A very timely discussion since organizations are looking at the separation of content creation from product development, and many journalists have lost jobs but have skills to collect content, create networks and gain dedicated audiences..

Review the session via the Twitter hash tag #bcnibrand.

The questions that started the session were this: How engaged are you with tweets from reporters as opposed to media companies. Where is that affinity going?

Julia Kaganskiy made a good argument from the outset saying personal brands have always existed as personalities that operate outside of an institution. What has changed recently, however, is that personal brands can now exist and thrive on their own.

With that said, most agreed it’s based on building a level of trust as to who you follow, who you read and who you interact with.

Howard Weaver said authenticity is what matters the most, not where the content originated from. The institutional tweets are less relevant to him than individual tweets, for example, he argued.

Kaganskiy asked a good question in reply. Is the institution part of a journalist’s personal brand? Is the institution the reason people engage with the journalists at least from outset?

So if the paradigm is shifting from personal brand to individual brand, how do they play together so the audience gets the best results? Do they play together at all?

One person said that journalists should operate under the philosophy that the media company they work for won’t exist in five years. His advice was to create your brand, your niche, publish, develop a specialty and do what you can to gain audience. Basically, make yourself indispensible because people want to connect with people, not institutions.

Here is how the session ended: We recognize that institutional brands are being broken down to individual brands. We’re not sure whether that’s good or bad, but we think we should salvage what makes since from the institution while given the personal brands the chance to thrive.

What say you?

We in the media industry are not asking one right question often enough at a time where it could not be more critical.

There seems to be many random, impulsive ideas about how media companies can generate revenue quickly in a time of economic decline and a where the century-old business model no longer applies.

Let me ask this question, and many of you will recognize it because it is not new. What is the job to be done?

If the answer is just to make money, you will fail. Making money does nothing to provide a product or service that adds value to a user or customer. It does nothing to build audience or connect to a community.

Those facts are often too easily overlooked, especially in hard economic times. But doing those things will lead to money.

I am all for experimentation, failing fast and taking risks. But if the product, service or change to an existing product is not done in a way that solves a problem, fills a void or clearly adds a desired value for a user or customer than it is not worth doing until you can answer the jobs-to-be-done question.

This is a new era. Ideas have never been cheaper, and taking a product or service to market has never been easier. But the time to act smartly could not be more important, and a great way to do that is to come with a concise and demonstrable answer to the jobs-to-be-done question.

So, how many jobs-to-be-done interviews has your organization completed in the last six months? How many will it do in the next month?

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Let me state from the outset that I don’t know if anyone in our industry has completely figured out how to make money with a digital-only community information site, least of all me. But here are some of my thoughts, and I would love to begin a discussion that actually leads to some solid answers, so please comment.

My last post talked about an experiment in Batavia, NY, by Gatehouse Media, where a media company launched a digital-only operation in a market where it doesn’t publish a print product. I proposed that my company, Gazette Communications, do something similar in Iowa City, IA.

A friend, Elizabeth, commented with a great question: How does it make money?

We have a responsibility to do more than just build it and hope they will come… how could a site like this serve the other, and equally important, constituency – local advertisers? We will need to be just as innovative in creating, er, fostering, the buyer/seller community as we are in creating new forms of journalism.

She makes excellent points. My expertise, if you will, is more on the content and audience than on revenue, but I’m going to give it a shot.

First off, we have to change the expectations. Twenty-eight to 30 percent profit margins are not realistic. A journalist – in this type of environment with this type of assignment – has to have an entrepreneurial mindset. Build everything in an open-source environment. Do something crazy like offering free classifieds. Draw audience by fostering those community and civic needs that are not being met. And, most importantly, be open to experimentation in revenue streams and content.

It’s a newspaper company thinking and acting like a startup – which is what every media company needs to do to survive the digital transition. – Scott Karp

I strongly feel this experiment will require thinking in terms of micro-pennies, or small amounts of revenue from new businesses that normally wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to advertise in a print product.

Online advertising means that small businesses who previously were not typical print or broadcast advertisers can now afford to advertise. In other words, there is a potential long tail of small advertisers that could prove a significant source of new revenue. – 10 ways that ad sales people can save newspapers

One idea my friend Tom is big on is in creating a revenue sharing network with other local bloggers. I think someone needs to run with that idea.

Here is another resource for disucssion purpsoses that Tom sent me: Counting your piles of Benjamins.

So those are just a few ideas I could come up with in the 15 minutes I dedicated to thinking about this today. What are your ideas? What have you done that is working? What have you done that has failed?

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