In the Shadow of the Season
I purposely held this column until after the New Year. With all the media hype around this time of year, it’s easy to get lost in the noise. Around the holidays every year pundits line up to offer predictions of what they think may happen in the coming year. Or worse yet, the year in review or “highlights” of the previous year.
The potential for interactivity in the professional audio realm remains largely untapped. Sure, there are great forums, the LAB and Gearsluts and of course, the home of the Shit Brigade, the RecPit. With the exception of PSW, the sucessful communities are operated by the participants or benevolent persons from within the industry, donating time and services to make the communities happen. The dot com crash of past few years has either bankrupted or in the case of the two media giants that control the pro audio trade mag biz (Intertec and Primedia) caused them to retreat, not being able to find a sustainable business model for an online operation. It’s difficult enough to operate a narrow vertical market media company, though the behemoths have the advantage of scale in that they also operate publications in other industries. That though, doesn’t necessarily transfer to a medium like the modern Internet.
While the trade pubs have a vast archive which should be published online, it’s not the only thing that will enhance the user experience. Even with all this info online, it’s still damn hard to find what the info you need to make decisions or gain bit of knowledge, unfettered from the propganda machines of those hawking the wares. It’s easy enough to find gear specs, even prices. Most manufacturers have done a pretty good job at getting basic product info online. There are some glaring mistakes, however. These include all Flash sites, unable to be indexed by search engines and not viewable to those that for whatever reason don’t want to or aren’t using Flash. Not having basic search functionality on the site or poor navigation is another. It’s great you have the info online, now help us find it. Basic info buried in large PDF or other non html files is another hinderance. Sometimes we just need basic info. Don’t make us download a MB or two of PDF to get info on a few basic features. There are some really well laid out sites that offer a great deal of info with minimal effort. Unfortunately, they aren’t in the majority.
My suggestion is to either train your marketing people in new information technology, or better yet, separate the online presence and put specialists in the role to work with marketing, engineering and corporate to get your message out. The folks that have done this are able to turn their Internet presence from a passive medium to a profit center by providing better info to promote the product line. I can hear some execs proclaiming they can’t afford it. The truth is, they can’t afford NOT to do this. With many if not most pro audio products becoming commodity items, the difference between you and the other guy is going to be service, availability and how easy it is to deal with your company.
On the community front, not much has happened in the last couple of years. My last year at PSW was spent playing catchup and dealing with a dwindling resource pool, unable to explore or deploy many of the nanescent technologies that now are pervasive in the tech industry realm as a whole. Things like social networks, P2P chat, blogging and other community driven tools are largely absent in the pro audio realm. In fact, most of them don’t exist. Just like email lists of the ’90’s and Usenet, forum centric message boards may not be long for this world. They won’t fall off the face of the earth completely, but already the importance of these kind of communities are waning in the general public eye. A general rule of message forums is that the majority of the particpants are passive, that is they don’t contribute. At the LAB this was in the neighborhood of 90% passive. Other communities I work with have similar rates of participation.
One of the reasons for slim participation is that most folks aren’t comfortable participating or don’t have the basic knowledge or experience to contibute in a positive manner. We see this all the time in the LAB and in the LAB Lounge as well. The resource has turned from an active community of audio professionals to a well for questions for those not versed in the applications of sound reinforcement. That’s not bad in and of itself but as I’ve stated on numerous occasions, it tends to lower the bar in terms of the level of knowledge and participation on the site. On a closed site, such as SynAudCon, which BTW, is still a mailing list, particpation is limited to those that a) find the resource in the first place and b) are willing to pony up the thirty five bucks to join. I think it’s a deal, considering the company that one keeps though I still have issues with communities that are that closed. Granted, it does keep some of the riff-raff out, but it also excludes some that could offer significant contributions. The SAC list works because it’s still a fairly limited community, less than 5000 persons last I knew, compared to 20,000 plus of the LAB and the nearly 100k of PSW in total.
One of the caveats of the current forum sturcture, not just in the pro audio sphere but in all community based forums is many times you never know who you are talking to. In the olden days it was standard issue to lurk for a while and learn the community, who the players were and who the trolls were. The bar has been lowered and this is no longer the case. Many just cruise in these days, ignorant or unwilling to learn even a minimal bit about how the particular community functions. I’ve beat this dead horse many times in LAB posts but thought I’d put it here. There are ways to combat this, however.
One of the first things I thought when I saw so called social networks like Friendster or Tribe, is who the hell would use this kind of thing. After following it for a while, and reading others that know much more about this kind of thing than I, I’ve concluded this is not an ends to a means in and of itself, rather a tool, or even mechanism to be used in other areas. eBay, dating, and forum communities are but a few of the potential applications.
In the next column we’ll talk about some things that may make traditional message forum communities obsolete.
’til next time…
Dave