All props to Eli, but the stars of the Super Bowl were a set and an ad.

With more precision than the Giants’ final drive to win the game, the “show-technology” company LMG rolled out nearly 800 custom-constructed LED tiles, built an electronic set over one-third of the football field, and rigged 32 projectors 150 feet above the set in less than seven minutes.

The display of imagery, video and 3D effects that followed — living VOGUE magazine covers, reverberating speakers and a heavenly universe — dazzled. Not even production excess, Madonna, M.I.A.’s middle finger, a pageant wish for “world peace” or something called LMFAO could ruin the twelve-minute media spectacle known as the halftime show.

Then came Clint. “Halftime for the Auto Industry” brought a lump to the throat of this former Detroiter with a gritty, reality metaphor about struggle and perseverance. The spot, more compelling than the half of football that preceded it, roiled the gods of football. Google and You Tube pulled the video after the NFL apparently suffered a concussion, filing a copyright claim that the commercial was political. Can’t have emotional honesty in the Super Bowl; it might draw attention from a violent sport, entertainers shooting us the bird, and wardrobe malfunctions. Fortunately, the video is back up today.

A sequel to the pulsating, Eminem “Imported from Detroit” campaign by Wieden+Kennedy, “Halftime” is rich with the unapologetic this-is-who-we-are-and-this-is-what-we-do attitude that made me proud to work in the Motor City. A pretty good metaphor for America, too, if you want to take it there.

Spend a little time at the Googleplex and you begin to believe that business is all fun-and-games and that The Life Google serves a better world.

Paul Allen’s personal spaceship hangs from the ceiling of Building 43. An organic garden supplies produce for healthy cafes across the Mountain View, Ca. campus. There are foosball tables, ping-pong tables and volleyball courts for creative play. There are massage chairs for relaxing; gyms for yoga, dancing and workouts. There are bikes and scooters for people-powered travel between buildings, and a winding path through a whimsical sculpture garden for dog-walking and contemplative jogs. The cubes, yurts and huddle rooms are filled with whiteboards, laptops, lava lamps and large, inflatable balls. Even the men’s rooms are Googlized; messages about groups working on complex problems hang above urinals as if to divert attention from the mundane business below to more Google-worthy issues at eye-level … and the organ between the ears.

I like the environment, but The Atlantic’s James Fallows so loves the the place that he believes Googlers can solve the problem that’s on so many minds these days. He writes that he’s spent a lot of time at the Googleplex over the past year talking with Google strategists and engineers about saving newspapers.

No doubt he passed the garden where
a bronze casting of a T Rex fossil,
a gift from founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, forages among the plants. Fallows has so thoroughly bought
into the cult of Google he reports the company is devising ways to save newspapers from becoming the next dinosaur in the garden.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media,” he writes.

Which is entirely wrong.

“Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or why the company now considers journalism’s survival crucial to its own prospects.”

Which is incredibly naive.

Fallows loses his balance assuming that Google can actually save newspapers. Or wants to. He bought what Google CEO Eric Schmidt sold to newspaper editors at their convention last month: the survival of high-quality journalism is “essential to the functioning of modern democracy.” Like newspaper editors didn’t already believe that?

Fallows acknowledges Schmidt is a family friend and an Atlantic reader. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows. He spends many pages arguing that Google is trying to save newspapers rather than killing them.

Okay, Google is working with some newspapers planning to put their content behind paywalls. Those Google engineers are such good friends of journalism and democracy. And their “permanent beta” culture is so innovative ….

But there are a few other reasons, too.

Google knows newspapers are good for Google because they generate information people want to search for. Google gets all the revenue from all those little ads, formerly known as classifieds, that run next to search returns. You know, those ads that paid for the Googleplex just as publishers were shedding reporters. The paywall is another way to get a piece, one story at a time.

Google would like nothing better than for newspapers to stop printing and start selling online ads for as much money as print ads. That has never happened, nor is it likely to happen. Google wants the money anyway, no matter how much or how little. It covets display ads that count for most of newspapers’ remaining revenue. Google would gets its piece through its its ad-serving platform, DoubleClick, which it acquired three years ago and has now integrated in Google systems.

