Does all this new media stuff take us ten years back?

Sometimes I feel like ten years ago: We are creating directories again, portals are as much distibution services as they are integration layers and there are a lot of newbies around, who think that all that is quite interesting, but don’t really get it.

There is also an ugly side in this nostalgia: The veruy old ROI-discussions are coming back, not in terms of “How can we make this more efficient?”, but in terms of “Do we need this at all?”

When I was asked to justify why I recommended this or that media or if I really believed that wikis were something useful a few months ago, I just took it as business as usually: nobody bus anything at first glance, you always have to add some extra spice or – actually more often – you have to give the customers the feeling they are adding some spice, so that it fits their taste.

Now there is more to it: People want to see measurable ROI again, they want to count short term successes in money. Up to how, we had been used to the fact that online media, ecommerce and email are business basics that don’t have to be justified anymore. Now, as short term efficiency rules and social media are complex, diffuse and not easy to understand anymore, I feel more scepticism in companies. They wont tell you that online is crap (actually, some people did already, #anlorenz), but they do already tell that they have to focus on the important stuff now

That’s one of the reasons that gives me the feeling of ten years ago.

The other side is that I’m convinced we have a vast lot of opportunities in corporate media and ebusiness, but also in consumer media. The high amount of communication and media options we have now ask for orientation and moderations – at least for the high number of newbies we have. Where do they come from? In fact, everybody is a newbie. We all can learn everyday, we will always find a lot of new things – and we can easily admit that, because it does not make us look uninformed, but actually very smart.

So I hope to see the rise of some new online magazines soon also in Europe, covering the area of media, their social and theoretical implications, the lifestyle and the business.

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