Internet Week: There's No Such Thing As "Free Content"

For one of our Internet Week outings, we attended Tuesday’s panel discussion at Columbia Business School, entitled “The Mass Media in Transition: How Digital Technology and the Search for Content are Transforming the Industry.” Moderated by Ava Saeve, panelists included Lisa Hsia, Jeremy Kagan, David Rogers and Sree Sreenivasan. Here are a few of the intriguing issues explored by the panelists.

•    How has online media changed the skill set required for a journalist? Has the increasing number of smaller media outlets made jobs at “mainstream media” companies less desirable?

•    Is the creation of sites such as hulu (the NBC/News Corp. site that offers free television shows and clips) a better strategy for the television industry and its viewers than the approach taken by the music industry (refusing to provide free content while attempting to prosecute piracy)?

•    How should companies deal with losing control of their brands to viral videos, bloggers and citizen journalism? Kagan gave the example of the Mentos/Diet Coke viral video; Mentos took advantage of it as a marketing opportunity and Diet Coke ignored it.

At the end of the discussion, a member of the audience asked the panelists to provide some “required reading,” and we thought their list of books, sites and podcasts was worth sharing.

Books

“Brand Hijacked: Marketing Without Marketing” by Alex Wipperfurth
“Groundswell” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
“Emotionomics” by Dan Hill
“Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” by Clay Shirky
“Personality Not Included” by Rohit Bhargava

Blogs and Sites 

Micro Persuasion
BuzzMachine
All Things Digital
AdvertisingAge
paidContent.org
eMarketer
TechCrunch
Engadget
Lifehacker
brite
The Technium
Influential Marketing Blog

Podcasts

Future Tense

Haley A. Lovett
Audience Development

Comments

[Rohit]

Thanks for including my book in this list ... it sounds like a great session, I wish I could have been there - but I really appreciate being able to read your recap out of the event as well!

[Jennifer]

I attended the panel about Entertainment Culture at the Time Warner Center. It was very interesting. I wrote all about it at http://connectwithyourteens.blogspot.com/2008/06/entertainment-culture-panel-during.html

Hope they have this every year. Its a great idea.