Depending on your point of view, Jeff Jarvis is either a new media visionary or a blowhard. Since he was the person who gave us the idea for Baristanet, we hold him in pretty high esteem. Long before newspapers were in the kind of trouble they are in now, he had spotted their weaknesses and encouraged them go online and make journalism a two-way street. To some, that makes him the enemy of print. Actually, he’s more a facilitator of the discussion.
In February, Collins Business published Jarvis’s first book, “What Would Google Do?” In it, he “reverse engineers” the search engine behemoth to find out what makes it, as the Times of London says, “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.”
This Thursday night, May 28, he’ll be at the Montclair Public Library at 7 pm to discuss his ideas.
If you’re in one of those industries currently under fire — journalism, real estate, publishing, to name a few — and you’re wondering whether your job, or even your company, will be around in a year, it’s time to listen to Jarvis.
Here are some of his “new rules of a new age,” from the first page of WWGD?
People can find each other anywhere and coalesce around you — or against you.
The mass market is dead, replaced by the mass of niches.
“Markets are conversations,” decreed The Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work of the internet age, in 2000. That means the key skill in any organization today is no longer marketing but conversing.
We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance. The control of products or distribution will no longer guarantee a premium and a profit.
After Jarvis’s talk, he will be signing books provided by Watchung Booksellers.
