• by Jean Pascal Mathieu , October 29, 2009

Are Personal News Networks replacing newspapers?

Who do you go to for news? More and more, we are relying on our Personal News Networks.

Updates from Facebook and Twitter are now central to people's information networks, much like bulletins from news wires or major dailies. I guess that's not really so surprising, is it? One of the first things they teach in journalism school is that a tragedy in my neighborhood elicits a greater emotional response than 100 tragedies
in my country or 1,000 in a far-off land.

Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, I keep up with news about the people who make up my personal or virtual neighborhood. It may sound heartless, but I suspect that our friends' status updates affect us more than news of a plane crash involving people we've never heard of.

I've read studies recently that show an exponential increase in the time people spend on Facebook and Twitter and a (nearly) proportional decrease in time spent reading newspapers, online versions included. Could there be a cause and effect here? What if we counted the time we spend reading news about our friends and social contacts in our overall news time? The most popular social networks suddenly swelled in size when mobile devices enabled members to broadcast real-time status updates (much like a reporter in the field feeds her producer or publisher) and receive those of their friends (like bulletins from traditional media).

Whether we get them via rss feeds from our preferred newspapers, from Google News, as tweets or as Facebook updates, we now consume "information units" that look very much alike. Under the influence of sms and Twitter's 140-character limit, they are short and simple. A headline and sentence - or a "hed" and "lede," as we said back when I was in journalism school - are becoming the new default format for communications, whatever the content, whatever the source. On Facebook, where growing numbers of us now go to get all of our news, updates look pretty much the same whether they are issued by our friends, the Huffington Post or The New York Times. In other words, "news" is whatever information units I admit into my Personal News Network - PNN for short.

So perhaps in parallel of media campaigns, marketers should take a holistic look at the benefit of creating content so valuable and viral that it generates massive volumes of "contact units" between consumers and their brand. For in the end, leveraging content to engage users within their PNN will have more impact. The reason, I believe, is that in the case of viral and small branded messages, time and money will have been invested in creating compelling, shareable content, allowing one's brand to be touched and interacted with by consumers on multiple platforms.