveraging social networks to deliver our content.”

But social-sharing timelines such as those found on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter have a challenge as well. They contain an enormous amount of information that is updated constantly. In fact, there is so much information hitting those timelines that we can’t possibly process it all.

It’s what link shortening service Bit.ly calls the half life of a shared link. They define half life as “the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive.” According the Bit.ly study, “The mean half life of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours, on Facebook it’s 3.2 hours and via ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours. So you can expect, on average, an extra 24 minutes of attention if you post on Facebook than if you post on Twitter.”

For discussion sake, let’s call the half life of a shared link three hours. After that, your link is considered old news. The findings of Bit.ly study have prompted some news organizations to develop a policy of re-posting their content after certain time intervals. There is no additional cost to repost the link, and it will very likely pick-up new consumers.

Enter Google to this discussion. Google shook up the digital media and search world when it posted on its blog a post entitled Search, plus Your World.

Google states “We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.” The latest search algorithm now includes results that are personal to your Google+ and photo sharing information. Controversies aside, about the what social data is included in the search results, what this means is that sharing news links socially could give that link a second life in future search results.

For news agencies, that’s good news. It means when a link from their content is shared with others, it could create additional impressions in Google’s search engine index. That can increase the probability of additional visits to their media properties in the future.

So the race for your attention continues. But the game has changed. It’s not played with college students selling you the covenience of home delivery through a subscription, but with digital publications and the quality of the content.

You the consumer are both the audience and the marketer. Your influence, and it’s a good one, drives more people to the published content when you share or recommend it to a friend. Social is as social does.

Guest post by Niall Cook, originally posted on Sociagility.com:

In November 2011, Sociagility.com – an organization in London that ranks corporate social brand value – looked at the social brand value of 50 of the world’s leading brands, creating a revised top 50 ranking according to their social media performance, as measured by PRINT Index™ KPI. The results are fascinating.

The PRINT system compares brands on five key dimensions or ‘attributes’ of social media performance – popularity, receptiveness, interaction, network reach and trust – across multiple platforms.

The Sociagility Top 50 report analyses the social brand value of the world’s leading brands and the competitive influences that determine their social media performance. Sociagility’s research is available through a free PDF download.

Here’s a visual representation of just some of the report highlights.

If you like it, please feel free to share.

It’s no longer just Twitter and Facebook but all of social media coming together – such as LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Groupon, Yelp, Scoop.it, and so on – working together on the cloud, those enormous server farms, like the Pentagon-sized technology marvel Apple has at Maiden, North Carolina.

Speeding up everything, together with collaboration in the tech industry, innovation, shortened product cycles and competition are driving this new and enormous growth in technology.

What really caught my attention was the way Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, described this phase of the I.T. revolution to Friedman. Benioff used the acronym SOCIAL.

S is for speed – everything is now happening faster.

O stands for open. Companies need to have an open environments in which to be innovative.

C is for collaboration. This revolution, writes Friedman, enables people to organize themselves to take on any kind of challenge.

I is for individuals who are able to reach and be creative farther, faster, and cheaper than ever before.

A is for alignment. “There has never been a more important time to have all your ships sailing in the same direction,” said Benioff.

L is for leadership. Leaders need to inspire, enable and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then bring vision to a final product.

SOCIAL is amazing, and it is part of a social revolution driving another technology revolution and business engine in Silicon Valley.

By Dale Buss, Chief Executive magazine

As chief of Hyundai in the American market, John Krafcik has driven the company right into the social media ocean—without taking the plunge himself. The president of Hyundai USA spends up to an hour and a half each day monitoring Twitter and Facebook feeds about the company, its brands and products, but Krafcik does so under an alias and doesn’t contribute to the social stream of consciousness.

“Right now, social media is a wonderful opportunity for me to listen and really feel the pulse of what’s going on,” Krafcik says. “But if I get out there in it myself, I want to make sure I can be committed to stay and deliver. And the time constraints are considerable.”