Fallows is right to suggest that craigslist, more than Google, undermined the classifieds money-machine. Craig Newmark’s crime was to make classifieds free and interactive, a wry play that made obsolete a highly-profitable marketplace in the back pages of the daily paper. Google is responsible for ruining the rest of it. Its algorithms blew up the newspaper bundle, exploding content into atoms. Context was vaporized. Newspapers have been unable to reassemble the pieces in a meaningful way or find a price low enough to charge for them. The Humpty Dumpty problem.

Now Google says it is willing to help. What it is unwilling to do is admit that it is culpable. Rather, its execs maintain that Google actually serves newspapers by driving traffic to their web sites from searches. Google has maintained that newspapers ought to charge a lot for the advertising on those pages, but a viable market has yet to materialize for most. So it goes like this:

First, Google unbundles content from the newspaper package and sells it off a piece at a time.

Next, it hastens the dismantling of physical operations — paper, ink, delivery trucks, production and the jobs that support them — as unnecessary, recurring costs of distribution. You get to find your news on Google without getting your hands dirty.

Then, it grabs display ads by serving them through DoubleClick and forcing online newspapers to create more expensive ads since newspapers would have to share ad revenue with Google.

Take that, Apple. Just like the iPad or iTunes, Google could try to impose controls on content-distribution platforms that yield revenue. Let’s take the big slice from those desperate publishers. Who’s your boy: Eric or Steve?

The survival of high-quality journalism? The functioning of modern democracy?
Let’s not leave those questions to the likes of Eric Schmidt, Steve Jobs or James Fallows. They confuse important questions with current cliches.

We don’t need lava lamps or inflatable balls to cool-out a business that no longer works.
Journalism and democracy will survive and flourish in new forms and formats that are emerging. That’s an idea worth the investment.

Charlton Heston channels Moses. Steve Jobs assumes a higher authority. Crazy guys throw down an iPad at batting practice. All this and more in The Throwdown Video, a preview of Tabula Rasa. Check it out on the program page and on YouTube.

I am excited to announce the launch of a new project that we are calling WeThink.

What is it? WeThink is a conversation about innovation and the future — an effort to explore new ideas and promote solutions to the challenges that our society is facing.

What’s the big deal? If you follow our work here at all, you’ll know that We Media is a movement – a concept – that helps explain how we know what we know, who we trust, and how we learn. It’s about power of the community. We Media is part of the infinite quest to harness the power of media, communication and human ingenuity for common good. And, well, We Media changes everything.  We Media changes the way we innovate.  We Media changes how we create, sustain, and grow successful ventures. We Media enhances the structures, models and economies that support human communication, interaction and achievement.  And through that, We Media challenges us to review our existing ways of operating, break apart our established structures, and re-build our approach to the future.  These changes impact all of us, and they are forcing each of us to find new ways of thinking about… well, everything.

What are you talking about? I have this crazy idea that we need to re-think the way we create, support, and sustain ventures.  We need to re-think how we innovate.  What we are doing isn’t working anymore – not as well as it should – and we need to try something different.  That means re-considering what kinds of companies and organizations are needed today, in response to the massive changes we are seeing in our society as a result of the influence that technology and the internet are having on our culture.  That means re-structuring how ventures, both for-profit and social in nature, are funded and managed.  That means re-assessing what success looks like for new companies and organizations, as well as re-considering how we measure progress of existing organizations against our needs in society.  And that means re-building the whole infrastructure of innovation… from how we teach it, promote it, cover it in the media, what skills we value, who gets to serve as gatekeepers, and more.

How will it work? Over the next year we will collect and share new ideas, highlight different approaches, ask tough questions, and propose solutions. We will lead a new and different kind of discussion about innovation. Everywhere we go we will be looking for new issues to discuss and new ideas to consider.  Everyone we talk to or encounter is invited to contribute their experience or perspective to help power this effort.  And all those ideas and suggestions, approaches and solutions will be shared.  They’ll be posted online.  They’ll be open to feedback.  They’ll be mashed up with other thoughts.  At the end of a year, our plan is to pull together a ‘solutions book’ that helps to support, and sustain, a vibrant and game-changing discussion going forward.  The rest we will figure out as we go.

The first few ideas and questions will be posted in the next several days.  So, stay tuned — the fun is just beginning.

Will corporate media become journalism? Or just resemble it?

Richard Sambrook, head of BBC Global News since 2004, is saying goodbye to one of the world’s most influential jobs in journalism, and hello to, what should I say – the murky, spin-meisterly, lucrative? – world of public relations. Or should that be creative, innovative and transformational?

