The line between mainstream media and consumer generated news is about to become more blurred.

The New York Times reports that beginning tomorrow, both Reuters and Yahoo will begin a renewed push to solicit and integrate reader submitted content into their news products both online and off.

CNN and other major news organizations have already been romancing their audiences to play a contributing role in news reporting through products like CNN Exchange, in which citizens all over the world who witness newsworthy events can upload photos and video to help tell more balanced, authentic stories.

What's unique about these new offerings is that consumers who submit content and serve as defacto journalists can actually benefit financially from their efforts (albeit it in a small way at first). Reuters will pay consumer journalists when their photos or videos are syndicated to Reuters clients.

With incentives in place, it's safe to assume more "casual journalists" will get involved in shaping the news we consume every day.

Companies and brands who have the most loyal followings have the best chance to benefit from this new model of news reporting. Imagine a mainstream article about the launch of a new car being supported by consumer-submitted video showing a happy customer driving off in their new wheels talking about the great buying experience and love of the new model.

And with all individuals being potential journalists, companies will need to focus harder in the future to ensure better customer service and consistently satisfying experiences. One consumer with a bad experience and a mobile phone has access to a global audience with unimaginable ease. Small slip-ups can have a huge impact.

As communicators, we'll need to stay on our toes to identify opportunities for encouraging our clients' loyalists to tell their own positive stories and to stay watchful for potentially damaging stories contributed by individuals.

Our jobs in PR are about to get a lot more interesting.

Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto debuted as the number one movie this weekend, grossing $15 million at the box office. Impressive considering this is not your typical holiday movie, and it’s not your typical blockbuster movie either. After all, Apocalypto has an obscure storyline, it is incredibly violent, has no famous actors, and is entirely in Mayan dialect with English subtitles. Wow! Movie goers must really be in search of something authentic this holiday season.

Lots of people, not enough talents

The world most populous country has generated 4.1 million undergraduates alone in 2006. These highly educated youngsters not only have to compete among themselves but also against an additional 790,000 job seekers (2005 data) who are between jobs. Last week I was in a campus recruitment event, and the competition for an interview was fierce.

It seems with so many graduates each year companies have easier time to find candidates. If you think this way, you are too optimistic. Today in China, the most common topic among senior management is the lack of talents in an organization, especially those with solid experience and the right set of skills. 6 to 9 months search for the right candidate for some senior positions is common in Shanghai, and most of the time, the fight for this talent can be brutal. This translates to higher cost. In other words, if you want your job to be done ok, the cost can be reasonable in China. But we all know our clients want the best of the best. Then don’t be surprised to receive a high quotation that can be similar to that of New York or Chicago. Talents worth a lot in China, that’s also why they cost so much.

So you can say that when it comes to entry level positions, companies have the upper hand. But when it comes to senior level positions, the talent has the upper hand. This is just a matter of life here in China, today.

With no ending in sight of this trauma, many companies have started to plan programs to retain their talents. All of the sudden Chinese companies realize that talents are not easy to be replaced, and the cost of losing a talent results in losing business and connections. Benefits packages, as well as employee training courses have started to appear in many local organizations, but most of them are one-offs and lack of a unified, long-term strategy. This is part of growing pains – of a manufacturing base economy moving into a service and knowledge-base economy, but also represents immense opportunities for agencies providing services for employee retention.

A friend once joke that “people” is a commodity in China. I think – people, yes; talent, no.

Posted by Lydia Lee

I just read an article in PR Week about a new study by Ketchum and University of Southern California's Annenberg Strategic Public Relations Center that shows that..."traditional and local media still carry a great deal of influence with consumers."

The "Media Myths & Realities" survey "compares the media habits of 1,490 Americans with the practices of 500 corporate communications professionals.... nearly 74% of consumers get their information from local TV news, while approximately 69% [including young adults] read the local newspaper."

It was heartening to me to read, in this age of new media and clients demanding the latest and newest, that this survey proves that traditional media is still alive and well and should absolutely continue to be part of a broad media mix.

I’ve written here before about blogosphere blunders. From the written word to the streamed image, some marketeers and PR types just can’t seem to avoid the high-profile belly flops that go along with trying to pull a fast one on the blogosphere.

Their acts are tantamount to high treason -- seeking to influence viral opinion by wrapping corporate spin in flogs, apocryphal posts aping as authentic web dialogue.

The latest example is Sony’s embarrassing effort to punk the blogosphere with a flog written by a couple of faux gamers in love with Sony’s PSP handheld. It took the blogosphere about 20 seconds to realize the site was an unintentional joke, a truly laughable attempt to speak the language of bloggers with a couple of “playas” trading “funky fresh” posts on the merits of the PSP.

The real joke was on Sony and its “viral mktg firm” Zapatoni that helped create the hoax. The blogosphere lashed back big time with universal derision even from die-hard Sony fans wondering how mktg execs for such a vaunted brand could be so lame.