Krafcik’s dilemma is common to CEOs these days. First, chiefs often figure crucially in whether their companies will heavily engage in the fast-changing and often arcane world of social media marketing and communications, weighing the unprecedented hype surrounding the genre with their memories of the last great Promising Technology. And second, more and more company heads are deciding whether to “tweet” under their own names, post leader-worthy thoughts on Facebook or Google+, pal around on LinkedIn, appear in a video destined for YouTube or blog under their own monikers on corporate web sites.

Such decisions face heads of more B2B companies as well as consumer-facing enterprises. BAE Systems Inc., for instance, is the $18-billion U.S.-based unit of the giant British defense and security contractor, and CEO Linda Hudson blessed her communications department’s full-on launch into social media last year as a way “to engage with a community of thousands each day, including the users of our products.” She did so even though information in her business “often is heavily restricted or nuanced, and a poor choice of words or a misplaced decimal can hurt shareholders or even endanger customers.”

Social media involvement is deepening quickly at most companies. So far, social media draws only about 2 percent of marketing expenditures at Atrion Networking Corp. even though the $60-million, Warwick, R.I.-based company is immersed in the infotech world. But Ford already is spending about 25 percent of its mammoth marketing budget to leverage its early auto-industry leadership in social media. And the overall trend is clear: Social media investments are gaining an average of 5 percent this year at the 600 member companies of the CMO Council, the most of any type of marketing, while surveyed companies typically are cutting at least 5 percent from print, television and outdoor advertising budgets.

This is happening even with most CEOs feeling that the answers they want aren’t keeping pace with the questions being kicked up by the rise of social media, including concerns about corporate transparency, digital security and brand vulnerability. One of the biggest criteria for their decisions is return on investment. The typically tiny financial outlays required to participate—a 20-something marketing staffer or two to field tweets and post tactically on social media networks, for example—can pay off hugely but also engender outsized PR disasters.

Many CEOs remain frustrated because practically no one has been able to quantify returns yet. “There is not [a single] way to answer the ROI question,” says Jason Breed, the social-media practice lead for Accenture. But David Sable insists the returns are immeasurably great. “Social media is an extension of social behavior, and social discourse is hugely important in business,” says the CEO of Young & Rubicam, one of the world’s largest marketing agencies. “That means the ROI is the highest in the world.”

So at this point, many companies are wading into the social-media milieu with CEOs relying only on anecdotal evidence and even gut feel. LinkedIn provided the high-quality candidates that led to the last three high-level hires by Atrion, for example. Language Line has tripled sales to $300 million over the last two years in large part by surrounding its over-the-phone interpretation services, for 911 dispatchers and others, with social media marketing and communications. “Language is a social activity,” says Louis Provenzano, CEO of the privately held concern based in Monterey, Calif., “so to us it’s very obvious that we need to be active in the growth of social media.”

Based in Paramus, N.J., Megabus.com is the largest unit of Coach USA, a unit of U.K.’s Stagecoach Group. Megabus has grown to a $120-million company in just five years by providing Internet purchase of low fares on intercity travel among 60 North American cities. And social media is in large part responsible for its takeoff, as company spending has risen to nearly $100,000 this year from about $20,000 the first year.

“It’s one of our largest demographics that tends to be involved in social media, of course,” says Dale Moser, CEO of Coach USA. “We use it to get our brand out there and for any promotions, announcements of new service areas—anything new and different. And then we watch how it spreads compared with what we’d have to pay for print or radio to get the same kinds of demographics. That would be hundreds of thousands of dollars each time, compared with very little for social media.”

Even huge, long-established companies without obvious connections to the social media zeitgeist also have gone all-in. They include Best Buy, where CEO Brian Dunn has become a world-leading apostle of social-media marketing. “Best Buy’s message has to be where people are, and today, that means being on social networks,” says the chief of the Minneapolis-based consumer-electronics and appliances retailer. Otherwise, a company “risks not being in the conversation at all. Over time, I believe that can be fatal to a business.”

But does that mean CEOs must be personally involved in “the conversation?” That decision can make the questions surrounding social media even more acute. Dunn’s unequivocal answer is, absolutely: His personal Twitter account has 5,000 followers. Jeff Joerres, CEO of the biggest private employer in the world, Glendale, Wis.-based Manpower, also tweets about important global labor-market news and has a personal Facebook page that has picked up more than 1,000 “friends”—including 700 Manpower recruiters around the world.

