Former publisher of The Australian Financial Review’s MIS Magazine, Matt Rigney, backed the idea and helped sell it to editorial and management at Fairfax Business Media. And FBM has backed me ever since.

Fast forward to April 2009 and  I received a huge thumbs up from my tech journalism and media colleagues when The Scoop received a Lizzie Award for Best Audio Program.  Obviously I’m stoked by the win, particularly given that The Scoop returns next week after a long summer hiatus. I’ll write more about that soon.

But since this is my site, and I’m not about to get drowned out by music as the logies fade to a commercial, a massive thanks & kudos to the following people:

• Mark Hollands and Foad Fadaghi - two regular guests who helped the show gain traction in the early days.
• Marc Tewksbury, FBM’s Multimedia Manager and my online producer at the AFR.
• Matt Rigney and FBM’s Jacqui Marlin & Barry McGhee.
• All the CEOs, CIOs, and tech leaders who have come on the show.
• James Kennedy for writing & recording the music.
• MediaConnect’s Phil & Donna Sim for hosting the Lizzies, and to Phil for being my first tech journalism editor.
• My wife. She’s awesome. And it’s her voiceover on the ads.
• God (And I’m not being silly about that.. :).

Finally, here’s some of the associated media coverage. And btw, congrats to all the other winners.

• MISAustralia.com: “Award winners“
• MediaConnect: “AFR & Yates win Gold Lizzies“
• Digital Media: “The 2009 Lizzie Winners“

As an aside, we’ve also got the “tech” part of this whole “ad:tech” meme. But that’s been conveniently sidelined in the battle of marketing ideologies. Maybe we just take technology (ie. the one giant computer called the internet) for granted now, since it’s use-case scenarios that matter.

So all this got me thinking. What is it about the mindset of agency-types, and the mindset of social media consultant-types (I tend to fall into the latter), that causes mild friction at events like ad:tech?

If I can be permitted to grossly simplify, agencies are commissioned by clients to conduct campaigns. Defined periods of time in which various media tools are exercised to generate sales on behalf of said client. No shock there, since advertising still keeps most of the media industry running.

Then we’ve got social media consultants, whose stock in trade is the intellectual property and experience they sell to clients for the purpose of engaging target stakeholder communities in conversations about brand, ideas, ideologies, and so on. The marketing angle can be less clear, or stated positively, more broadly defined.

It’s the classic conundrum where the disciplines of marketing, advertising, communications, PR and good-old editorial collide and get mashed up. The answers are not simple or easily quantified — unless of course you’re an agency charged with delivering quantifiable results to justify a very large invoice. Quantified results are where you make, or lose money. And by the way, that’s what this whole internet thing has promised the marketing community since the mid-1990s and we’re still trying to figure it out!

Anyway, while listening to keynotes and panel discussions yesterday, I got the impression agency types are very clearly focussed on the profit motive (surprise!). They might not be getting it right all the time, but their drive to find measurable results is clear. And you know what, I don’t think that’s bad.

However it does raise a challenge for content-focussed social media consultants (communities are giant content machines, after all). They must come up with some clearly agreed metrics and models that communicate to c-level executives just why the social media revolution matters to the bottom line. I’m the first to admit this is not an easy problem to solve.

But let’s face the harsh recession reality: if more of the social media consultants out there want to make more (or any) money from client engagements then it’s time we developed more solid, industry-wide accepted answers when companies demand reasonable levels of quantitative measurement.

Am I right?

Many of you already know I’ve been a technology journalist for more than a decade, and I’ve continued to work as a freelance contributor for The Australian Financial Review, producing video interviews and The Scoop (which is on an extended summer break). But what you might not know is I’m also a keynote speaker and workshop host focussed on, you guessed it, digital media and internet trends (btw, you can book me direct, or via agencies like Saxton and ICMI). Why? I’ve always made career decisions based on a simple premise. If the idea sounds scary, I do it! Life is more fun that way.

So last November I found myself on a big stage at the Financial Planners Association Conference on the Gold Coast speaking about social media in front of a few hundred people. It was one of a dozen or so keynotes and workshops I have delivered over the past 6 months or so.  The folk at the FPA were kind enough to send me some photos of yours truly on stage, pictured here.

