Andy Lark's take on "the really wicked blog revolt that killed the media and changed everything"

Andy Lark's keynote on Day 2 of the New Communications Forum was subtitled, "a wander through the blogosphere and a look at its implications for communicators."

Wander? Judging from his talk, I'd be surprised if this bluff New Zealander with the 90-mile-an-hour mind and the mouth to go with it has ever "wandered" in his life. Andy led his audience a chase more like a motorcycle ride without a helmet, the better to experience the dramatic pace and piercing effects of media transformation.

The slides from Andy's presentation, "The Participatory Communications Revolution," are posted here, so I'll just note a few highlights:

- You absolutely have to watch the video Andy began with, "The Road to 2014," produced by the Museum of Media History. Call it science fiction if you choose. I call it a plausible cautionary tale of media evolution. Could the New York Times actually go offline by 2014, becoming a small-circulation print newsletter for the elite and the elderly? Watch the video!

- "Companies don't decide that blogging is going to happen. It's gonna happen" -- and the legal folks won't be able to do a thing about it.

- "Conversation in the blogosphere entirely disintermediates conversations between a company, the parts of the company, and customers."

- "Bloggers now produce as many stories every day as the Associated Press." Think about it. That's with just 8 million bloggers out of 6.4 billion humans on earth.

- See the diagram on page 16 of Andy's slides: You are at the center of a "new social dialog."  Society, Ethics and Law, Technology, and Network Effects are all impinging on you. The notion of audiences is changing and the focus is shifting to the customer.

- The customer relationship will be democratized, so that that "the guy who writes a letter to the comics section will be treated as important as your largest customer." Andy said this in answer to my question about measuring the value of customer relationships. I hope he's right, but from my perspective, this certainly hasn't happened yet. I doubt whether rock stars like Andy spend as much time on hold waiting for "customer care" as do small entrepreneurs and individual consumers like me.

- Two trends: A drift away from mass media to more specialized media ("niche media" like blogs), and media consolidation to a few dominant players. "It behooves us to go out of our way to support media that is further down the food chain today to help diversity win out.

- We're moving from "appointment-driven" news consumption to "on-demand" news consumption. Thus, Andy says, "RSS = TiVo for the web." Not everyone agrees, but I think this makes great sense as a way to explain why to use newsreaders and how they can increase productivity. To think that only a year or so ago, I was grasping for ways to explain TiVo, and now TiVo's the metaphor for RSS!

- If you're a business executive, you can't control the blogosphere. So set up regular, informal opportunities to teach employees (and their families) how to blog. Show people how to post comments and become members of communities.

-  "Bloggers are the the canaries in the coal mine" with respect to what's happening in your markets with your customers.

- See Andy's "Authenticity Axis" on page 54 of his slides. It's a 2 by 2 matrix, whose vertical axis represents "Behavior (voice & authenticity)" and whose horizontal axis represents "Transparency." A "Best-in- Class" organzation, ranking high on both axes, is what Andy refers to as Naked. So, to promote media diversity and transparency, what you want to do is get naked.

- Andy selected a few dozen memorable quotes to pepper throughout his presentation. A few of my favorites:

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" -- Justice Louis Brandeis

"A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine." -- Jay Rosen

"Companies will thrive on the basis of their stories and myths. Companies will need to understand that their products are less important than their stories." -- Rolf Jensen

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -- Mahatma Gandhi

- One of Andy's slides asks,"What's your PN competency?" He blew through the last part of his talk so fast that I have no idea what PN competency actually is, though it has something to do with engaging with new collaborative media. Hey Andy, what is PN competency, anyway?

This session may have been too fast too keep up with, Andy may have been too deep into rock star mode, he may have tried to cover more than was humanly possible in too short a time (and then ran overtime, anyway)  -- but it was invigorating, challenging, and a ton of fun.