OhMy News is a very popular South Korean news website with as many readers (700K
per day) as any large
U.S.
news outlet. It relies 100% on citizen journalists to report the news; OhMy’s only
staff is comprised of a handful of professional copyeditors.
Articles reach prominence digg-style, via
a user voting system.
To date, Consumer Generated Content (CGM) has been seen as
a wave of craptastic YouTube videos, easy-come/easy-go blogs, inane MySpace chatter,
podcasts, etc. Revere it or revile it, CGM is
a BIG wave; it cannot be ignored; its “wavelets” (content, producers, mediatypes)
will get ever-more sophisticated… But so far, CGM has not posed an outsized threat
to mainstream content sources (Hollywood,
MSM, MTV, etc.).
Except for OhMy News.
It’s as good as it needs to be.
It’s accurate, timely, popular, profitable. It’s
probably what the BBC 2.0 project strives to be; a model for journalism in the dawning
CGM era.
So here’s the
Question of the Millennium for PR types:
what if every journalism outlet in the
U.S. morphed into an OhMy clone?
First off, we’ll end our subscriptions to journalist-tracking
services like
Bacons.
You’re on your own, kid. There will always
be “professional citizen journalists” like
Foremski and a cadre of A-List bloggers to impress, but their ranks are likely
to thin out. The reporter you’ll need to impress
could be your dog-walker, or your pesky kid-sister, or the butcher...you won’t know
til it’s too late; the article is posted, amigo.
So what can we do to supplement PR's traditional capabilities?
A few ideas spring to mind, but we’ll need more:
- Event planning – manufacture a buzzworthy gig
Word-of-Mouth Marketing – tell your friends! (And your dog-walker, butcher,
sister…)- Blogger Relations –
already underway - Blog Monitoring -
already underway
Purpose-Built Blogs (CEO, news-based, crisis-made, etc.)
Press Release-As-Content – for the media remixing needs of the media- and
blogopshere- Podcasts
– “timeshift your content” - Remixable
Media – it’s not just the press release; we can produce scads of cool content - Psychological Counseling – I am only half-joking; it will
not be easy for the clients to offer up their content in an easily remixable
format (to "set
it free"), only to watch their message and content get hacked & contorted
by legions of amateur journalists and bloggers!
What do you think YOU’LL be doing, 5 years from now?