By Kendall Lougheed, President

A light bulb went on this morning.  Two news items on CBC radio are telling us an important story and I don’t think that very many corporate executives are ready for the ending.  One news item tells a final chapter - the end of traditional communications.  The other news item announces the beginning of another communications era.

Traditional communications media are on the way out

This morning, CBC reported on the CanWest media empire bankruptcy and disposition of its TV stations and newspaper assets.  These companies no longer know how to make money. Their declining audiences have moved elsewhere and advertising revenues have declined.  Bottom line is that traditional media communication systems are anachronisms.  This trend can be quite discomforting to those of us who grew up on “old” media. After all, there is something special about Lloyd Robertson telling us the news with his confident, professional and authoritative demeanour.   And what joy we feel sitting down on a Sunday morning with the newspaper and a cup of coffee.

But there is a decline and we need to question why.  Are audiences just moving to other media such as the Internet?  Yes, to some extent, but content itself is also changing and with it, the communications model itself.   But first, consider the new communications media.

The new communications media are Internet based and have no limits

On March 9, 2010, Cisco Systems, the world’s largest networking systems manufacturer announced their new CRS-3 carrier-class router.  This new media-aware equipment provides a 12-fold increase in network performance and offers 322 Terabits per second of information transfer. Sounds impressive… how fast is that?  Well, it “enables the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress to be downloaded in just over one second.  Every man, woman and child in China can make a video call simultaneously; and every motion picture ever created can be streamed in less than four minutes”.  The CRS-3 is 8 million times more powerful than the Radio Shack computer I bought in 1979. 

Canadian Telco and cable companies will soon install these Cisco CRS-3’s.  In fact, the carriers are busy upgrading their infrastructure to deliver more content in more forms to our homes, our offices, and everywhere in between.  We will watch high definition movies in 3D, we will have access to more online services and enjoy any content without delay. Why run down to the video store when you can click a button to get the same movie?  Why not watch the news when it’s convenient rather than when the network slots it into their schedule?  Why not put together your own TV series on submarine warfare? 

Your TV, radio, computer, mobile phone, alarm system, stereo, even your 8-track will all be connected at limitless speed to everything everywhere.  And according to Cisco, the CS-3 is “designed to transform the broadband communication and entertainment industry by accelerating the delivery of compelling new experiences for consumers and new ways to collaborate in the workplace.” 

The new communications model and the new content

The old media model is essentially a one-to-many distribution system. Content is delivered from a single source to a mass audience, usually in a given geographic region.  Content production and distribution reflects the capabilities of the technology. One printing press manufactures a newspaper’s content that is distributed by truck overnight.  A television station broadcasts local news while its network does national or regional news.

The new communications model over the Internet permits a varied and dynamic communications model, including one-to-many, one-to-one, many-to-one, and many-to-many. Because of this, new media can engage audiences or users in new and unique ways.  Mass communications to broad audiences is giving way to common interest groups, or communities of interest. Groups may be Westmount High School pals, an interprovincial policy working committee, an Elvis fan club, or an ad hoc group of engineers specialising in constructing tall buildings on mud.

Public and office communications are becoming more personal and less formal.  I am one person who likes privacy and am horrified at the thought of exposing my life to the public.  We send and receive vast amounts of email daily and we have all become more tolerant of typos, concatenated sentences, and fuzzy ideas. We gave up quality writing standards because of the sheer volume we have to deal with.  Our dependence on email is becoming increasingly heavy.

With the new communications model we can work and play online, near line, or offline.  We can communicate with increasingly varied forms.  Through its short history the Internet started with plain email, became a mainstream technology when layout and graphics (HTML web pages) became available, and now easily does audio, video, text, animation, and live action.  Microsoft Office, our source for Outlook e-mail and productivity applications, is going 2010 this year and it promises to take us to the next level of design and communications.   Multimedia support will finally integrate our computer-based phone system with our contact lists, video with our audio and rich animation to liven up our PowerPoint presentations, and offer rich online meetings. 

What does this mean for your organization?

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Delicious, Digg, EOS, Netmeeting, and Plaxo are names of systems you’ll want to know about.  The same applies to social bookmarking, blogs, cloud tagging, Wiki’s, and RSS.   You are going to need to learn when and how to apply these technologies in your own organizations.  

You will have to accept the co-existence of the personal and the professional. Decentralized communications means loss of control. Content about your organization will come to exist as much outside your physical and electronic walls as inside. You will have decreasing central control over the conversation between your organization and your customers.  Your reputation will be determined by people you never knew.  Your corporate records now hide in your email. They will soon be pasted onto Web sites or stuck into some Facebook discussion that you can neither save nor destroy.  Your administrators will have to figure out how to manage corporate information assets in this environment.

I have a University degree in communications, over 40 years of technology experience, and, as you can probably tell, communications is a favourite subject.  Yet the challenge of coming to grips with new media is daunting to say the least. Maybe it’s because I am pushing 60.  Younger generations coming into your companies are not troubled in the least by these new ways of conversing.  But for you - the executive - the mission of your organization may remain just as valid now as before, but execution of your mission is going to transform into something very different, very quickly.

The broad objective for the savvy media-aware executive will be two-fold. First, you must develop good communication tools that will engage your customers in an open forum.  You will have to deal with the bad and the good, so get used to it. Your ability to respond to your customers will still define your success.   Second, you must find a way to capture and manage significant content to leverage it in the future.  The communications tools and the leveraged content will foster tomorrow’s success.