Media sits at the top of every org chart
For example, go to a retail store and check out the cash registers: The old mechanical adding machines have become media experiences, not unlike Web sites. Cash registers now have multiple screens, capable of showing inventory, customer purchase history, and more. Behind the scenes at the warehouse, workers move products from truck to shelf and back again in the inventory system. Information is provided to them via wireless computers worn on their wrists, giving the process a cyborg-like feel. The work is still physical, but now there is a media layer on top of the classic ergonomic issues — a forklift driver’s minute-by-minute performance can now be negatively impacted by poor information design.
At headquarters, too, the product that is being moved about is information. Everyone is on e-mail, managers have company-supplied Blackberries, the company’s Intranet provides access to forms, department information, company news and announcements, and electronic tools. It’s all a media experience, but very little of how it was originally set up was overseen by people with media perspectives.
Every modern company is, in very real terms, a media company. Media isn’t just for marketing and ecommerce anymore. Nearly every job in the modern workplace is to some extent a media job, which means that companies will need employees with keen insight in their organization’s media experience, which goes well beyond getting ten thousand followers on Twitter. Studying media can help us understand the benefits of applications like Twitter—as well as the drawbacks—and allows us to apply that knowledge to media problems wherever they may arise.
Anyone can learn how to Tweet the company news, but can you see how to reduce errors by tying cash registers to an internal micro-blog that allows checkers to choose which other store employees they follow in real-time while they work? Can you demonstrate that a forklift driver posting his observations on how much longer it took to retrieve a pallet of popular items compared to three pallets of less-popular items can lead to improved efficiency? Can you improve Intranets so they will actually be used?
The media tsunami has already hit the workplace, and a lot of people are struggling to stay afloat. Whether or not companies start to consciously understand they are now in the media business, they will eventually notice who solves media problems for them. Understanding how media experiences shape what people do is going to be an increasingly useful skill as companies begin to recognize the role of media at all levels of business.
Brook Ellingwood is a Media Producer, Information Architect, and User Experience Developer. His own social Web can be followed using brookellingwood.com as a starting point.
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10 Comments, Comment or Ping
Matthew "Mattso" Stringer
Amen, Brook! I help produce, shoot, and edit web videos and DVDs for a cancer research institute. It’s not simply PR or promotion, either, it’s helping develop relationships and share content in the same ways any other media outlet would. Our videos are distributed in the social media space, too, and there is utterly NO excuse for any institution to sidestep social media these days. All organizations can utilize inexpensive tools to tell their own stories now.
Oct 10th, 2009
LADunkin
Yes, every modern company is a media company. Companies must realize the impacts and the possibilities that come with all this media, as you say, by diving deeper into the benefits and applications of the platforms and tools. But I also think every modern company should be a data mining company in order to fully take advantage of the media. Businesses are sitting on more information that they know what to do with, whether it is information on their employees and business processes, on their customers, or on their employees’ interactions with customers. Not only do they have more media experiences and tools, they also have terabytes of data on the backend that is a treasure trove of information. In order to solve media problems and business problems in this new environment, that data needs to be analyzed and studied to determine how to use it to benefit the company and how to get the upper hand on the competition instead of drowning in all the media and data. So yes, companies need to study the media experiences, and in conjunction, the data in the backend must be understood so in the end, the bits and bytes and the experiences come together to tell a story that all rungs on the org chart can understand.
Oct 10th, 2009
Brook Ellingwood
Good points Leigh Anne.
In my view, data mining is a component of a comprehensive media perspective. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a significant software business segment these days. Offerings seek not only to provide better interactions with customers, but to capture data from these interactions and provide analytical tools for learning from them. But many companies are struggling to unlock data they’ve already been capturing for decades.
The source of the struggle is that the data is in databases, and databases are technology, and technology is owned by Information Technology departments, which are cost centers whose performance is evaluated on their abilities to save resources, not their abilities to generate income. CRM providers work with companies to integrate databases and uncover previously obscured data, but the fundamental problem is still built into traditional departmental silos.
To draw a traditional media analogy, many database administrator positions are defined like the film librarians at the Library of Congress: They are maintaining an archive for historical purposes, and only pull something out of the vault when someone requests it, or when it needs repair. IT thinks of databases in terms of price for performance, storage, and administration. Making this data easily accessible makes them nervous because it adds cost and potential risk. And in many companies there is no voice that carries equal weight arguing for openness and information sharing. That missing voice is the voice of the media professional, who sees that technology is not an end in itself, but a layer on which human interaction with information depends.
Oct 11th, 2009
Matt D
I found your piece really intersting Brook, I agree that nearly all if not all companies are integrating digital media and technology as foundation to their operations. Top level managers are talking about digital media and often are asking their organizations to think about how to use it but it is the based of the organizations that are making it happen. In my view though, ditial media is more of a horizontal thread that ties different groups together across the organization. From IT, to Marketing to Product development, companies are integrating media in innovative ways to help drive productively and creativity across their teams and out to their partners and customers. Basic business practices are still there but those diciplines are learning to rethink their work to utilize new and emerging media technologies. To me this pulls media in and up from the bottom levels of an organizaton because it is those front line/bottom level workers that are driving the innovation in their everyday work. As it so happens that is where the digital ‘natives’ (Gen-X/Ys) have begun entering into the business workplace and as they rise withing an organization they will bring the ‘wave’ of digital innovation along with them as an everyday practice.
Oct 11th, 2009
David Jones
Very interesting article Brooke. My takeaway was that employees with digital media insight will become highly valuable assets to the organization b/c they will help to define how processes are run using digital mediums. I don’t argue that digital media insight is in fact a valuable asset, but I’m curious if the point is that every company is a media company and should start identifying it’s in-house talent, or that every company should develop a digital media platform strategy that defines the way they collaborate; access date; manage content etc? The distinction for me is that I wouldn’t, as an executive officer, necessarily want individual employees driving this vision, but rather a partner with expertise in these areas to help me define and implement a cohesive strategy and supporting platform.
Oct 20th, 2009
april
Its been a long way until we reached this point of technological age.CRM Providers.Media have done a big role for the improvement of it.
Oct 27th, 2009
Justin
Very true. It’s also interesting that while every company has become a media company, traditional communication and media roles are morphing as the digital media wave continues to surge. Marketing, advertising, and PR functions are now decentralized thanks to the democratization of digital media, and those responsible for spreading the word about a company’s product or service are becoming unnecessary. Big advertisers are moving their budgets into social media (just a drop in the bucket compared to TV, radio, and even print,but it is happening), PR has become an industry where managing the message is more important than crafting the message. Why? Because the message is getting crafted and evoloved by the masses. The communication genie is out of the bottle. Instead of containing it, marketing professional’s main task is to now try and manage it.
Oct 30th, 2009
Amanda Vashro
I love this article. You are so right. It is unreal how so many companies use so much media but don’t realize it. These, and many more, need to wake up and become fully aware of their current use of media and capitalize on furthering the technology to completely take advantage of all its possibilities. Often companies are too afraid to take the “jump” into the next level of a new company wide technology when, in this case, they are already three quarters of the way there.
Nov 30th, 2009
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