On the one hand – yes, and yes, all of the above. He’s announced he’s joining Edelman PR as vice chairman, based in London.

On the other hand – regarding what’s behind him and what’s ahead – we’ll see. We’ll also talk about it at We Media Miami next month, when Richard will join me for a one-on-one conversation during our opening reception there. (Register here.)

Ingrid Lunden of PaidContent got it half right when she noted the significance of his new gig: that big journalism institutions like the BBC are shedding talent, and big companies are gaining it. True enough, but nothing new there – although Sambrook’s seniority and prominence make his hiring a real “get” for Richard Edelman, CEO of the privately-held PR firm.

But there’s a second and equally significant sign of the times in Sambrook’s new role. You need to look at what he’ll be doing: CREATING content.

Sambrook understands, as well as anyone I know, the shifting patterns of news and knowledge. He understands that companies, along with governments, NGOs, sports leagues and virtually all institutions, are becoming media entities in their own right. Edelman, like other global PR firms, is trying to recast itself as a creative and strategic consulting agency for the We Media world – one in which spin, crisis management and distribution of a finely-honed message through journalists and their traditional media outlets are among a much broader menu of communication services on offer, with many others rising in prominence and value, like word of mouth marketing, manufacture and monitoring of buzz, and design-and-production of cutting-edge digital content for distribution, sharing and discussion anywhere.

Sambrook will be Edelman’s chief content officer, overseeing creation of multimedia for Edelman clients – for distribution across any and all platforms. He explained the move in his blog:

Some people will be surprised that a journalist who has stuck his neck out on many occasions for the independence of news media has joined a PR company. It misses the point. Edelman are redefining corporate communications and growing fast. As digital media explodes traditional channels, they are exploiting the new opportunities that are opening up.

Readers of PRWeek debated whether hiring a top-notch journalist was good for the PR business, or just window-dressing to impress clients and help them meet more journalists, to which Sambrook’s new boss at Edelman, David Brain, replied, “He’s been hired to help us move into a new area…one of content. The skills required for that are journalistic and editorial.”

Given Sambrook’s background and prominence as a journalist, this leads to some obvious questions, or maybe some unfair burdens for someone who’s simply looking for a new creative challenge with new people. Will those branded content experiences he helps produce for Edelman and its clients be trusted by anyone other than the clients? Will their values and point of view be transparent? Will they inform us – and help us make informed decisions? Will they be journalistic? Or will they simply be, at best, entertaining, slick and well done? We’ll see – and talk about it with Richard in Miami.

A few months after three, young software architects launched an obscure social networking and microblogging service, students at a rural Virginia university sent short messages to their friends from their PCs and cell phones as they hid from a gunman who opened fire in classrooms and a dorm.

“Everything you thought you knew about media has changed,” we wrote in a report that followed the shootings at Virginia Tech. We called it “The Reckoning,” a moment when news moved into the hands of tech-enabled people who were directly impacted by it, and was spread through networks of friends and followers. As a result of this simple, new thing called “Twitter,” we forecast that news would never be the same.

That was in January 2007. Following initial resistance, virtually every news organization now uses Twitter to spread the news of its reporters — ironic because the SMS-based communications system is perceived by most news outlets as a threat. Now comes another reckoning. Twitter has developed a new way to find useful and relevant tweets by offering a refined version called “local trends”– lists of tweets bearing popular keywords.

The Twitter feature is reliant on the accurate location of a Twitterer. When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge: everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses. The service is just now emerging. As in January 2007, the implications for traditional content providers seem apparent, particularly for local news sites that have scaled operations for hyper-local strategies.

Twitter has long offered users a list of marginally useful trending topics such as “Haiti” or “Super Bowl.” The topics are largely irrelevant, a cut above spam. But soon Twitter can suggest location-centric tweets. It can recommend whom you should follow based on geographic community, influence or affinity. Twitter’s value continues to expand as it becomes a personal source for local news and information, an alternative to institutional media.

Twitter is also working on improving its system for recommending what Twitterers follow. It has always suggested prominent Twitterers, but it recently launched a suggestions page using algorithms that identify clusters of people with similar interests.

