Ideas

Old Media’s Effect on Reputation and Action

Blog writing has a different effect on people from printed media, Martin Varsavsky observes in a post.

I agree.

Martin finds postings in blogs like TechCrunch or GigaOm about him or his company - Fon - will bring traffic to his websites. When an article is written about him or his company in a publication like The New York Times or Forbes, however, the reputational effect is much greater (judging by people speaking to him about the article), but blog traffic hardly changes.

In addition to Martin’s Old Media Reputation Effect, I would add:

1- Old Media Action Effect

In launching a laser customization service in Paris, TagMyPod, my brother-in-law discovered a corrollary rule:

When someone blogs about TagMyPod, site traffic can increase dramatically, but sales often remain slow.

When a newspaper or magazine writes about his service, however, people start coming into the shop with ripped out clippings in hand.

2- The Old Media Search Defect

A related topic is the continued inability of Old Media to adapt to Internet search.

If I Google “Martin Varsavsky”, for example, I did not get a single link among the first 100 going to an article from a newspaper or traditional publication. (Most people don’t look beyond the first 20 results of a Google search.)

When I Google my own name - a byline that over the course of a decade appeared on more than a thousand articles in The New York Times and International Herald Tribune - I find only 4 links to articles in those publications among Google’s top 100 results.

When will traditional media figure out the importance of Google?

Not for a while, I hope. It helps traffic to my blog!

Popularity: 7% [?]

Technorati Tags: Fon, Martin Varsavsky