GigaOm features an article by Joshua Auerbach “New Media Demands a News Media Company“. His conclusions mirror what we’ve been thinking:

1. Creative / experimental media development will become business drivers

Media is entering a stage where the new media development of media properties will differentiate successful companies. As media technologies and the social media inexorably evolve rapidly, it’s up to media companies to keep up. They need to tap the entrepreneurial base creating these new media – help them, invest in them and incorporate their content into their broader distribution platform. Knight Ridder is doing this with their Knight News Challenge: You Invent It, We Fund It.

The barriers to entry in media have fallen. That means successful media companies will start many more ventures than they have in the past. New opportunities arise all the time, and the capital requirements are typically minimal. Fortunately, the barriers to exit have fallen, too. Without sound stages, broadcasting facilities, or printing presses, a new media company can shut its doors with minimal asset losses.

2. Media companies controlling the vertical production process will become inefficient

Mass media production – TV and movies – are and have always been Hollywood fiefdoms that stacked the odds against outsider participation (at least, until they, usually gratefully, became insiders). Online media has lowered the hurdles for independents, and those producers may create their differential advantage by writing innovative code instead of movie scripts.

Why doesn’t the traditional model work online? In short, the web is too fragmented (millions of videos, millions of web sites), too loosely coupled (countless hyperlinks, embed codes, APIs), and too nascent (too few revenue models, too little clarity about the future) to fit comfortably into a media conglomerate as they exist today.

3. “Social Distribution” is the Art of Viral Marketing and will begin to take market share from SEO as the Science

Media likes the science of Nielsen rating and advertising CPMs that they can bank with their advertisers. Social distribution, the art of generating viral marketing opportunities and buzz via Facebook or Twitter, can’t be evaluated as well quantitatively, leaving media companies frustrated in developing business models based on ROIs. Yet, this new benchmark for assessing marketing campaigns will become key to corporate (and media) adoption of social media marketing.

Lately, yet another trend has left media strategists puzzled: “Social distribution” — most visible in the increasing roles of Twitter, Facebook, and other media as ways for users to share links and discover interesting content in real time — may well become more important than search as a driver of traffic. While social distribution won’t threaten Google’s revenue for some time, if ever, it complicates media companies’ efforts to build traffic through search-engine marketing and optimization techniques.

4. Smaller, cooperative and jointly owned media companies become easier to develop

The old media “Studio System” stranglehold on 100% control of its moving parts (operations, talent, infrastructure) will cede to more flexible arrangements because the new keys to success for a new media company – the programmers, the emerging talent, the new global opportunities – will lie outside the Hollywood fiefdom. The new media properties (and Twitter is one of them) will have open APIs, and foster cooperatively developed business models that reward its participants based on business merit, not Hollywood nepotism.

Traditional media conglomerates own 100 percent of their core businesses. They reward talent (actors, directors, producers, etc.) with contractually determined compensation. But that model fails when the talent are writing code. The best alternative is for the key talent to own equity in their venture. Perhaps this structure is an interim step toward a day when star engineers take home $10 million paychecks, or a “share of the gross.” In any event, the most valuable company in the near term is one that will own less than 100 percent of its constituent businesses.

In his updates from the CUNY New Business Models for News forum in Aspen, Jeff Jarvis discusses how a Salt Lake City newspaper acquired a real estate agency in order to sell houses as an alternative commercial venture.

Also here at Aspen, I was amazed and impressed to hear newspaper owner Dean Singleton tell some of us that his Salt Lake City paper has bought a realty agency and will list homes for a flat fee of a few thousand. Yes, the paper undercuts other agencies’ listings businesss. But, hey, the agencies have pretty much abandoned newspapers and newspapers still have readers and the ability to market homes in print and online. In Salt Lake’s case, the paper will send buyers – rather than sellers – to agencies that advertise.

When I worked in the newspaper industry way back at the start of the consumer web, I tried to convince papers to just this: to get into the real estate business to get homes into the listings and to get access to listings data. I thought I was going to be killed. But I believe that this was an inevitability.

Singleton’s move is the ecommerce strategy we presented in our models made substantial and real. We talked with the Telegraph’s Edward Roussel about their sales of wine, hangers, and hats. Selling homes is certainly bigger ticket. It monetizes the relationship papers have with readers in a new and smart way.

With the Breaking News Media Network, real estate brokerages and agents are using the same strategy, only opposite that of the media companies. They are building Breaking News city sites like Chico Breaking News in order to develop their community media presence as a branding vehicle. Note that the real estate participants in the Breaking News Network adhere to the idea that the sites are community services, so with a few exceptions, it’s almost impossible to see that a real estate brokerage or agent is behind them. Yet, their presence is always there because they are communicating with the community through the site. This is the new wave of marketing that real estate is beginning to adopt to attract the community for business rather than spam them to death with drip marketing techniques.

(tx h/t Tom Royce)

With media layoffs (McClatchy slashing 1,600 jobs today) and newspaper foldings becoming daily occurrences, editors no longer rely on sourcing stories from the decimated news rooms. They do what everybody else does – go online.

News media still needs to cover core breaking news – economy, politics, editorial, disasters, sports, local coverage – for credibility as news organizations. What’s being left behind are the topical news – arts, food, entertainment, real estate, fashion, home, books, travel – which seem more suited to coverage by bloggers or even corporations involved in the topic.

In real estate for example, I see more data being produced by real estate 2.0 companies that were once the province of commissioned media surveys. Louis Cammarosano of HomeGain tells me today that their just released survey of Realtors on the housing market was picked up by USA Today, Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News. Last week, Trulia.com, an RE 2.0 site had their VP of Marketing Heather Fernandez talking about the Mortgage Relief Plan on KTVU television.

Content is still king, but production is no longer a journalistic monopoly. In fact, the old line producers have moved into a new rank and file of citizen producers, all of whom are competing for media attention. Companies like HomeGain and Trulia that provide the most original or compelling content get to showcase it in this new media system.

Returning from BlogWorld with a social media marketing system embedded in my brain. Although I follow how Zappos uses Twitter to engage their customers, I was impressed hearing the whole Zappos story from ceo Tony Hsieh.

Ten Steps to Successful Marketing via the Social Media by Patrick Kitano is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

1959 was the first TV election with the Kennedy-Nixon debates. Paris Hilton has just become iconic this election… demonstrating that a dubious, accidental celebrity can instantly transform her brand with a smart timely YouTube video in response to a McCain commercial: