The venerable NYTimes unveils TimesWire tomorrow in its attempt to “real time” its reporting. New articles are fed into TimesWire as soon as it’s published, but the stream of articles is slower than a ticker tape. I think it needs to open up to other journalistic sources to create a compelling stream of news and articles.

The moral of this story is: media organizations, even the NYTimes or CNN, can’t position themselves as the sole sources of news to a dedicated reader/viewership in this real time reporting world. News consumption will cross various media sources, from Twitter to blog feeds to the NYTimes. Media, both new and traditional properties, that can package and customize this real time news for distribution will attract traffic. That means any media organization trying to firewall their proprietary content behind subscriptions will ultimately fail unless it is provides tangible value, like stock trading data based on real time news feeds.

The new movement to aggregate Twitter feeds into portal web properties – Tweetmeme, Muckrack, Venture Maven and BreakingSFNews are four examples – places greater demand for professional-grade Twitter content that stays on topic. Who wants to hear the meandering tweets of an incomprehensible conversation?

There will be a move by Twitterers to launch a “commercial” Twitter feed that parallels their personal brand feed. This begins to change Twitter’s role from that of a chat box to a more focused broadcast media in which readers / followers rely on the Twitter feed for data value, not irrelevant “What I am doing?” conversations.

UPDATE 5/13/09 12:45pm PDT: WSJ management sets personal vs. business policy on Twitter. (hint: it’s all about business)

Domus Consulting Group has been a leader in educating the real estate industry on how to use the social media systematically to become hubs within their local community. The mainstream media have the exact same mission to reach out to their community.

We call our system the Social Broadcasting System and invite you to attend a free two-part webinar series specifically focused on demonstrating to producers, journalists and reporters. (And there is absolutely no upsell or even hint of it, we want to show you a revolutionary concept for media business and branding that will increase media market share and thus, revenue opportunities. We’ll show you new business models).

Session #1: Flight 1549, and the Mumbai and Gaza incidents demonstrated how powerful Twitter and citizen reporting has become for breaking news. Tips on the right ways to leverage Facebook and other social networks to reach your audience.
Session #2: How the Social Media and Mainstream Media are converging based on the new “Breaking News” reporting paradigm. Explaining a new business model: how to connect your news network into massive local social media infrastructures… efficiently and free.

Register for the Free 2-part Webinar Mini-Series

Dates:

* Session 1:  Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 9am Pacific time
* Session 2:  Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 9am Pacific time

About Pat Kitano

The Domus Consulting Mini-Series are for educating industries, organizations, companies and individuals who need an efficient and powerful online community presence. We started with the real estate industry, demonstrated how effective social media is in making real estate professionals hubs within their community, and are now offering the same methodology to the news media and to non-profit organizations.

The evolution of the business model twisted from personal, user-generated broadcast content, Justin style, to a media site that hosts individual broadcast channels.

It’s a play on the “be your own DJ” online model, and many participants are using the pulpit to broadcast sporting events and movies that they are (likely illegally) re-broadcasting from existing online subscriptions. The more interesting feature that YouTube or Hulu don’t have is real time chat functionality to pundit the broadcast.

The moral of the story is the power of combining cutting edge technology (in this case, online streaming video) and outrageous action to develop first, celebrity, and then an online media model. Through discovery, a true online business model – personal broadcast channel – emerged based on the simple cable access channel paradigm.

Simply put, brokerages can now leverage their agents into reporting on their markets in real time without blogging. The social media, particularly micro-blogging tools like Twitter and bookmarking applications like Delicious, have advanced to a tipping point where agents can “broadcast” updates in sound bite format. Brokerage sites then aggregate all their agent updates and comments into a stream of compelling news feeds – new listings, info on recent sales, multioffer stories (118 on a house in San Jose recently!) neighborhood changes, new deals – that is displayed on the home page. The analogy: Think of providing a housing update ticker tape, anybody interested in real estate is compelled to subscribe to it and watch it on a daily basis, just like CNBC.

Example: Chase International

Chase International has been a pioneer in providing the Web 2.0 interface between their agents and the consumer, starting with their social network Chase Nation. ChaseNation’s expressed mission is to provide a wealth of commentary on the Northern Nevada and California High Sierra housing markets and create consumer loyalty, even inviting them into the Chase Nation social network. The key to ChaseNation’s success in execution has been their agent involvement to provide that commentary. We’ve recently begun working with Chase agents through our Social Media Marketing Workshops on the mechanics of “broadcasting” that commentary across the web via a variety of social media applications. By doing so, agents directly benefit from positioning themselves as experts in their market. This translates into increased online exposure that generate leads without blogging.

Want to know more about the mechanics?

We invite broker/owners, agents and others interested in the broadcast social media to free webinars this week that will detail how to develop this new brokerage website that “broadcasts” real time information to your customers. Best of all – the system is also free to implement! We’re scheduling the one hour webinars this Thursday from 10:30-11:30 and Friday from 10:30-11:30. Please click here to register.

Testimonials

You can find commentary and testimonials on our Social Media Marketing Workshops at this Twitter based group (called #smmw) where participating agents communicate during our webinar sessions. If you’re an agent interested in learning more about our Social Media Marketing Workshops, we are starting a new 12-week session on Mondays from 10:30-11:30 Pacific time, starting November 10. You can register at this link.

Related articles:

The Social Broadcasting System
Slideshow: Website 2.0, Creating the Conversational Web

This will happen soon in the mainstream media…