It shouldn't be surprising that there's been a great deal of confusion among existing media companies about the words "convergence" and "multimedia" over the past decade plus.
The proliferation of tools and platforms is confusing -- from a relatively static world of radio, TV, newspapers, and magazines to a new world of websites, audio clips, video clips, streaming video, citizen reports, social media, aggregated content hubs, ecommerce apps, sharing tools, blogs, and mobile platforms, just to name a few of the major developments that have affected media.
At a strategic level, however, it is less important what the various media forms are than how your company must be able to adapt to them.
If your core product was print, now you need to have a strategy for broadening your channels to include video and audio; if you were primarily a radio station, you now need video and print components; from a past in TV, you've had to integrate print and audio.
At various points in this process, companies may seize upon one thing -- maybe podcasts or Twitter feeds -- as a key part of their strategy, to the relative exclusion of others, but this isn't smart.
Rather, today's media companies need to have content strategies that are agnostic as to platform; social media strategies that aren't depending on any one source in a rapidly changing universe; and mobile strategies that can adapt as the market there shakes itself out.
At a high level, executives should not get stuck on any one platform or channel, because the one thing we can say about this environment is that it is going to continue to change.
When I hear Anderson Cooper of CNN these days stress that you can "follow us on Twitter," I cringe. First of all, even though what people primarily do with Twitter is follow other people, that does not necessarily equate into a smart public relations plan.
Integrate Twitter, of course, but don't necessarily make so much noise about it, that's using a sledge hammer to deliver a message better delivered by a tiny bird's call.
Over and over again, however, media companies make this mistake, overly promoting their websites, their Facebook pages, their blogs, their iPad apps -- whatever top execs have been told is the latest and greatest trend.
The problem is that by the time they are talking about it, the moment for promoting it has already past.
Properly formulated, a media company's overall strategy encompasses every tool and channel mentioned above as well as some not yet invented. The capacity for digital technologies to remake our workplaces and work styles is endless.
Start from that perspective, remain utterly agnostic about channel, and you'll be off on the right course.
Thus, one of my favorite companies to date has been NPR, which has recognized the need to become a source for print articles to augment its traditional audio offerings. NPR can compete in text forms as well as anybody; video offers additional opportunities.
In that regard, today's announcement that NPR is leading the effort "to develop a digital distribution network that will allow public broadcasters and web producers to combine, create, share and distribute their news and cultural content" is a move in the right direction.
The effort is a joint effort by five national producers: American Public Media, NPR, PBS, Public Radio International (PRI) and the Public Radio Exchange (PRX).
Rather than a collection of multimedia bells and whistles, what is badly needed in so many companies is an old-fashioned editorial strategy, which is the guts of any content strategy.
Know what stories you are good at getting, how best to get them, and which of today's channels provides the best first option for communicating them. Strong visuals imply video, naturally; complex stories require long-form print or documentary capability.
We've seen enough come and go now to predict the future. There will be more tools, more channels, more options. Fine, if that's the way it is to be, we never have to commit so fully to any one option as we did in the past.
Stay open, be experimental, embrace change.
Good advice in all avenues of life, actually, not just in media.