The moves come as a new analysis shows that the number of Twitter users soared to about 75 million in December 2009 from fewer than five million one year earlier. Twitter emphasized its news and information network strategy in November 2009 by changing the question it asks users for status updates from “What are you doing?” to “What’s happening?”

Since then, Twitter has been widely applied in campaigning, education, public relations, marketing, space exploration, surveying, and dissent. Research reported in New Scientist finds that instant messaging systems like Twitter now do a better job of disseminating information during emergencies than either traditional news media or government emergency services — a finding validated by events following the earthquake in Haiti.

A world of Twitter developers are at it again. Can incumbents react quickly and apply Twitter’s expanding portfolio of apps, tools and services? It has taken three years for the media formerly known as mainstream to reluctantly embrace the first wave of social media. Here comes the next wave.

My day is now a little less sucky thanks to an invitation from Blogads founder Henry Copeland (aka @HC): SUXORZ: the worst social media campaigns of ’09.

Henry and friends will select the worst of the worst at an event Feb. 3 in New York:

Braving hate-mail after naming ’08′s “winners,” the Suxorz panel returns to dissect the twelve worst social media and web 2.0 ad campaigns of ’09. Together, we’ll shame the marketers who abuse people-powered media.

The Suxorz occurs in three rounds: each panelists talks for a couple of minutes about an ’09 social media campaign they hate, maybe showing a slide or Youtube clip, then the drunken mob audience votes on the worst campaign of that round. Finally, we revisit each rounds’ winner and vote on the grand champion Suxorz campaign.

Nominees include Pepsi, @insidethebcs, Charmin, Habitat and Pampers.

Join the Facebook group or register here.

Over on my Fast Company Experts blog, I offered some thoughts on the new Cone Nonprofit Power Brand 100 Study.  Here is how my post begins:

Cone Inc released their “Cone Nonprofit Power Brand 100” report yesterday – in which it valued (and ranked) the brands of some of America’s leading social, environmental and animal organizations.  Not surprisingly, the report is already generating a lot of buzz.  People mostly want to talk about which charities were ranked and which ones weren’t, or who scored highest on the list (and why).  But I think that is the wrong discussion to have.  I want to focus on something else – the very concept of brand, and its importance for nonprofit organizations, in today’s connected society.

Go read the full post, and let me know what you think.

Remember when The Times ran those profitable, short “liners,” commercial and personal ads, at the bottom of front-page news columns in the print editions? It took years for editors to get them off. Times change. See today’s homepage.

BTB: I captured the musical iPhone animation with Jing, new software to grab images and video off the Web. Cool, free and easy to learn. But video is jerky on the free version and it doesn’t scale when you embed in WordPress; Andrew spent an hour coaxing the code, but … So an image grab of the invasive ad on the NYT home page follows.

The first full day of WeMedia presented interesting challenges and opportunities regarding the state of new media, social change, and journalism. Conversations revolved around the future of traditional media, expanding the scope of social media companies to facilitate social change, how to more effectively run a business, how to reach target audiences, and more. As a social entrepreneur working at the intersection of social media, business, and international development, I was thrilled to see the range and depth of issues addressed. Representatives from the BBC, Ashoka, NPR, CNN, Fast Company, Global Voices, and Ushahidi were all present. As the founder of BOP Source and a writer for NextBillion.net, I was excited to be part of the conversation and for this post I will share some key points and take-aways from one session in particular, “Reinventing Advertising.”

“Reinventing Advertising” looked at what the changing landscape of social media means for businesses, their reliance on advertising, and what they can do to better engage consumers. The workshop was facilitated beautifully by Marck Walsh of GeniusRocket and the panelists were Joe Marchese of SocialVibe, Melissa Godis of Crispin+Porter, and Sheryl Catell of LGD Communications.

The panel echoed many themes we are all familiar with: How do we make money from ads? Do ads belong on social networks? How do we get consumers excited about our brands so that they will welcome and endorse the presence of our ads on their sites?

Melissa represented the “agency” perspective and shared what I thought was the most important take-away: we must create tools for customers to engage with. Tools invite the customer into a conversation and educate them about products. Sheryl echoed the point by emphasizing that the days of banner ads will soon be over. I did not hear a framework emerge for what tools work best or how to create such tools, as we focused mostly on the questions and less so on answers. (Afterall, if we had the answers, we probably would not have needed a session on “Reinventing Advertising”).

