My favourite thing about Social Media has to be the ability to connect, and share ideas with like-minded people from all over the world, and I’ve met quite  few people IRL over the years who I really admire, and enjoy spending time with.

My new favourite blogger is the Comms Corner’s Adam Vincenzini, the rising star of Digital PR, and a very likeable person on a personal level too!

Earlier this year, Adam decided to give up reading newspapers for a whole year and purely rely on digital sources instead. Here’s his take on digital content and our thirst for ‘news’

By Adam Vincenzini, The Comms Corner, on location in Australia.

It’s been interesting watching the ‘digi-sphere’ from a distance while in holiday mode in the last few days, especially with a huge time difference attached.

Without client deadlines et al, I’ve been able to spend a little extra time dipping into conversations I wouldn’t normally and read articles (purely online, of course) in more depth.

One theme has cropped up that potentially presents some huge opportunities and some equally huge challenges: consumer and media boredom.

This boredom stems from a ‘greed’, not a ‘need’ for continuous ‘news’ (now, I am only using ‘news’ as a term here as it’s the most easily identifiable way of describing what we crave, but honestly, only about 5% of what pops up on my screen each day is actual ‘news’) .

I’ll quickly highlight a couple of examples.

The ongoing rise and fall, and rise and fall, and rise and fall of Social Media

It was The Drum’s Gordon McIntyre-Kemp’s turn today to tell us that Social Media is dead and that certain tools like Twitter were completely ‘dispensible’.

Now, I’m not one to predict the future (that’s best left to Doc Brown ad Marty McFly), but I’d happily bet my entire Michael Jordan Basketball shoe collection that The Drum features a report in a few weeks time telling us how Social Media is growing at a record rate.

I blame us, both as consumers and communicators for this. Why? The Drum wouldn’t feature such content unless it’s readers wanted it…and then retweeted it…of course.

#JournChat talks about delivering news in real time

The lovely bunch of PR folk in America, led by Sarah Evans, regularly host an interactive discussion that focuses on burning media issues – it’s quite fun, and I think just as valuable.

One of the topics this week was meeting the consumers need for news around the clock and how that presented opportunities for traditional media, Bloggers, PRs etc

It’s true, a story can be played out over a few days now if it has enough sub-plots, but it comes back to my earlier point, are we actually reporting on ‘news’?

This has been clearly demonstrated in the last month in relation to the launches of the Google Nexus One and the Apple iPad.

I’m still recovering from the amount of chatter and deliberation that surrounded ‘what would be announced’ on the 27th of January this year.

We, yes we, were giving legs to a story about WHEN something might be launched?!?!

Madness.

OK, get to the point…

The moral of this post (!) is that people who create quality content are fast becoming the most sought after professionals on the planet.

And, for brands who want to capitalise on this insatiable thirst, very measured choices must be made when appointing resources to help deliver this content.

While the platforms and tools are fun to play with, they are indeed ‘dispensible’ if the content they deliver doesn’t adequately satisfy the masses.

AV