• by Henry Copeland , September 21, 2005

"Consumer-generated media" seems to be the catch-all phrase for blogs, wikis, podcasts, forums, list-serves... everything that the darn consumer gets up to when not dutifully reading or watching the so-called media perform its professional duties.

Google already lists 46,200 Web pages using the phrase and hundreds of thousands more using its acronym. The phenomena that CGM describes are clearly booming. At least 1.3 million Americans now blog at least once a week. That number is particularly impressive when you consider that there are just 50,000 daily journalists in the United States.

But the label of CGM misses the vitality that people experience as they engage with each other publicly and in real time. Calling blogs consumer-generated media is like calling sex the "clothless generation of heat, musk and mucus." The essential excitement and motivation just doesn't come through, does it?

Unfortunately, the words "consumer-generated media" aren't just misleading, they put things exactly backwards.

First, forget the word consumer. These folks are now participants, both in the news cycle and the creation of new products.

Generated? This stuff isn't generated, it's lived. Bloggers and podcasters are speaking from their hearts and passions, directly with their peers.

Media? Mediation means bridging a space between you and me, him and her. But we're all connecting directly now. Who needs a corporate bridge when all this new stuff is inside the same vibrant space, unmediated and immediate?

So I'd like to propose a new label: immedia. Companies that insist on ignoring the mutation of mediated consumers into immediate participants are blind to the future, not just of marketing, but of their own markets.

Now that anyone can grab the microphone, advertisers need to think and talk on a human scale. As the book The Cluetrain Manifesto put it in 1999, "In just a few more years, the current homogenized 'voice' of business -- the sound of mission statements and brochures -- will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court."

A few more years is now. Corporate "we-speak" sounds inane or ridiculous. Most print ads are laughable. Don't tell us you are creative and humane; let your staff have blogs and show us how dang creative they are.

What's growing now is not a re-aggregation of eyeballs but a living organism, as unpredictable as a hurricane. And, thanks to Metcalf's law -- a network's value is the square of the number of its participants -- the new game is far bigger than the sum of its players.

Bloggers trashed Kryptonite's brand in a few hours. Thousands of rampaging bloggers dethroned Dan Rather in days. Savvy T-shirt companies read blogs to learn buzz phrases that they put on T-shirts and sell back to blog readers the next day. Howard Dean went from a national nobody to a presidential contender on the back of a few hundred enthusiastic blog posts. And a TV show's popularity is now discernible on forums and blogs weeks before the season's opening.

Finding the right new name for this monster mashup is crucial. Old labels obscure more than they reveal. Alexander Graham Bell titled his patent for the telephone as just an "Improvement to Telegraphy."

I'm betting the word "media" today is teetering on the verge of irrelevance just as the word "telegraphy" was then. Consider some immedia numbers. There are an estimated 1.2 million new blog posts every day. In aggregate, the top 100 bloggers attract far more readers -- no, let's call them participants -- than the venerable New York Times and Washington Post, which together have nearly 2,000 editorial employees. And, gee, there are nearly 2 billion SMS messages sent globally... every day.

This is just the beginning. So let's close by quoting the oldest of old media, brothers and sisters. The Bible, Mark 2:21: "No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and so are the skins."

CGM, and even the idea of media itself, is an old skin for a great new wine. Let's toast the new age with a few big gulps of immedia!