The Pen Is No Longer Mightier Today!

In today’s world of jargon, I have found a new one for myself – as I help clients in understanding media behavior, I realize I am now a mediacrat. I delve into various forms of communication vehicles and try to identify nuances for my clients to improve their business decisions, on various matters.

While performing this role, I am reminded of journalists and reporters of the past era like Mark Tully (BBC), Anita Pratap (CNN). They were quite powerful in their times as their pen would drive individual minds and seed opinions in a certain direction. The column-centimeter was the ultimate battleground as journalists turned opinion leaders and often made heroes or zeroes of virtually anything; be it a government, head of state, celebrity or the common man on the street. They were the warriors of what is often called the Fourth Estate or more commonly the Press. In India, the practice of putting stickers titled “PRESS” on vehicles is somewhat of a prestige and carries on, to this day. This is done to send a subtle warning to all about the occupant of the car and what he/she could do with the backing of this profession.

However, times are changing. Today, you may want to invest in a sticker titled “e-JOURNALIST” as a new weapon has emerged to take over the press warriors – I call it e-ink.

e-ink or social media in its more popular form denotes the ability of the common man or anybody at that to shape opinion by sharing their thoughts, inputs, feelings, trials, tribulations, critique, etc. on the ever-accessible Internet. While the traditional press could sometimes wield some clout in starting the thought process among its readers, e-ink allows any thought process to get documented, shared, discussed and disseminated to a much larger audience, and also those that do not have access to the original traditional media piece. This makes this medium truly powerful and a clear game-changer. While the traditional media clout is restricted to its readership, which is typically a smaller sub-section of the population, e-ink has no boundaries and can be infinite in reach as it is fuelled by many like-minded human carriers who amplify the author’s point of view through several networks like Twitter, Facebook, delicious, dig, reddit, blogs, forums, etc. basically, it is the H1N1 virus of the digital world and can either harm/benefit the context in which it is used.

Net net, the verdict is clear – the pen might be mightier than the sword, but e-ink is the clear winner in today’s times.

EmPower’s clients recognize this phenomenon and have engaged with us for multiple needs – most of them want to be clued into e-ink behavior with respect to their categories, brands and their overarching corporate identity, itself. EmPower has pioneered several methodologies to assist clients in understanding the scope, extent, influence, outcome and impact of both the traditional press and e-ink. This helps our clients to understand how their business decisions are dealt with in both forms of media and more importantly, how one media’s reaction is played out by the other. These are very exciting forms of research in today’s times and as you can gauge, boredom is not an option

Our methodologies like PRISM, ASPIRE, SMMART help us to identify critical decision making points like tonality, perception, awareness, reconsideration and influence in both forms of media for various programs that our clients have seeded in the form of both offline and online initiatives. While traditional press opinion is typically very scientific and judged on hard facts, social media or e-ink reveals that perception can also quite often get crafted basis softer issues in consumer’s mind. Another interesting phenomenon is that e-ink is more often used for poor product/service/brand experience than for praise. This again underscores the importance of e-ink for today’s firm. I need not cite case studies here to emphasize the force of e-ink. The best possible case is probably that of the Twitter Revolution that brought down a nation – Egypt. Need I say more……

EmPower also helps clients with Pareto analysis of media – by identifying the 20% of those opinion generators that drive 80% of opinion among the mass online population on the strength of their sheer popularity, reach, expertise and goodwill. These so-called influencers are typically either journalists or publication outlets themselves in traditional press or could be a blogger/forum/twitter handle in the e-ink space. EmPower has very strong credentials in this space across multiple domains in various geographies. In summary, EmPower Research is well placed to harness the power of e-ink to help today’s corporates in their business activity.

- By Arun Swamy