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When I started in association publications—about the time of the last ice age, reckoned in Internet time—communication was simple: write it, print it, mail it. The dynamics of communication had not changed fundamentally from the time Moses brought the tablets down from Mt. Sinai. God speaks. Listen up.

Now, the era of author as God-on-high is over. Anyone with a blog, a podcast, or a Web page can issue a commandment, a commentary, a criticism. And, unlike God, today’s authors do not rest on Sunday.

The Web has made communications today fluid and fast-changing, nothing like the one-way transmission from author to reader I grew up with. I count seven broad trends in communications, the “7 Cs”:

1. Content creation by users. User-created content has come a long, long way from the humble letter to the editor. Users want not merely to respond to content they read; they want to co-create it. And, these days, they can, whether by contributing to essays in the Wikipedia, sharing the bookmarks on del.icio.us, or confessing their most private thoughts and actions on Facebook.

2. Connectedness. Communications prophet Bill Gates phrased the desire for communications connectedness best. Speaking in January at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, he said, “Our ambition is to give you connected experiences 24 hours a day. We admit that when you're sleeping we haven't quite figured out what we're going to do for you there, but the rest of the time, the minute you get in the kitchen and look at that refrigerator, pick up your phone, hear the alarm clock tell you about the traffic; whatever it is, we want you to have the information that you're interested in.”

3. Continuous updating. Time was, updating meant the afternoon edition of the local paper. Today, many users are frustrated if a Google News update is more than an hour old. They demand up-to-the minute coverage, for example, of who will get custody of Anna Nicole Smith's baby daughter.

4. Customization. Ever since the John Deere company launched the first custom publication, The Furrow, in the 1890s, publishers have been striving to tailor information for the individual reader. Today, even simple sites offer some measure of user customization. For that matter, customization is not unique to publishing. It is possible to customize your Roomba vacuum cleaner, for example, with skins that make it look like a pizza or a flower.

5. Criticism. The legion of bloggers who brought down Dan Rather and help to doom John Kerry's campaign are just as much on the prowl for association publications. The American Diabetes Association, for example, despite being the leading association fighting diabetes, comes under attack for its stance on dietary sugar, for its support for animal research, and for taking money from the pharmaceutical industry.

6. Cross-media delivery. Even seemingly stodgy old-line publishers like Time, Inc. have caught the cross-media bug. The company has gone so far as to name a "Chief Research and Insights Officer," Betsy Frank, in charge of "driving strategic insights across all of the company’s brands and businesses on multiple platforms."

7. Competition. Competition is everywhere. Where many associations once had their markets to themselves, today competing publications and Web sites come from for-profit media companies, vendors, other associations, bloggers, wikis, the government, and many other sources.

At first glance associations might seem poorly equipped to tackle, let alone profit from, the seven C's of new media. In my next post, however, I'll argue that associations, as communities, have a natural advantage in exploiting today's trends in media toward community, consensus, and collaboration.

This posting is based on presentation given on February 2, 2007, to the Pittsburgh Society of Association Executives and co-sponsored by the Society of National Association Publiations.

Labels: web publishing community

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