When you are into online marketing, you are not being decent when you are spamming, when you are treating people as fools when you are doing your social media marketing bit, and you are not being decent, neither to the target audience nor to the client, when your marketing is annoying people and generating negative publicity for your client.

This post has started a torrent of thoughts in me and gave me a topic to raise with Dave Evans whose social marketing workshop (India) I am attending…thx

Perhaps the “monopoly” in news is being challenged, but nothing much has changed in other areas of commerce.

Even in the “news” business most national and international information still originates with a relatively small number of sources. The bulk of what exists online is still commentary riffing on the original stories.

This is changing, but places like TPM (which has some actual reporters on staff) are still small operations.

Wrong.

It is all about who gets to decide, the individual or the collective. Just as once the the monopolists who once controlled the information flow decided for everyone what was and wasn’t news, that power has now been turned over to the individual.

And society as a whole is better for it.

Whether you talk about decency or intimacy or whatever new face you want to put on it, the bottom line is still the bottom line. So, yes, advertising represents a failure, but not the one that Jeff has highlighted.

It is a failure of our society to differentiate between needs and wants. This downturn offered a chance for the fundamental assumptions of consumerism to be examined, but instead all we have gotten is ideas about how best to re-inflate the consumerist bubble as quickly as possible.

At some point this will need to be addressed, the world is consuming at an unsustainable rate and the rate is increasing due to rising population and rising wealth in newly developing areas.

Media could be an example of how a new economic structure might look. It requires a minimal amount of physical stuff to be consumed, the amount to be generated and consumed has no physical limits and it can expand to include as large a workforce as desired.

An expanded market also can overcome one of the worst aspects of the current economic system – market concentration. Rather than buying what firms wish to sell us (hence the need for persuasion), we can have vast numbers of choices and even create our own contributions.

Perhaps the lesson from the newspaper and network broadcast implosions should be that the new world of media won’t be one of huge firms, but more like the days of individual artisans, each creating something unique and supporting himself or a small workshop.