It’s All About the 4Cs: Conduit, Content, Connection, Customer

If you're reading this column, I bet you understand those four things very well.  You start with the content (frequently and still quite often hailed as the king), which flows over a conduit to a customer thus making a connection. Which, you hope, will flow from the customer to your bottom line.  The problem today is making sense of all this, and all the different players who are busy building sandcastles in this brand new whatever-you-call-it box.

To bring some clarity to it all, let's start with the basics.  Which goes back to the question, “What are we anyway?”  Which starts with, “What are we to call ourselves?”

If you think names don't count let's contemplate the New Coke of yore which turned out to be the Coke nobody wanted?  Or how about Ford's attempt to sell the Pinto in Brazil, where Pinto translates into “tiny male genitals?”  Or, for an example from media, let's contemplate that source of endless bad jokes, “Comcastic!”

Ah, no.  Let's don't.

In any case, in the great media universe of the past, businesses identified themselves mostly by naming their services after things … like cable and sheathed wire; television and a box; broadcasting and airwaves; wireless meaning no wires, etc.  In truth all those “things” are services: communications (mostly) means via a cable (or fiber these days); television means video from elsewhere via whatever; broadcasting means getting a wireless video feed from a single source; wireless means voice communication (telephony) via spectrum.

So, let’s think about the service … content delivered to customers via a receiving/sending customer connection to a conduit.  Lots of differing media delivered lots via different ways to customers paying for two-way access to whatever.

An aside: interestingly, competition in one form or another exists at every aspect of the media ecosystem.

To me, the crux is the nexus … the connection that enables layers of commerce.  But what can encompass the rest of the media ecosystem?  How can all the variety of media (increasingly digital) be encompassed in a word?

How about “transmedia” … meaning “across all media?”  Or, collectively:  transmedia nexus?

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