In the New Realities process, one of the Teams was called "Eat Your Lunch". If you were a member of this team, you were told that Rupert Murdoch had hired you to set up a new Media business to take Public radio's 30 million listeners away. They had the most fun of all the teams and were all a bit stunned at how easy it would be.
We had every reason to pick Mr. Murdoch. He has already done a good job at hitting the TV Networks hard in how he set up Fox - grab some key major market stations. At irrevocably changing newspapers in England - take them somewhere that the unions cannot follow. At taking TV Global - dominate Satellite. Now he is doing the same on the web with MySpace.
The link above is to an excellent article from Wired, thanks Duncan, that spells out the beginnings of the MySpace Murdoch story. It shows the reader all parts including how Murdoch has stayed clear of interfering as the new model develops.
Here are some rules that we discovered in NR that are confirmed by Murdoch and My Space
Participation is not a feature - it is central to the new media
As lucrative as those ideas may be, they’re based on an old media conception of audiences as consumers. But MySpace members are something different: They’re participants. The site’s greatest value isn’t connecting people to products, people to information, or eyeballs to advertisers. It’s connecting people to people. The MySpace team is light on information theorists, but DeWolfe happily quotes Metcalfe’s law: “The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users.” In other words, MySpace multiplies the value of each member by connecting one to another. It’s a virtual nation of people instant-messaging their friends a link to Gnarls Barkley’s new track and decorating their pages with Family Guy clips. And that’s where MySpace could strike gold: It lets News Corp. host the cultural conversation.
Trusted Space is where the particpation happens
Platforms have long been the key to digital power, and the Internet only extends their scope and grip. eBay built one for retail transactions. Google’s organizes information. MySpace is a platform that gives ordinary people a place on the Net to interact with one another – and provides an expanding set of tools for doing so. With enough people, it just might be the ticket to selling media in a world where audiences, not corporations, call the shots.
Peer Power in Marketing and all Opinion - Experts are not trusted only Peers
Which brings us to MySpace’s ultimate value to News Corp.: the power to make hits. Umair Haque, who runs the trendy London media consulting shop Bubblegeneration Strategy Lab, puts it succinctly: “MySpace’s challenge is to do for branding what Google did for ads – to create a hyperefficient form of interaction.” In plain English, audiences create hits. Make that happen more quickly, cheaply, and reliably, and you have a philosopher’s stone for media: a Net-fueled word-of-mouth machine.“.......
technorati tags:Public Radio, NPR, New Realities, Rupert Murdoch, Wired, MySpace
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