Joe made the excellent point that everyone wants their ads to be viral sensations–the homemade video that is cheap to produce, rakes in millions, and becomes a “cultural phenomenon.” I often wonder about what features or qualities make a video viral; Joe thinks it at least has to be be funny, edgy, or scary, and does not necessarily have to carry the brand message. Check out the role of memes, if you’re not already familiar with the concept.

When we got on the topic of whether or not political campaigns will ever mimic consumer marketing campaigns, there were heated responses. Many asserted that Obama’s campaign was brilliantly executed and a shining example for companies.  Others thought that political campaigns are not quite there yet, but that both have a lot to learn from each other.

We covered a variety of topics, as you can tell, and the conversations were interesting and engaging. I was particularly impressed by SocialVibe’s ability to connect with youth through branding and at the same time empower them to be social change agents. SocialVibe seems to have their fingers on the pulse of youth culture and are using that knowledge and that userbase to positively impact the world, through young, MySpace-addicted, pop-culture-loving teenagers.

At a time when newspapers are hemorrhaging employees and questioning their survival, they are adopting a more stable role in the community through new media – namely, citizen journalism. Newspapers are helping communities connect, reach out, learn more about their resources through their sites. The goal is to foster a way to make the community dependent on the service, like allowing citizens to connect at any hour. They could exchange tips, or, for example, resources for young professionals to establish roots in their new city.

This was a focus of the uber-packed (about a dozen were left without a chair) ‘How News Companies Can Change’ workshop on Wednesday and getting the public addicted to the story.

The question, though, was creating innovative projects for news companies that fit into their mission and are sustainable.

This forces newspapers to test their assumptions. Are traditional media companies innovative by partnering with Twitter or Facebook? No, said Jennifer Carroll of Gannett. Newspapers use the technologies to tap into the communities they’re trying to reach.

Neil Budde of DailyMe spoke about looking at distribution and destination. Considering them both. Looking at the niches and groups out there to distribute your content and brand. Help people create their own destination with a flavor of your content. Individuals can become editors, shape the content, create packages and content around moms or young professionals in Rochester, to be specific.

Ordinary citizens can fill news vacuums in creative ways, said Jan Schaffer of J-Lab. For example, niche sites and regional investigative sites starting out, like the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism in Madison.

CNN‘s David Bohrman said the network ‘threw away the old-rule book” from the campaigns to Election Night to Inauguration Day. Debates looked different by bringing in YouTube. By embracing new technologies, younger viewers came in. More people watched the Election Night on CNN than any other network, so it was a prevailing of the new over the old and stodgy. They partnered with the Web site. They urged people to watch the program with their computers.

Solana Larsen said Global Voices looks at communities that don’t usually speak up. Not your CNN audience, but still people interested in using new media to have a voice. Covering international stories through the eyes of the people living through the events increases the story’s value.

Journalists, then, should think outside of the box and expand their source list.

But the question of the business model emerges. How do you have the revenue to pay people to do risky reporting around the globe?

A dialogue quickly grew on how to integrate the community and technology to aggregate content and determine the payment. Like Allvoices – you can make a lot of money if many viewers are checking out a contributor’s entry. While some just want to contribute, others are concerned with the pay. This got a lot of whispers going and heads turning.

Others suggested the traditional source of advertisement but making it part of the content. If people will take time to view a certain ad, then that makes it relevant to the public and can help bring in revenue.

One unexpected suggestion – ask the prostitutes (or strippers like Marisa Tomei’s character in the film The Wrestler) for the community scoop, since they’re paid to listen…

We’ve recorded another podcast!

WeMedia is producing a regular podcast that features in-depth interviews with prominent media, technology, and social change figures, as well as distinguished experts on current affairs and news.  Today marks our third installment.  Our goal is to help the WeMedia community understand the roots of the changes taking place in our society, hear from the thinkers and doers who are on the front lines, really understand the difficulties facing the media, consumers, and others — all while being somewhat entertaining.

Today’s podcast features a conversation with Joe Marchese, the founder of SocialVibe, a site that allows users to Get Sponsored by their favorite brands while earning points for the reward of your choice.  SocialVibe is changing the way individuals, causes, and corporations are interacting with eachother.  So, we discussed social networking, the future of advertising, how charities and causes are embracing technology, politics, and even sports (spoiler alert: Joe is a Mets fan).

Click below to listen.