My next speaking gig is a 5 city cloud computing panel event with IBM, which kicks off next week in Perth.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been running a workshop called “The Digital Media Advantage” for CEOs and senior executives who participate in TEC, an organisation that mentors business leaders. I’ve found that typically one or two of the 15 executives in these workshops understand digital media, and the rest are yet to be convinced. So we talk. They get practical advice and insights, and I get a written evaluation on my performance (I’ve developed broad shoulders…heh).

Then we come to the odd experience of being the interviewee, not the interviewer as I’ve been throughout most of my journalism career. I’ve made a few cameos on ABC Radio lately, including an interview with Kara Greiner on “Overnights” to discuss what they called “Cyber Wars.”

Facebook is of course a fantastic platform to generate grassroots support for just about any cause, and that includes war. In this interview, we spoke about how the Gaza conflict is being reflected on social networking sites. I even managed to steer the conversation to Twitter, much to the amusement of Mrs J who remains bemused by my Twittering. The producers kindly sent me a CD of the interview, so have a listen here (warning: 14 MB download): ABC cyber wars interview with Mark Jones. Enjoy!

One of my twitter buddies had linked to a test broadcast by ABC personality James Valentine. He was in a radio studio with an engineer (off air) and trying to figure out how to possible weave a live video feed into his radio show.

And here we were, some 92 people who had caught wind of the experiment and buzzed by to see what the fuss was about. James was engaging directly with the assembled onlookers. He wanted to get the sound working. Technical stuff. As an aside, it was fun to discover one of the ustream participants was an old friend who I’d not seen for years – the online equivalent of bumping into someone in the street.

Meanwhile, I had other stuff happening while ustream’s live comments unfolded. I was glancing at my twitter stream (you can find me here, btw), reading email, doing some online research ahead of a social media workshop I was to host the following day, synching my ipod and smartphone. Just your regular Joe with an digital attention deficit disorder.

And so amid all this digital noise, my thoughts randomly turned to this abstract idea they call the semantic web. In simplistic terms, theory says online tools and services are maturing to give us a sophisticated layer of services that automate common functions, and fill in the blanks when we have to do stuff.

An example: Google Calendar now automatically creates a map when you create an appointment and plug the location address details into the “where” field. Simple, but very useful. But my digital multitasking scenario is even simpler (in theory). The semantic web has a long road ahead before it’s considered “mainstream”. In the meantime, we have us - you and me.

We are the aggregators, the gatekeepers, live human services that take streams of data that represent life and mash them up. Sometimes we share the product of our digital mashing in the form of blogs, tweets and facebook entries. At other times we sit back from our digital TV screen, sorry, “computer monitor”, and simply muse.

This, I suggest, is what real life on the web looks like for many of us. Ordinary folk take digital content, unconciously treat it as liquid and mash it up. And guess what, sometimes it tastes incredible. Other times you gag and spit it out. A lot like life itself really.

What’s clear to me is that the return to economic fundamentals will rub off on everything else. In tech, media and marketing circles, that means a flight to quality companies, quality products, and the radical pursuit of simplicity.

So it’s incumbent on the digital media industry to clearly articulate the social media value proposition. I think we need less talk about social media theory, less industry obsession with jargon and the wow factor, and more focus on real results achieved by companies using social media.

I’ve been conducting some research for more speaking engagements coming up, such as this one at the Financial Planners Conference. And I found myself getting lost in a thousand different theories about where it was all going. After clearing my head, I realised we need to get back to basics.

Social media, or whatever you want to call it, represents a fundamental shift in how we understand and use digital media to communicate.

In the same way the world faces a new economic reality, most of the corporate world still needs to discover the new communications reality. Yes, it’s so-called two-way model of communications and conversation. Most of us get that. What we need now are more success stories that prove the theory.

So I smiled when I stumbled across this video from Microsoft (of all companies!). If you still don’t “get it,” try watching this for a funny insight into a profound disconnect I hope many companies will avoid in the months ahead.

Today’s uh-huh moment comes from Twittercounter, a service that give you statistics on anyone’s twitter subscribers. Yours truly still hasn’t hit the big-time because unlike many of my peers, I maintain a tight, select, or if you like elite list of followers. So we’re talking hundreds, not thousands of fans following our every thought.

