Toward a New Business Plan, Courtesy of Google

(MoneyWatch) 

Google VP Marissa Mayer on the atomic unit of media consumption from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Google V-P for search engine and user experience Marissa Mayer gave a succinct and powerful two-minute explanation to the Knight Foundation last month of the "atomic unit of media consumption" theory we discussed here yesterday. I'm not going to beat around the bush: Any media executive who is seriously concerned with how to help her company succeed online needs to take a deep breath and consider what she is saying.

If we start with the presumption that what we are selling to the public is an individual item -- say a news story or a blog post, as opposed to an entire site or bundle of unrelated services -- we can break down a new business model into modular components. First, the way a digital piece is structured plays a critical role in how it ends up ranked by search engines. Thus graphics, links, typeface variables, colors, and the use of keywords, among other page elements help a story rise in the new global hierarchy of the news.

Then, if we apply the same "news judgment" we've traditionally used to determine the significance of an individual story, we can work on providing the proper Wikipedia-like context that will convert that story into a "living entity" -- one that can be both backdated and updated to an infinite degree. Thanks to Google's "news archive search service," any publication that predates the Web (e.g., a daily newspaper) can reassert its natural position of superiority over its new media competitors simply by integrating its newly digitized archives (all paid for by Google) into Wiki-type buckets. These can serve as the theme pages, i.e., containers for the living entities that are essentially the narrative arcs of a storyline over time.

Maintaining these "best-of-class" stories at stable URLs will increase their performance significantly. Why? Because the stories will not die, they will just keep reaching ever-greater audiences. Keyword search guarantees that each important piece of your content will live on for a long time. Assuming it proves sufficiently relevant and unique, it will keep showing up high enough on search engines to continue drawing in new users...forever (or a reasonable approximation of forever.)

Next, involve your user base in the story. Check out AnyBlock or another hyper-local service that enables users to post relevant Flickr photos, Yelp reviews, and blog posts, while also accessing public records like crime reports or real estate information. All of a sudden, you've optimized your "atomic media unit" for search engine rankings, for incremental content accretion over time, and for community interactivity.

Sounds like a recipe for success to me. What do you think? Please comment below.