Every Company Now is a "Media Company"

In the future every company will need to behave more like a media company, argues Larry Kramer, author of "C-Scape." That should strike you as an odd statement, as it implies virtually any company is, in part, a "media company."

But the argument is that "every kind of storytelling, from news stories to family news, from mass entertainment to literature, including every tool we use to describe a product or a shape a relationship between business and customer," now assumes a different shape in an online world where a company's brand and product are shaped online.

Organizations and individuals increasingly are creators and distributors of news and information.

“When marketers create fan pages or communication with prospects and customers, they’re no longer just advertisers, they are publishers of content.

When they create an app or widget, they are software companies. And when they listen to what customers and critics are saying back to them, they are public relations, customer service and even product development.

Several years ago, for example, I began arguing that in a world where most information was online, Google became a publisher. Several years later, I'd go a bit further and argue that in a world where it is easy and relatively inexpensive for any company to produce its own media, there is as much logic to creating media as there is to allowing other firms to create media, assemble audiences and then spend money advertising with those media.

As we began to see several years ago, when small businesses began to divert "advertising" funds to creating better websites, now firms of almost any size, but especially larger firms that sell on a continental or multi-continent basis, it might well make as much sense to create "media" themselves rather than "advertising in other companies' media."

You'd have to have spent more than 25 years in ad-supported media to fully realize what a change that is. Observers used to say that, in a world of inexpensive blogging tools, "anybody can be a publisher." What most seem not to have realized is that the same tools mean every business can be a publisher.

Where today nearly everybody might agree that a business must have a website, someday a significant percentage of larger businesses will simply assume they need to create media themselves, directly aggregating audiences that potentially buy their products.

This is more than a simple matter of showing "industry leadership" or "thought leadership." This will become a matter of directly creating the audiences that in the past would be seen as "lead generation" tools. The older ways will still work. The point is that a "C-Scape" business environment also allows firms to do it a new way, by becoming media themselves. It's a big deal.

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