In 2008 and 2009 I was an adjunct lecturer at Queensborough Community College, teaching an introductory course in information systems and technologies. Inside that course I had a direction I chose myself, which was new media in small business. That is the whole of what I am going to state about the class as fact. I am not going to reconstruct a syllabus, a reading list, a set of assignments or a single lecture from memory, because I have none of it written down, and a syllabus written seventeen years later from a vague feeling would be a forgery with my name on it. What I can do honestly is describe the premise in general terms, explain with sources what new media meant around that time, and give a present-day checklist for a small business owner.

What is New Media? (Explained in 4 Minutes), Helpful Professor Explains! on YouTube

The premise

Spiral notebook and pencil on a classroom desk by a window

The premise is in the direction’s name: new media, in small business. A small business, such as a diner, a shop or a one-person maker, has a different budget and a different amount of time than a large one, and the question the name poses is what a business of that size does with new communication tools. That is the general shape of it, and it comes from the one line I am sure of, not from lecture notes.

That is as far as I can go. I do not have the examples I used, the order I put things in, or what the students did with it. If a former student reads this and remembers more, they hold something I do not.

Separately, I worked in the same field at the time. Nanos Media was my technology integration and consulting group for the restaurant industry, where I installed point-of-sale systems, consulted, and developed training sessions for managers and staff. I mention it as part of my background, not as a record of what happened in a classroom.

What new media meant

Wikipedia’s article on new media defines it as digital communication technologies that share material online and through computers, enabling interaction among users and between users and content. It names scholars such as Lev Manovich, who describe new media as computational media, and notes that the category is often grouped under the label Web 2.0.

The article gives a short history. In the mid-1990s the term spread as a sales pitch for interactive CD-ROMs used for entertainment and education. In the 2000s it says blogs, wikis, social networking, virtual worlds such as Second Life, and video platforms such as YouTube spread widely, and that the 2008 presidential campaign set new standards for digital political outreach. Toward the end of that decade, it says, Pew reported that most American teens used social networking sites.

Those are the years of the course, and the list shows how much of it was still new.

The article also lists the characteristics that separate new media from what came before. Interactivity, meaning communication between users and between users and content. User-generated content, which shifts communication from one-to-many toward many-to-many, since individuals can publish their own text, images and sound online. Digital convergence, which combines media forms. And the reduced importance of physical distance. The article adds a caution that is easy to skip: the degree of interactivity varies, and some digital media, satellite television among them, are not interactive at all.

Where Web 2.0 came from

Desktop computer on a small office desk with a blank browser window

The label that the article keeps pointing to has its own history. Wikipedia’s article on Web 2.0 says the information architecture consultant Darcy DiNucci coined the term in January 1999 in an article called Fragmented Future, and that Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty popularized it in 2004 at the first Web 2.0 Conference. It describes Web 2.0 as websites that rely on user-created content, are easy to use, support participatory culture and work with other products, systems and devices. Users move from viewing content passively to interacting and collaborating in online communities. The article is firm that the term describes a general change in how the web was used, not a formal new version of it.

Blogs, wikis and social networks are its examples: personal publishing sites where users post and readers comment, sites where users edit shared pages, and platforms where users create profiles and connect with others.

For a small business, the practical meaning of all that was a change in who could speak. Before, a business with a modest budget could be present in a phone book, a flyer or a local paper. Afterward, it could publish its own pages and let customers answer in public, which is what the many-to-many description in the article amounts to. That change is the one I would have wanted to teach, and I state it here as a reading of the sources, not as a recollection of a lecture.

Not every effect was friendly

The Wikipedia article is not a sales brochure, and a course on the subject should not have been one either. It records that MP3 files emerged in the 1990s and 2000s and drove file-sharing services such as Napster, that piracy followed, and that laws were later enacted to curb it. It also records that the Zapatista movement in Chiapas made early and effective use of new media for communiqués and organizing in 1994, and that the 1999 WTO protests used it to organize and to share alternative coverage.

The same tools that let a movement reach people without a newspaper also let a song reach people without a store. A small business sits somewhere between those two cases. A maker who publishes photographs of work online reaches buyers who would never have walked in, and the pictures can be copied by anyone. A restaurant whose menu is posted is easier to find, and easier to compare against the one down the road. Those are my observations on how the pattern applies, not statements from the article, and I raise them because the honest version of the premise includes the cost.

What has not changed

Two people looking at a laptop in a restaurant back office

The tools have been replaced. The question has not. A small business still has to decide where it is present, who looks after it and what it says. The difference now is that the places have become standard parts of running a business, not experiments, and several are free.

Google’s guidance is a fair reference for the basics. Its SEO starter guide says content people find compelling and useful will likely affect search presence more than any other suggestion, and that changes take from a few hours to months to appear. Its page on images says alt text is the most important metadata for a picture. Google’s Business Profile help says a verified business can edit its hours, address and category, respond to reviews, and add photos and videos.

All of it is within reach of a diner with one person to spare for an hour a week.

A present-day checklist

This list is drawn from the sources above and from nothing I taught. It is a list for today.

  • Claim and verify the business’s Google Business Profile, and keep hours current. Respond to reviews.
  • Add real photographs to the profile, and give each picture on the site a plain description as alt text.
  • Choose one place to publish regularly, and say why it exists. Google’s content guidance asks whether a site has a primary purpose or focus.
  • Put the owner’s name and role on what is published, so a reader knows who is speaking.
  • Link each page to related pages on the same site, with link text that says what is there.
  • Wait a few weeks before judging any change, because the search timing runs from hours to months.
  • Treat every channel as something to be looked after. A neglected profile is worse than none, because it is the first thing a customer finds.

The last item is my own judgment, not a source’s. Whether a stale profile does more harm than none is something I could not find measured, and a business with limited time may reasonably choose to leave a channel unclaimed. Such a business pays for the choice only if a customer searches for it and finds a stranger’s photo in its place.

What to add

The gap in this post is the course itself. A former student, a colleague at Queensborough, or a copy of the old syllabus in a drawer would fill it, and I will add what turns up. Until then, this post says what it knows. Why the site exists at all is set out in what Till Post is for.

For informational purposes only. This post summarizes published sources and a short personal record, and it does not describe the content of any course; consult a licensed attorney or financial advisor on any legal, tax or investment decision about a business.

Sources