“I was at the World Economic Forum” in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, Joerres recalls, “and while I’m speaking about the shortage of talent in China, I also have a tweet going out with my 140-character observation about the latest U.S. unemployment-claims report. And look at those who followed it: newspapers, magazines, university people and human resources executives from all over. Many of them end up tweeting back or e-mailing me.”

Even banal social-media missives by CEOs can be effective attention-getters, conversation starters and brand builders, especially if the chief is communicating with a restricted group, maintains Eric Darr, executive vice president of the Harrisburg (Pa.) University of Science and Technology. “For those minutes, I feel like I have the CEO’s attention,” he says. “It makes you feel special, like having the CEO’s cell phone number.”

But many other CEOs remain ambivalent about devoting their own precious resources to social media—daunted by the time commitment, heeding security experts’ warnings about exposing their thoughts and movements digitally, wary of conceding any of the insularity that gives them some of their authority, concerned about making a costly mistake in some sort of social media forum, or just dubious about what they consider a fad that still has to prove itself.

The social media "Conversation" by Brian Solis.

BAE’s Hudson, for instance, has launched an internal blog but so far has refrained from using her own professional account on Twitter. “I’m not ready to travel down that road until I’m convinced that I have the time, and processes in place, to use the tool responsibly and effectively for the betterment of my business,” she says. “And once you initiate engagement on social media, expectations are high about recurring content—and it takes time.”

For Gary Hirshberg, vanguard of the organic-food movement and a hero to Millennials as founder of Stonyfield Farm, it seems that blogging and tweeting should come naturally. But they don’t to the CE-“Yo” of the Londonderry, N.H.-based yogurt company. Much of his misgiving is generational, believes the 49-year-old. He still believes in “personal conversations” and likes to go out and make about 150 speeches a year before audiences of real people. And, Hirshberg says, “I can never seem to get the time.” He has a blog, but he only makes about 10 entries a year.

But lately, social media has been growing even on Hirshberg. For fun, he filmed a video about the wonders of organics that was paired as a YouTube “rap-off” against another organic-company CEO, Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, and has picked up more than 72,000 views. He’s willing to use social media to parry opposing views on industry issues. And increasingly, Hirshberg allows staffers to excerpt his speeches and put them on his Facebook page.

“I have to admit that it’s unbelievably effective,” Hirshberg says. “I get more feedback from my Facebook page than from anything else I’m doing.”

Blog Guidelines

Hundreds of IBMers (though not CEO Sam Palmisano) have blogs. In 2005, IBM published a set of rules to guide IBMers who wanted to blog. The guidelines offer good general guidance for anyone—including CEOs—thinking about starting a blog.

1. Speak in the first person.
2. Respect copyright and fair use laws.
3. Safeguard confidential and proprietary information.
4. Protect company clients, business partners and suppliers.
5. Respect your audience and your coworkers.
6. Add value.
7. Don’t pick fights.
8. Be the first to respond to your own mistakes.
9. Adopt a warm, open and approachable tone.

Key Takeaways

1. Social media isn’t going away—CEOs need to decide how to handle the medium.
2. ROI numbers and other data mostly aren’t available. CEOs must rely on other criteria.
3. Personal involvement is a separate consideration from corporate involvement.
4. Despite the challenges, an increasing number of CEOs are opting to engage in some form of social media.

Republished by permission of Chief Executive Group.

The landmark research paper from Wedbush takes a look at it this way:

• One Million B.C. – 1993: The Offline World, moved slowly, major winners included Walmart.
• 1994 – 2009: The First Internet, moved much faster than The Offline World, major winners included Amazon and notably few of the winners from The Offline World.
• 2010 – ????: The Second Internet, moves much faster than First Internet, is much bigger than the First Internet, major winners include such companies as Huffington Post, Quora, Zynga, Kabam … and surprisingly few of the winners from the First Internet.

