Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

I recently gave a presentation at the Digital Innovators Summit in Berlin on how FORBES is disrupting the traditional news media.

My solution was to tell the FORBES story of the last 20 months — the successes, challenges and learnings of a 95-year-old startup helping to lead journalism into the future.

I’ve boiled it down to nine key points that capture what we’ve done to reinvent Forbes.com and put our authoritative journalism at the center of a unique social media experience....

... Scribble’s traction is international; its ScribbleLive real-time content creation and distribution platform is available in 14 languages and used by the biggest media brands, including the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN and ESPN to name a few. I spoke with Scribble CEO and co-founder Michael De Monte about the raise, and his vision for the company.

He pointed out that Scribble recently launched ScribbleMarket, a way for brands to easily syndicate their live content, and to find said content from other sources for use on their own site. Licensing can be free or paid, and this lets news agencies quickly leverage their reporting resources for additional income streams, by providing not just static articles for syndication as has been the case, but full-featured, interactive real-time content that’s being dynamically updated from a single backend.

quiet“The marketplace for us is the exciting component of what we’re building,” De Monte said. “This opportunity to share content in real time, becoming like the iTunes of real-time content has a lot of potential to change the face of media.”...

Does this signal the beginning of the end for Forbes as a knowledgeable source of business information? Have they finally "jumped the shark" on their way to the exit? "Jumping the shark" is actually an expression that goes back to the TV sitcom series, Happy Days. It was a show that pictured everything as rosy and happy, with neat little endings that were all nicely tied up in twenty-two minutes. The chief influencers on that show were "The Fonz," who only had to give you a look to let you know you were in trouble, and Mr. Cunningham, who set down the rules of the family.

In the midst of its ten-year run the writers must have gotten tired or were negatively influenced by the Hollywood decision-makers, when they inexplicably decided to have their characters travel to Los Angeles. Well, one thing leads to another and Fonzie ends up responding to an assault on his courage by taking to water skis (wearing his leather jacket of course) and jumping over a shark.

The stunt was so ridiculous and out of character that "jumping the shark" eventually came to be known as the moment when a television show begins a decline that is beyond recovery. While Happy Days bravely soldiered on for a few more years, it was never really the same in the minds of viewers and critics. Since that time the meaning has been broadened to define the moment when a brand or creative effort begins to lose the qualities that initially defined its success. Some still refer to "New Coke" as the moment when the Coca-Cola Company jumped the shark....