Saturday night at 8:00, I’m the guest monologuist for Dallas Comedy House’s Megaphone Show. I’ll be telling some seedy stories from my bachelor days in Dallas and then the pros will be improvising scenes inspired by them. It’ll be a great time. I’m also improvising in the 10:00 PM Maestro show. Both shows are $10– get your tickets here. I’m beyond excited about this — I’ll guarantee a good time.

On Monday at 1 PM, I’ll be guest-hosting the Innovation at Work Radio Show on CNN AM 1190. I met host Winston Edmondson as a result of my Ignite Dallas speaking gig. We hit it off and he’s since become a PegNews content partner and had me on the show to talk about our launch. We’d batted around the idea of me occasionally guest-hosting and he’s giving me my first shot Monday. I’ll be chatting with the folks from Dallas Startup Weekend about this year’s event. Tune in or catch the stream online.

Monday at 5 PM, I’ll be appearing on a panel for The Media Club of North Texas with a handful of other local mediati from The Dallas Morning News, D Magazine, KERA and the like trying to hash out what the future looks like…

And then on Friday at 3 PM I’ll be speaking at the Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University. (This was preempted earlier by The Great Blizzard of 2010. I’ll be giving my preso on why I think all the turmoil in the media biz will, eventually, be good for local journalism and then joining in on a panel on what J-schools should be teaching their students now.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Busy Startup Week in Dallas! (texasstartupblog.com)
• Catch Mike at Dallas Comedy House Saturday Night (April 10): Square Pegs (pegasusnews.com)
• Startup Weekend Dallas – April 16-18 (springstage.com)
• Improv resources (orrenmedia.com)
• Ignite Dallas!: Square Pegs (pegasusnews.com)

It keeps getting smaller.

There’s a pissing match today among several InterWebs iconoclasts about Comscore‘s traffic counting methods and business models. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s a bunch of bitch-slapping about unrelated issues, but web traffic is the jumping-off point.

You can read it for yourself — be sure to follow the comment thread too, in which all the principals rebut. (Or, as one commenter deems it, “three poodles fighting over a piece of raw meat”).

But for me, the whole thing is sad because it reminds me of another “scandal” almost six years ago now. Several newspaper chains had been caught overstating their circulation. There was all sorts of hand-wringing over it, but in the midst of the mea culpas, I read one simple line in a column by Ed Wasserman that changed my way of thinking and in large part led me to create The Daily You as a major feature of Pegasus News:

“Still, there is an absurdity to the whole scam. Counting copies is a dopey way to gauge impact. The explosion of information channels necessarily means erosion of audience share held by dominant media. There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.”

…

I’m not sure that even Ed would still agree with the last sentence, but the rest holds true today, at a different level. We’re arguing over what should be a largely meaningless metric. Yet it is the metric on which our industry’s customers make the lion’s share of their buying decisions. More than a half-decade later, we’ve dragged our old problem into the promising new world.

Why? Partly because the truly meaningful statistic is sales conversion. Despite my hopes for major strides in this area, no one has yet found a way to meaningfully connect an online view with offline commerce (which still accounts for the lions’ share of transactions). Frankly, from what I see, there’s a lot of missed opportunity in connecting online media with online transactions. (Hint: We see tons of user activity on editorial content related to offline businesses who advertise on our sites — exponentially exceeding the number of clicks on their ads.)

It’s also because the same executives and industry leaders that refused to see the bloodbath coming to “traditional media” didn’t mark the potholes on the road to the bankruptcy courts. Comscore’s panel-driven metric is just the new flavor of circulation audit or television rating — not to pick on Comscore, because we all know that no online measurement tool is perfect.

But my point is this: If the local Chinese restaurant (or dry cleaner, or Wal-Mart, or car dealer) is still just hoping to get the maximum number of eyeballs with a nonzero chance of buying, everyone is getting shortchanged. They need to be buying the attention of people who like Chinese food who will be within a five mile radius on a day the restaurant won’t be full. Five of those people are worth a million who don’t fit that rubric. Add the multiplication of messages we see every day, and finding the sweet spot in that fragmented attention is even more valuable.

The sad thing is that this problem should be much closer to solved by now — but the major media companies still have a medium-term disincentive to show their customers exactly which half seven-eighths of their advertising is wasted . The panoply of startups working this area continue to prove that this is a micro problem that requires a macro solution to create a viable business.

I see some promising activity on the mobile front, but that’s a post for another day. What we can be sure of, though, is that the value and price of advertising sold on the metric of audience size and broad demography will continue its race to $0. How quickly our industry (media and buyers) adapt will determine whether the last couple years will be looked upon as the bottom or the last bastion of the glory days.

Related articles by Zemanta

• 7 New Years Resolutions News Execs Should be Making in 2010 (simsblog.typepad.com)
• MediaNews parent files for Chapter 11 protection (sfgate.com)
• The Future Of Social Media Monetization, Part 1 (allfacebook.com)
• Newspapers Are Committing Suicide With The Paid-Content Rope (stoweboyd.com)
• Online Newspaper Audience Declining; Older Media Consumers Moving to Social Media (poynter.org)

PR people wonder why there’s sometimes resentment towards them from media folk — I don’t think it is actually because of anything PR professionals do per se, but rather because of the utter disconnect between most businesses public relations and advertising. And I don’t think it is generally front-of-mind for most media companies because of the church-state separation. But as someone who lives in both worlds, I’ve found myself seething lately over repeated scenarios like this:

Do they really work together?

Company X’s PR people inundate you with pitches and requests. Now at PegNews, we pick up almost anything that’s local, so the hit rate is pretty high. But let’s say we go the extra mile for Company X’s PR folks, making corrections; posting numerous items; adding multimedia, etc. PR person may even say thanks and note that we’re the one outlet that always finds a way to help get the word out.

So, even though there is no stated or tacit quid pro quo, it’s maddening when Company X buys a massive media schedule that covers print, online, TV and radio and doesn’t include us. Even worse, doesn’t even consider us or meet with our ad reps.

Now I’m not suggesting they should just blindly buy us just because we ran their releases. But I know that we’re at least as good a buy as the other dozen media they bought. That frustrates me not only on our behalf, but on Company X’s too. They are spending good money on PR professionals who are placing content and know that it is getting response. But, I presume, they aren’t even getting their input in making a media buy.

I did an informal survey today via Facebook and Twitter, and from PR, advertising and media folk got a universal agreement that PR and advertising don’t generally communicate, whether in-house or out.

Seems a wasted opportunity for all involved.

• We find most PR folk very accomodating about passing on our info to ad folk. And we find they generally have little to no sway.
• In the end, we’re a business and the Company X’s of the world are businesses. It seems that half the relationship works and the other half doesn’t. The Chinese Wall is probably why that’s been so for so long. As that wall begins to crumble during the mediapocalypse of the aughties, I wonder how that relationship will change.

Saving the auto industry means saving car makers.

Saving the free press does not mean saving newspapers.

I tried really hard to see Second Life as something more than a timesuck for gullible ex-dungeonmasters and marketing consultants with enough disposable time and income that they don’t mind slow, jerky, crashing animations of their alter-fauxegos. But I’ve come up empty. I mean at least WOW gives you the entertaiment value of killing stuff.

So I find news of a real estate crisis in SL beyond ridiculous.