Recently Damian Kulash, lead singer of OK Go, wrote a piece in the WSJ entitled The New Rock-Star Paradigm. The article is an astute summation of the present state of the music business, specifically how the business has changed in the face of maturing digital communications. The guy isn’t your typical rock group frontman. (more…)

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Does one have to be a lunatic madman to be an entrepreneur? Are all visionaries nutjobs? Highly debatable. However I recently happened upon two pretty compelling pieces of evidence that point firmly to “yes.”

The documentary film We Live in Public chronicles the rise and fall of Josh Harris, the most famous (and incredibly eccentric) Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of; in 1992, he predicted much of what the web has become:

The Internet is like this new human experience. At first, everybody’s gonna like it, but there will be a fundamental change in the human condition.

The film highlights Harris’ social experiments and how they ultimately predicted the exhibitionism that marks social media today. We do live in public. Harris called that shot years before YouTube, Twitter or Facebook.

And in Sunday’s New York Times, there was a feature on Seth Priebatsch and his start-up company Scvngr (pronounced “Scavenger”). The story focuses on the 21-year-old wunderkind who wants to “build the game layer on top of the world.” Huh, right? That sounds crazy, but so did the premise for all of the other sites that millions and millions of people use every day.

Recently I read a quote on the stages of a visionary, world-changing idea: silly, controversial, progressive, then obvious. When you think of it that way, crazy starts to make a lot of sense.

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Our friends at New Uniform Design pointed us to this video on social media, and as they say, it’s a “fairly dramatic but powerful message about social media.”

I’ve emailed the video’s creator, Erik Qualman, to find out the source of the statistics.

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So the world has gone social media crazy. When Oprah got in on the action last week, Twitter had officially arrived on main street. (For the record, @redsquareagency was here before Oprah.)

With Web 2.0 widely adopted, old media like print, newspaper, outdoor and broadcast are suffering. Some more than others of course. But we feel like the death of “old,” traditional media is greatly exaggerated. The old media that learns to adapt to the nature of new media will thrive.

It’s about conversation and timeliness.

Social media is a conversation. Brands, like people, have the opportunity to interact with their friends (or fans or followers or whatever you want to call them) and engage unlike ever before. The result is awesome brand loyalty. You don’t just eat Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut is your buddy. You hang out online with Pizza Hut.

Timeliness cannot be overstated. This is where old media, especially newspapers, are behind the eight ball. The news cycle, buzz cycle, fame cycle is real time now. (In fact, Google searches are even becoming obsolete due to real-time search on Twitter Search.)

In the midst of the “Ashton Kutcher/CNN race to 1 million Twitter followers” pop culture moment last week, Lamar Outdoor Advertising showed all of old media how to play ball. They took part in the conversation. “Follow Ashton Kutcher.” Okay then. That’s how Lamar rolls. Team Kutcher. Beyond joining the discussion, they demonstrated agility and that they could mix it up in real time. Lamar had the board up in nearly 1,200 locations nationwide within hours. We love it.

Here’s our prediction: soon again, new media and old media will just be called “media.” Only smarter and faster.

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