Wedbush believes that that most First Internet winners will not transition to become Second Internet winners, partly because the new and more social media-oriented players have a significant head-start while the more recognized First Internet leaders are asleep at the wheel.

credit: Wedbush Securities

Wedbush says successful Second Internet companies are powered by similar features, including:

• Platforms open their API to developers, giving code developers essential building blocks to enhance a site or application.
• Continuous and rapid pace of innovation (such as Facebook and Huffington Post).
• The company/brand must listen to the dialogue and participate with customers.
• Customer contribution is a large percent of the value/experience.
• Every customer has a personalized experience.
• Social graph connections drive discovery rather than search.

Not surprisingly, old and more traditional conventions – such as advertising and typical public relations – are less influential or effective in the Second Internet unless cleverly integrated with online shared content, comments, news, photos, video and discussions … and a greater “voice” for stakeholders.

What I found to be particularly interesting was Wedbush’s explanation of how Huffington Post has exploded to become one of the leading online news sources, eclipsing most other more traditional news organizations and challenging even The New York Times.

Wedbush shows how a typical Huffington Post lead story may be written by the AP, with content coming from CNN, Reuters, Fox News, MSNBC and others. People can debate the quality of the content, but you don’t become the thirty-third most trafficked site unless a lot of people approve of the content you are providing. Much of Huffington Post is driven by cleverly written search engine friendly headlines and the social media connections of users.

Click here to download a PDF of the Wedbush research.

I’m in awe of trend-setters – like Tony Hsieh of Zappos and David Pogue of the New York Times – who really know the key importance of listening to their audiences, using all the tools of social media and taking the time from their busy schedules to personally get involved and interact.

On the other hand, countless organizations advertise to hire a “social media expert,” generally one entry level person to handle all of the company’s social media outreach. That’s an approach doomed from the start.

Successful social media in 2011 – the use of social media that captures the spotlight for companies, organizations, issues and people – is going to be more of the Hsieh/Pogue style … organic and authentic.

Teamwork

For an organization to seek social media prominence in 2011, it will need to be an internal team effort with everyone involved. Yeah, that means everyone … everyday … from the CEO or Executive Director on down the org chart to you and me. And, this is important … a company must permit reasonable time for employees to boost their organization through social media.

1. Facebook – If a company wants visibility on Facebook, it must create a meaningful Facebook page that’s interesting and engaging … and the company must ask each employee to spend a few minutes each day sharing something on that Facebook page. Employees, in turn, must encourage friends, colleagues and vendors to get involved in the Facebook page.
2. Twitter – Same approach as with Facebook. Create a cacophony of voices on Twitter to build awareness for your news or what’s on your mind.  It’s not just one “official” Twitter account but many.
3. Email – Every email signature at a company must contain Facebook and Twitter links … as well as to the organization’s news site, if it has one. Email signatures can make for terrific collateral promotion.
4. Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr, YouTube, etc. – Social media is a galaxy of online tools, many of them increasingly powerful. Become expert with at least a half dozen of them, especially using video to tell your story.
5. Bloggers – For any industry, issue, subject or business sector, there are bloggers looking for things to write about. Friend bloggers in 2010. If you are in a tech field, friend bloggers who write about your industry. If you are in the food industry, friend bloggers who cover your part of the food industry. Bloggers are amazingly easy to contact, and blogging in general is having increased influence on news, perceptions and issues online.

Let me note that this team approach to social media will deliver a better quality of audience engagement, greater understanding of the competitive landscape and a better investment of time than simply hiring one of the many guru start-ups that focus on numbers and rarely dwell on quality … and ultimately may not have any better savvy about social media than you.

Winners will be differentiated from losers in 2011 by how effectively individuals, companies and organizations understand and use social media. It’s never been about promoting or marketing but rather engaging, listening and conversations. The outfit that makes it a team effort will win.

“It still amazes me how big agencies are still using Flash… Do they not know mobile is the future?“

Patten is absolutely right … mobile is the future, and most mobile devices (iPad, iPhones, Blackberrys, etc.) are not Flash compatible.

Northrop Grumman's Flash-driven empty home page, viewed on iPad.

