The Cluetrain Manifesto opens with these historic words:

“These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

I think that it is clear that not only will markets be conversations where consumers have a voice - think Dell Hell and Jeff Jarvis - but also the media. The media will have to listen as well. They will have to host conversations as well as have them. Their relationship with their listeners, viewers and readers will have to change as it will have to change in all enterprises. They will have o change their voice and their relationship with their customers and inside.

The challenge is - How do you do this when you never have done this before? For it’s not just about will - it’s about habit. It’s about learning a whole new way of being. This post is an introduction to how hard this is to do. How hard it is when you want to do this but don’t know how.
Over the last 2 years I have had the honor of working with NPR and with some stations in both TV and radio as they struggle to make the same shift from “One to Many” to Hosting a Trusted Space where Many to Many could have a safe conversation. As a system we learned what we had to do and how important it was to do this for our future. The new challenge is - to find out how best to put these ideas into action.
I am working directly with 2 stations right now. KETC, St. Louis and WOSU Columbus. We are struggling with what do we have to do to change our relationship with our audience from a “Kinetic” to a “Participative” relationship?

We have just begun. Rather than wait and tell you in a years time what we had done, I want to share our struggle with you, so that you can follow and hopefully participate in our voyage of discovery. Today I will offer some broad context, some highlights and ask you for some help on areas where we are really in the dark.

How to begin? First of all, we decided that trying to host conversations and find ways of engaging our audience as a general idea was too broad. So, instead, we have chosen one project as a foundation where we could possibly learn the basics.

We have chosen as our starting point, the launch this fall of a new documentary by Ken Burns on World War II, called The War. Our intent is use the momentum and the related publicity of “The War” to find out how to use existing Social Software tools to engage our local communities in St Louis MO and in Columbus Ohio in finding the social meaning of the war. Can we link the kids with their grandparents? Can we get the stories locked up in the hearts and in the attics of the vets and their wives, sisters and loved ones out into the open? Can we find a broader sense of community, as all races, ages and cultures come together to honor the stories? Can we find out how to support and help a community grow?

Inside the stations can we find out how to make the web central to all that we do? Can we learn how to use the Social Media tools that exist? Can we learn to cooperate across the traditional departmental walls? Can we cooperate between stations? Can we cooperate up and down the hierarchy? Can we learn how to use these tools ourselves?

In summary this is where we are going:

In this link for KETC - you can see that we are starting to use all the key social media tools. A blog, Facebook, YouTube etc. More important we are fumbling along to find a way to make them work and to integrate them. We also do not focus on technology alone. At WOSU, we had a kind of Veterans Memories Roadshow were we invited vets and their families into WOSU’s amazing Social Space COSI to tell their stories on video. The link is to YouTube where WOSU have a channel.

We are finding that having great physical space is important. COSI is up and running and at KETC we are thinking about opening our space to a wider public. We are finding that people want to meet face to face and that as media centres we might also be able to teach them or help them getter better at using media.

The hard work though is in the Social Media side. Here we are such novices. We picked Facebook because that is where people are. There are over 70,000 in St Louis. There are 57,000 in Columbus. There are growing national groups that use Facebook that support NPR and PBS such as I Heart NPR. Our ingoing bet is that Facebook may become an excellent way of fostering support. We just don’t know how to do this well yet. Any advice would be welcome.

We picked YouTube because it is becoming the de facto place to find video and so we felt that if we were to encourage our viewers to send in material, we wanted to make it easy. We also wanted to learn how to use YouTube well ourselves. We are learning though that merely putting film on YouTube is not enough. Again any advice would be welcome.

We know that the standard for web video is about 3-6 minutes. By a happy coincidence, we are brilliant at this for this is the length of show that we have made for years to fill in as local content before the main events.

KETC is making about 50 6 minute films in support of “The War” where we interview people or tell local stories like this one. What a story teller she is. We also have more than 400 short films on many other topics. But these at the moment are hidden on the regular website and stream only because we did not realize early enough the importance of digital rights. Our challenge is to release the value of this work. Shortly we will put films on the blog. Our plan is to use the blog to talk about each film so that it can be tagged and found and also to use music in future where the rights issue is not a problem. You will be able to search and find material, download the film and or begin a conversation about the content. When we go live here, I will return and ask for your help in organizing the material so that it works best.

We are also learning how to use the web to expand what we can do on air and in person. Tonight Ken Burns visits St Louis and will talk to an invited audience of about 300 about the documentary. We will be filming using two cameras and will stream locally today - we don’t have enough bandwidth to go national yet - and then post the film so that anyone can see it.

I can see this type of event becoming standard in the future where a TV station uses the bandwidth of the web to vastly improve its local coverage. Here the web supports the air and vice versa. I can not only the station doing this but what about citizen shows - high school sport in your town - local restaurants - local politics - whatever? If we can get this right, we can offer a true public service and allow a community to tell as many stories as it wants. A “public” TV and Radio station by the public and for the public.

What is so hard is that all of this is outside of our own experience and the experience of most other people. There is no manual. How do we make the web the wrap around? How do we change our voice? How do we integrate all of this? How do we create enough value for you so that you support us better?

For me, the difficulty has a benefit. We want to find the answers to these questions. We are committed to finding them. So what about those that want to avoid all of this? How hard will this be for them? I think so hard that they will not be able to do it.

So the new barrier to competition is no longer money but culture. Those who cannot open up will fail because of their own cultural barriers. I am hopeful as a result.