(We are finally getting the hang of this podcasting stuff.  But we still want your help — finding guests, identifying topics, making improvements.  Send us your thoughts and suggestions.)

The annual list of what the world searches for online has been released.  No real surprises — Britney Spears and Barack Obama top the lists, which are littered with pop culture (WWE, Miley Cyrus, Lindsay Lohan) and political (Sarah Palin) references.  The Olympics, the iPhone, and functional terms like credit score make a good showing as well.  The lists are here.

More interesting than the list of results is how the search companies tabulate the rankings, and what it says about us.

For example, “Yahoo doesn’t reveal exactly how it calculates its rankings other than to say it analyzes the number of queries for a specific term and its increase in popularity. Generic search terms such as “car” are ignored, as are most company names.”

Why would you remove generic search terms?  Searching is searching, there is no need to massage the results.  If online users are looking up brands, that says a lot about how we choose which products to buy and use.  And there is no doubt we are using Yahoo! and other search engines to find basic information, like a phone number to our local pizza place.  We may not all be searching for the same simple piece of information, but by the same measure I believe (or maybe hope is a better term for it) that most of the population isn’t searching for information about Britney Speaks either.

The Ask.com, whose list is apparently unedited, lists the term “Dictionary” on the top of its list, and shows Google, Facebook as being of great interest to users as well.  Their results suggest, among other things, that finding the sites we use most is one of the most important things a search engine helps us to do.  They may not have the same PR value, but for people who want to understand what people are using the internet to do, it says a lot.

The fact that Yahoo! feels its necessary to adjust its rankings for PR purposes makes me wonder what they do with the actual results.  Do they manipulate the results to align with advertising listings?  Do the search engines promote certain information that supports their political agenda, or their personal interests?  Do the results that search engines provide reflect the full scope of information that is out there period?  Maybe its just a sad cry for attention.

Whatever the reason, the lists make for good cocktail party conversation, but little else as far as I am concerned.

McDonald’s has decided to pick a fight with Starbucks.

In addition to offering espresso drinks to their billions of customers served, the fast food chain has launched a massive online/offline/outdoor marketing effort to distinguish itself from the world’s most popular coffee chain.  The concept is not original – Dunkin’ Donuts has been comparing itself to the Seattle-based coffee giant for years.  The tactics used by McDonald’s however, are worth considering.

According to the Seattle Post-Intellegencer, “McDonald’s has erected a billboard in sight of Starbucks headquarters declaring, “four bucks is dumb.”  Another billboard, located near Starbucks cafes in Western Washington jabs at Starbucks saying “large is the new grande.”   And earlier this year, McDonald’s started unsnobbycoffee.com to promote the launch of espresso drinks in the Seattle market.

Starbucks hasn’t responded – in part because they argue their customer base is different and in part because they believe their brand can withstand a little friendly ribbing.  But can it?  In a connected age, where reputation matters and opinion can change with one click of a mouse, can Starbucks afford to stay silent?

The question of the day: Should Starbucks fire back?

If you say yes, what should Starbucks say?  And how can they demonstrate that they understand how people get and share information in today’s technology-centric world and what they must do to protect their base?  If you say no, what happens?

Thoughts?

NPR News in the US aims to double its online audience – in part by building a closer relationship with people who already love NPR. Dick Meyer, NPR Digital Media’s editorial director, calls them NPRistas. He says in the American Journalism Review:

“Folks who listen to NPR think of themselves as NPR people … The biggest goal that I have personally for the next six to 18 months is to really create a community for NPR people that hasn’t existed before…We want to create an environment where NPRistas can comment on stories, can share stories with each other easily, where they can ask questions of the reporters and producers who work on the story, where they can talk and have an honest conversation with those people and where they can talk amongst themselves…We want to do it in a way where the smartest, the most civil, the most enthusiastic commenting floats to the top. And where it’s easy to be seen by the rest of the user community.”

What this means for other companies: NPR’s social media goals are familiar. If you don’t understand them, figure them out. Fast. Or get some help. But there’s something much bigger and harder you’ll also need to figure out. This may make you and your management team squirm. Who are your people? Who loves your products? Who are your groupies? Who are your istas? If you don’t have any – work on that first. In the U.S., Americans express deep distrust and dissatisfaction with their media. NPR is a shining exception. They prove that media with passion and purpose can thrive even as business models and consumption patterns change.