This isn’t the first blogosphere blunder nor will it be the last. But I say enough is enough!

Letting these guys off with a simple slap on the wrist, a la WOMMA’s attempt to censure Edelman for its recent WalMart fakery, just doesn’t cut it.

As a profession, we communicators need to be more vigilant about policing ourselves and holding guilty parties truly accountable. Not exactly a perp walk, but something that suitably calls out floggers and marks them as such.

Call it the National Flog Offender Registry. I see it taking the form of a website and serving as a database of the companies, agencies and individuals that have flogged their way to infamy via the blogosphere and other viral media.

First-time offenders get posted on the site for one year and then, barring any further fakery, lapse into archive status. Repeat offenders are called out on a permanent roster of naughtiness for all the world to see.

The Flog Offender Registry serves two purposes: First as a deterrent for any would-be flogger who would rather not suffer such public humiliation. Second as an on-line resource for corporate marketing and PR professionals to search as part of any credentials check of prospective agency partners or employees.

With TIME naming anyone contributing to the consumer-generated media revolution as its Person of the Year for 06, we have the opportunity to embrace or alienate pretty much the better part of humanity and the way it will communicate going forward.

Rather than circle the wagons and protect our own, how refreshing would it be to see our industry willing to name names, hold all of us to a higher level of transparency and in the process pave the way for a truly authentic and trusting relationship between the comms community and the blogosphere.

How cool would it be to have the Flog Offender Registry built as a microsite off the PRSA homepage or run in conjunction with a group like WOMMA?

That would go a lot further than the simple lip service we have seen from some of these organizations to date. What do you say, WOMMA, are you willing to put your website where your mouth is?

It’s official -- baby boomers and senior citizens are the new hipsters.

“Greatest Generation” grandparents and "Boomer Zoomers” are living longer, fuller lives, going back to school, traveling widely and adopting new hobbies well into their golden years. Today’s grannies are tech-savvy, using cell phones, e-mail and actively blogging -- check out the “Can’t Open It” videos chronicling the challenge of opening a jar on Thoroughly Modern Millie.

And it doesn’t end there… the Entertainment Software Association reports that more than 25% of regular video game players are 50 and older. These are definitely not your father’s grandparents.

The active baby boomer and senior citizen demographic is growing at an amazing rate. Every minute this year 330 American Boomers will turn 60. The 80 million-strong baby boom generation is the largest, most wealthy and influential generation in the history of the US, with more than $2.3 *trillion* to spend.

This group is hugely important to retailers for Holiday 06. Forget reindeer sweaters, Old Spice and fruitcake -- this holiday season, what grandparents and baby boomers want to receive are the hottest tech toys.

A recent Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Nintendo found that 52% of grandparents and 68% of baby boomers want to receive the latest tech items, such as MP3 players and DVDs. Nearly a third of grandparents and baby boomers reported that they’d like a portable video game system, like Nintendo DS Lite, from their loved ones this year.

Looking to 2007, it’s critical that advertisers, marketers and PR professionals get the attention of this older, wiser demographic. Otherwise the gold in those golden years will be helping to build market share for the competition.

We can take a page from sophisticated marketers like L’Oreal and Ameriprise who are already leveraging older icons in their ad campaigns.

If 60 is the new 40, it’s time raise our sights above the almighty 18-34 demographic and start thinking about what the Greatest Tech Generation really wants, what they’re not getting, and how their needs should impact everyting from product R&D to brand management.

Want to know what’s on the minds of today’s seniors? Just take a look at what’s playing on their computers, PDAs and video game systems.

Market research has made tremendous strides over the last ten years in understanding how consumers' demographics can be used as a preliminary indicator of their attitudes and behaviors. With the advent of specialized online market research, a lot of hay has been made around behavioral and contextual marketing--two distinct disciplines that respectively seek to target consumers on the actions they take or the content they read on a give Web site.

But these complex crafts may be obsolete before they are every fully formed. In their place, completely new ways of targeting based on where, when and what is going on in a person’s surrounding environment could emerge.

Accessing the Web through a computer will become less and less common, thanks in part to a growing list of Web-enabled household appliances coming to marketing in the next 18 months. These include seemingly mundane appliances including refrigerators, alarm clocks and coffee makers. Yet, they herald a new era of the Internet age when someone may be as likely to get their daily headlines and personal email from their alarm clock as their laptop.

Smart refrigerators will notify owners when their running low on milk--or its expiration date has passed—but will a message for orange juice "stick" better if heard in the shower or read on the fridge with the morning's bowl of cereal?

Smart marketers will figure this out. And over the next fifty years, marketing study and insight will move beyond demographics and behaviors to try and match messaging to the activities and distractions in the surrounding environment for optimal effect.