But yesterday’s technical glitch meant Twitter wiped more than a hundred of my subscribers away. Today, they’re apparently back and the list keeps growing. Here’s what’s interesting - Twitter is now in the business of predicting subscriber growth. I’m growing at an average rate of three people per day as this chart illustrates.

But you’ve got to wonder about other possibilities for dissecting Twitter data. The other well-known Twitter data mining tool is summize, recently bought out by Twitter and simply turned into Twitter search.

Tools like buzznumbers are already parsing this data to take advantage of all the obvious marketing, product positioning and PR applications you can imagine. So, we’re in a world where live conversations are not only tracked, but the widespread accessibility of conversation analytics will become part of business. It’s at this point privacy advocates throw their hands up in the air and run around in circles waving frantically…

If you think about the new media meta-narrative, it strikes me that we’ve become fixated on the drama that’s affecting incumbent media. You’re familiar with the story: mainstream newspapers and TV are “losing” while new media like consumer-generated content and social networking is “winning.”

Just about every media debate I can think of – blogging vs. journalism, the future of advertising, digital rights management, mobile content – fits into this paradigm. Every conference, panel discussion or private meeting I’ve enjoyed over the past two years has roughly echoed this story. And it’s a fascinating story, even if it sometimes seems overplayed. It’s fascinating because it echoes other big underdog stories that capture our attention: David vs. Goliath, Vietnam vs. the United States, Maxine McKew vs. John Howard.

I realise I’m speaking in pretty general terms, but today I realised what’s been bugging me about this story. As an industry we’ve spent so much time focused on who is losing that we’ve lost sight of where the opportunities lie.

Let me give you some examples. At Ross Dawson’s Future of Media Summit 2008, it was interesting to see a few eyebrows raised when he predicted the total worldwide media industry would be worth US$5.7 trillion by 2024 (pdf here). You could almost hear people thinking: “Huh? That’s not part of the “big media is dead” story I’ve been following!” How, how did he get that figure? I don’t know. But it’s a good story.

If the total media pie is actually getting bigger, then that’s worth further investigation. Of course, it’s not a new idea. Figures I compiled late last year show that while growth in advertising spend is falling in some segments like Outdoor and Free-to-Air TV, the total pie keeps growing (albeit slowly in segments like newspapers - see chart).

Another interesting data point can be seen in these e-marketer stats which show total TV consumption in the United States has continued to rise despite the boom in online video. One of the theories here is that as we become more sophisticated media consumers, media continues to occupy even more of our everyday lives.

We don’t stop watching TV just because we’ve started micro-blogging on Twitter, for example. Some of us, including yours truly, watch TV AND write Twitter posts. You can laugh if you like - my family does - but it’s fascinating to realise that instant, real-time conversations are becoming a normal part of the way we consume live events, TV and video streams. The likes of ustream.tv or mobile phone streams on Qik are just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s an old cliche that a rising tide floats all boats. It’s actually not a perfect analogy because it hides from view the very real, game-changing impact of consumer-driven changes to the media business. But what the statistics tell us is that there are more media fortunes to be won than lost in the years to come. And that’s a good story, one that demands more attention regardless of whether you are in the “old” or “new” media business.

My interest in the convergence of media, technology and marketing hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s deepened. What has changed is that my attention is increasingly divided between different forms of social media. And most of my social media time is currently soaked up by Twitter. If you want to follow my twitter musings, check me out at twitter.com/markhjones.

I sat down with Sony Pictures Television executive VP Jack Ford in Sydney at the VentureOne/AIMIA Commercialising Video conference to talk about digital media convergence.

Watch it here on AFR TV. And kudos to producer Marc Tewksbury for the slick editing.

On Monday I spoke at Jed White & iTechne’s Pubcamp conference in Melbourne on the subject of social capital. I spoke for 10 minutes about what I called “social capital transfer” - the notion that individuals build social capital inside web communities, which in turn builds or depletes the social capital ascribed to their employer.

And when a net-citizen moves jobs, there is social capital transfer that takes place. Understand how this works, and you understand the digital economy.

Below, the controversial “old vs. new media panel” facilitated by yours truly, pic shot on Ben Barren’s b’berry.