Categories: Articles

Getting A Fix On 13 Great Media Voices

Marketers are a pretty quirky bunch. We love reading about what we could be doing better. We love reading about others who are doing interesting things, and yet there’s not a huge interest in actually following the channels we market within.

Why is that?

I have a personal passion for media. Whether it’s understanding television, radio, newspapers, magazines, or beyond. I’m interested in what the media pundits have to say about their changing landscape as much as I’m excited about the next shiny object in Social Media. Over the past few months, I’ve had multiple discussions that involved questions like: "why do you Blog about journalism so much?" or, "why do you even care what’s going on in the newspaper industry?".

Those are very short-sighted questions.

Here’s my angle: for me to be a better Digital Marketing professional, I have to know what all of the media channels are, what they can do, the trouble they’re facing, how they’re surviving, where the opportunities are, and who the recognized and experienced voices are within the channel. If all we’re ever doing is simply looking at how Facebook is tracking against Twitter in terms of growth, then there’s a big world of media (and yes, Marketing) opportunities that are being missed or ignored.

Everything is "with" not "instead of".

The best brands know this, and the best Marketers know this too. It’s never going to be about one media channel over another, but it will always be about how to integrate and find the proper balance leveraging all of the media channels for a specific brand. The media landscape is changing in such a rapid and dramatic way, that the only way to stay on top of what the potential outcome for Marketing will be in the coming years is to be tracking what they uber-smart media pundits are thinking, pushing and collectively hoping for.

Here are 13 non-Marketing voices (and platforms) that you should be following to get a better fix on the new media landscape:

Nicholas Carr.
Cory Doctorow.
Jeff Jarvis.
Bob Lefsetz.
MediaBizBloggers.
MediaShift – PBS.
Richard Nash.
Niemen Journalism Lab.
O’Reilly Radar.
Shelly Palmer.
Jay Rosen.
Clay Shirky.
Sparksheet (full disclosure: Sparksheet is owned by Spafax which also owns enRoute whom I write a column for).

Who is missing? Who would you add?

(I’m also well-aware that there is a severe lack of diversity on this list, so please add to it!)…

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.