I attended journalism graduate school and graduated in May 2007. I tell you the date, because it was a blink ago. While there, graduate students researched ways to save our dying newspaper industry. One model being tested was convergence: Broadcast stations and newspapers could align to reduce costs and improve ad revenue. These alliances should also incorporate online resources: at the time, online was simply a link to PDFs and videos of stories currently running in newspaper and broadcast publications. There was initial resistance, especially in the advertising and content development departments. But, the model stuck and evolved in most companies that survived.

The evolution has been more than just a converging of media platforms. The way audiences consume information, interact with its producers and one another and the tools available to publish information have all changed. Yesterday, it felt as those all of my research, conversations, tweets, seminars and meetings zoomed into a pinpoint. For the first time, I heard a chief marketing officer (CMO), in fact, I heard two CMOs say something that we would loved to have understood while in my graduate training. Yesterday, I attended the Raleigh Triangle Chapter of American Marketing Association (AMA) March luncheon by invitation of Brian McDonald, Triangle AMA’s Vice President of Social Media. Brian, a Twitter friend, knew I would be very interested in a CMO panel discussion of the lessons they’d learned as they worked through the crisis of the past two years and emerged on the other side. The panel included:

• Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at SAS.
• Rohit Gupta, Chief Commercial Officer for Genworth’s US Mortgage Insurance Business.
• Tom Barbitta, Vice President of Marketing for Carolina Beverage Corporation, oversees the marketing of Cheerwine.
• Kevin McAteer, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Concord Hospitality Enterprises Company.

A key learning that may help explain why convergence has made a great leap forward came from Gupta. He said his team learned, “Don’t waste the crisis.” Gupta went further to explain that the fervor of a crisis forces you to develop strategies and products that you might not consider at any other time, when you might be too conservative or timid.

And timidity won’t work for a private technology company that wants to hold its 30 percent market share against the Goliaths. So for SAS, the downturn included many of the same cost-saving measures as in other corporations, except there were no layoffs or reduction to benefits. But one dramatic change, according to Davis, was a retooling of its marketing department to include social media. “We even included several new positions,” he said, referring to Dave Thomas, SAS’ Social Media Manager, Kirsten Hamstra, SAS Publishing’s Social Media Manager and Alison Bolen, Editor of Blogs and Social Content.

Then the ‘aha’ moment happened. Words that I’ve tried to express to my peers on Twitter, words I’ve heard more and more often of late from social media innovators, had now come from an executive. After a while, an idea has been around for so long that it becomes a truth. Barbitta said that the key learning for Cheerwine marketing was not to call it social media. "It’s all media,” he said.

Barbitta said that today’s media is about finding relevance or looking for a way to be available when someone has the emotion to buy. Cheerwine marketing has embraced this philosophy. “Cheerwine can be difficult to find, so a Cheerwine consumer has developed a platform called Cheerwinefinder.com,” said Barbitta. “We’ve developed an “arms-length” relationship. This thing is growing like wildfire.”

When the radio came along, everyone said that no one would read again. When cinema and television went mainstream, editors predicted the death of radio. You see where this is going. Platforms and channels have come and gone, but social media (online interaction with your customers) is here to stay. With that in mind, said McAteer, it’s important to understand who your audience is and then find the most effective channel. For Concord Hospitality, Twitter and Facebook were not hits but a well-designed Web site is.

“We’re trying to understand what’s next from the customer’s perspective,” said Davis. “The next generation of customers has grown up with social media. How are you going to market to them? For instance, their attention span is in short 140-character bursts. And although our generation is concerned with data privacy issues, I think those data privacy issues may lessen as the new generation enters adulthood.”

It’s a wheel!

Good ideas often find focus after weeks, months or even years of pounding at your skull. Perhaps the cave man had been trying for years to make a wheel and all along he was staring at a round rock: the wheel prototype. For years, we’ve labeled each form of media so that we could differentiate ourselves and create a niche that would draw advertisers and an audience. It was only during the belt tightening of an economic crisis that we took a close look at the audience – a generation of techno-savvy children. Now, we are forced to see that all media – broadcast, print, online (social) and mobile – are media to this generation of consumers. With that realization, it’s easier for all of us to become cutting edge marketers.