Big creative, PR and ad agencies love to sell clients on websites chock-full of Flash features. It’s in their bag of tricks – like tossing a handful of glitter in the air to make clients gleeful with “ohs” and “ahs.”

For the agencies, selling Flash helps jack up the cost … and profits … for online projects. Yet, in the rush to connect with audiences … many of whom are online through mobile devices … Flash is increasingly outdated and incompatible.

Take, for example, Northrop Grumman, the big defense contractor. They advertise programs through online news sites, like The Washington Post, that link to Northrop’s home page where nothing of substance shows up when viewed on an iPad. Northrop’s key message is just a blank, gray box on the site.

I believe many agencies push Flash on understandably less than tech-savvy clients who trust alleged agency expertise. Perhaps the agency is knowingly only selling glitter in return.

On the other hand, maybe Patten is correct in suggesting that some agencies just are not be all that savvy themselves about today’s evolving online environment.

The question is … Why? Why the need not only to follow Lindsay Lohan’s troubled life through the slick magazines, but, also, why the need to gather as many Twitter followers as possible? Increasing we are seeing people with no particular expertise or accomplishments come out of nowhere to become sought-after online social media and blogging stars with a multitude of wide-eyed followers.

We can’t blame it on the media because we all … or nearly all … are culpable … involved in this behavior.

As an author who has written four books on the media and communications, I’m on a quest for answers and understanding.

What got my attention was a story by Vanessa Richmond in The Tyee, a news blog in British Columbia that focuses on culture and the arts. Vanessa recently wrote a piece about the guileless documentary, Teenage Paparazzo. Vanessa has kindly given me permission to repost her story here. It’s a fascinating read:

By Vanessa Richmond ~

Oh the roller coaster of addiction! Lindsay Lohan, after several stints in rehab and jail, has just failed one of her daily drug tests, and could now face legal punishment. She says addiction is a serious disease, but she’s taking responsibility and will face whatever consequences.

What’s that, you say? You don’t care? You don’t even know her?

Well, that’s partly true. You might have celebrity fatigue or annoyance. You might reject the systems that create it: capitalism, big media, consumerism, Americanism. You might be secretly resentful and jealous. But it’s pretty unlikely you don’t know who “Lindsay” or “LiLo” is, and don’t actually care at all. In fact, it might actually be culturally, psychologically and anthropologically next to impossible to not care. Even men, more than ever, are tuning in to celebrity gossip (the Tiger Woods saga migrated male sports audiences to the tabloids, the new, so-called poparazzi). The questions are: why do we care, and what are we are gonna do about it?

So says a new documentary by… a celebrity.

Adrian Grenier gets the media's attention.

In Teenage Paparazzo, Adrian Grenier (star of HBO’s Entourage) gets blinded by the flash of a 14 year-old photographer, and decides to turn the camera on him. What on earth is going on that a pre-pubescent kid is out in the middle of the night stalking then blinding celebrities in order to sell photos to a hungry audience? Grenier wonders.

Grenier follows Austin Visschedyk for two years, during which time, Grenier’s lens inadvertently makes Visschedyk into a minor celebrity and a major brat, both of which the two of them deal with by the end.

Jet-fueled gossip

Just as interesting as the actual story are the people Grenier interviews to explain the phenomenon, beginning with James Hosney, a film historian at the American Film Institute. Hosney says that this type of celebrity and the paparazzi that follows and fuels it is very recent. Under the studio system, the studio manufactured stars and had a heavy hand in any information released about their personal lives. “You didn’t know anything about them other than what the studio wanted you to know,” he tells Grenier.

But now, with the Internet, someone simply says something, and it’s true, or at least known by millions. And audiences, of course, tend to gravitate to stories about celebrities’ personal lives, rosy or not, and spontaneous, real life shots, not stand-and-smile shots from premiers and movie promo packs.

Perez Hilton, one of the biggest exploiters of celebrity Internet gossip, says in the film, he doesn’t “make things up knowingly, but having strong opinions is perfectly acceptable.” (And if you’ve been to his site, the word “opinion” is easily interchangeable with supposed “fact.”) But Hilton kind of shrugs and smiles, and says that while not everyone agrees with what he does, he gets up to 10 million unique visitors a day.

The other reason for increased fame of a few, and the increased sizes of the audiences that follow them, is bigger big media. Alec Baldwin wryly explains what he infamously experienced first hand a couple of years ago when he was doing publicity for a movie, and landed in the tabloids. “So you go to work at a studio, which… has a TV arm and a movie arm… While you’re making a movie… they want you to go do an interview with them, so they’re going to double dip you. We’re going to make money off you twice: we’re gonna sell tickets to the movie you’re in, then we’re gonna put you on a TV show to talk about the movie, then we’re gonna sell commercials of you talking about the movie, also to make money. And down the hall, there’s a [gossip publication] arm that’s trying to bury you. So when I did The Departed for Warner Brothers, [the gossip publication] was shoving it up my ass one brick at a time.”

But it’s more than big media’s machinations and money grubbing that make celebrities big. People have to want to see and read about TMZ shoving a brick up Alec Baldwin’s you-know-what. Baldwin’s tirade at his daughter must have resonated with people for psychological and anthropological reasons.

Why you can’t look away

Even if we don’t think we care and don’t want to care, “some part of us… and that’s not the conscious part of us, it’s the deep-rooted part of us” pays attention, says Jake Halpern, author of Fame Junkies, who’s also featured in the documentary. “I think it’s because human beings since time immemorial have benefited from watching powerful people, and that’s now hard-wired into our brains.”

He cites a recent study out of Duke University with monkeys. “What they found is that these monkeys will actually pass up the opportunity for food, they will go hungry, in order to stare at pictures of the dominant monkeys in their troupe. The only other pictures they gave up food to look at were close up shots of the hind quarters of females.”

He adds, “The thinking is that nowadays… that instinct has just kind of gone awry.”

But Grenier thinks it’s too easy to reduce this to monkey business. Halpern continues by explaining what psychologists call parasocial relationships, which are the “weird, one-way relationships where we don’t actually know the people on TV but we think we do.” Our brains have the same response to them as to people we actually know.

He says research that shows people have fewer family dinners together, join fewer clubs and have fewer picnics. And more people than ever live alone. “We’re lonely… but what we do have is these fake relationships with people we think we know from TV and the movies. And magazines like Us Weekly play right into that. It’s all first name: it’s all Brad and Angelina and Tom. And these people, they’re just like us… it makes us feel that we’re part of something. But of course, we’re not. We’re not part of it.”

The editors at one gossip magazine talk to Grenier about how they consciously pick photos where the celebrity is looking right into the camera (at “us”) in a casual way as if they know us. So that we feel like we’re friends.

But in fact these parasocial relationships make us even lonelier. While we put out, while we feel like we know them, we don’t get anything back.

“There’s a piece of this that’s serious celebrity envy,” says Thomas de Zengotita, a professor of media studies at NYU and author of Mediated.

“In this society, if you’re not famous, there’s a certain sense, a certain very real sense in which you don’t exist.”

He then compares the kind of attention we give celebrities to a kind of emotional market transaction. “Even mammals, puppies, like attention. But only humans need acknowledgement. They need to be recognized. And this is fundamental to human nature, to the human condition.”

A star in your own tribe

He says when we lived in tribes, in small groups, everyone knew everyone. And that meant everyone got acknowledgement and was famous.

“You have to think of the evolution and development of media of all kinds in all societies as taking the fame and the acknowledgement that used to be everybody’s, and somehow reassigning it to only a few people. And there’s a fundamental sort of robbery that goes on.”

So celebrities are taking the attention that we and our friends and families need, and leaving us starving and lonely.

But there is still a social role that celebrity plays, according to Henry Jenkins, a professor of media studies at MIT, as the fodder for gossip. “As we move from a society of small towns where people gossiped about the town drunk, to the era of the Internet, we can’t choose to talk about our aunt or uncle or the guy down the street because we don’t share that in common. We only share [celebrities] in common.”

A celebrity’s job is to be the subject of gossip. “When we gossip about someone, the person we’re talking about is actually much less important than the exchange that happens between us. We’re using that other person — the celebrity, the town whore, whatever — as a vehicle to share values with each other and sort through the issues that matter.”

The celebrity stories that become the most popular, that stick, are the ones that give us the material to talk about something that matters to us at that particular time, “that speaks to the core conflicts the culture is going through,” he says.

So back to Lindsay, and the fact that her story is at or near the top of most tabs this week. When I mentioned the newest installment in the saga to people, some started talking about how difficult addiction is. A few speculated that it’s brought on by loneliness and stress. A few told their own stories of addiction and how they did or didn’t manage to kick it. But more have talked about the consequences of over-ambitious, over-involved parenting, of trying to make your kid live out your dreams, of taking from them instead of giving. A few have told stories about a kid they know with a stage (or hockey) parent where things are ugly.

There’s value in that discussion. We’re talking about aspects of Lindsay’s story that matter to us, that resonate with our experiences, or that help us think through current issues in our lives, that might even lead us to take action, that make meaning, that create community.

So in the end, we’re using celebrity-based gossip to create small connections between real people. And those conversations, ironically, are a small antidote to the very lonely and disconnected world that celebrity culture has a big hand in creating.

However, to really solve the problem, to make things real, Grenier, who’s still at work shooting Entourage, thinks we have to turn off the camera.

Used with permission of Vanessa Richmond.

Social media ... Paris cafe style.

The online tools for social media are, unquestionably, invaluable to enhance awareness amid all of today’s noise and competitive clutter. But, it’s not a space for beginners.

Social media is a place for nuance, subtlety, interaction and transparency … all skills acquired by experience and accomplishment.

Most of all, social media is not about you … because, as harsh as it sounds, no one cares about you or your company. People only care about the value to themselves of your products or services. The trick is to convince people of the value you offer.

Consider the challenge a company faces when introducing a new product. Old styles of marketing and promotion are far less effective today. Audiences are skeptical of advertising; they want endorsement from friends or people they respect, such as bloggers. Expensive advertising no longer has the influence it once had. But a third party voice in the online social media world has real power.

If a company or organization uses social media merely to direct people to visit a typical “look-at-us-and-aren’t-we-great!” type of website, no one will return a second time, and your brand image risks tarnishes.

On the other hand, if you credibly become the center of all news and conversation within your particular industry, business channel or area of expertise, it gives your social media initiative valid and meaningful purpose … because you are no longer shouting for attention but sharing information. That’s when the full potential of social media really comes into play.

So … how is this accomplished? Create a news site that is not so much about your company or organization but rather the center of news about which you are on expert. Be recognized as the expert and applauded for openness. Use online social media to promote that. It works.

These are people who are hired by motion picture companies, car makers, PR-marketing-advertising agencies, clothing designers, computer makers, perfume companies, partisan special interests and anyone with an agenda or something to sell. Their job is to find ways to manipulate what you and I think through online social media.

Even though some pundits have said the media has been democratized by the digital revolution, there is lots of pure propaganda being preached, manipulated and presented those who work nonstop on the “shadowy side” – twisting perceptions and ideas on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace and, yes, places like Yelp.

We never know really who is in the shadows, promoting an agenda. An innocent-sounding yet anonymous “international flight attendant” on Twitter who promotes right-wing hate nonstop may actually be a college kid at a computer screen in DC or London, getting paid hourly to work his way through school and just working off a sheet of talking points. Hey, it’s just a job.

Yelp is at the center of controversy now for allegedly offering to sell more favorable reviews of business while burying critical comments. If half of what is being written is true today about Yelp’s efforts to make money by manipulating reviews, the company’s credibility in the online social media world is seriously damaged.

Social media is facing a showdown with trust. What online resource can be trusted? If a service, like Yelp, stumbles once, can it regain our trust?

Can we trust what we read on Twitter? Perhaps but only if we know the source and dismiss those with vague-sounding profiles and no online link.

We know about Yelp because the alleged behavior by some of their sales people got caught publicly. But each second of every hour, hundreds are working on the shadowy side of social media to influence how we think.

Can we today trust Yelp? The jury is out, and I don’t believe it looks good. Can we trust social media? Perhaps but only those who operate out in the open in a transparent manner.