It might not seem surprising to my readers that I'm working on a project with Mediaco, a Weber Shandwick business that advertises, "We Help Every Company Become A Media Company." 

Helping companies be great media companies is a noble calling these days, especially with the huge loss of skilled and experienced media professionals. There's hundreds of years of best practices that still apply regardless of paper and electron.

I'm working on an interesting project with Mediaco's West Coast lead Luca Penati and an enthusiastic team of professionals across many disciplines and locations.

This is what's needed in today's digital media worlds — the complexities of managing fragmented media channels and user interfaces across many devices requires integrated tech, media, design, SEO and communications professionals on the same publishing teams.

Brand publishing on today's scales requires sophisticated tools and apps. There is an opportunity to create a new type of enterprise app, a media publishing platform for corporations that also acts a listening post.  After all, it's a two-way Internet and each screen is both publisher and published.

We live in a world surrounded by media technologies. Computer pioneer Ted Nelson, said "We live in media as fish live in water."

Silicon Valley is a Media Valley, our largest and most dynamic companies are tech-enabled media companies or sell media technologies. Google, Facebook, Twitter publish pages of content with advertising. Intel microprocessors decode and encode high definition video streams in parallel; Apple sells media players and media making devices.

From Gutenberg's movable type to Silicon Valley's dynamic reprogrammable media — it's a huge leap. We know that leaps in media technologies have dramatically changed our society so what will this do?

Media Management Tools...

Enterprises will need a lot of media technologies and this will become a new genre of enterprise apps,  more importantthan ERP and CRM.

Selling media technologies to the enterprise will be a lucrative business and it is one that makes full use of advanced cloud technologies and subscription business models. 

PR is artisanal...

A year ago I asked where are the technologies from the public relations industry? How can PR firms also become tech firms? Where are the scalable technologies of promotion? Ad agencies are great at scalable promotion and this is a vulnerability.

Brand Publishing...

Somehow I missed this last week but Weber Shandwick's Mediaco launched a publishing platform that seems headed in this very direction. It comes from its just announced media tech group focused on brand publishing led by Eric Helgesen. 

Weber Shandwick uses the term "brand publishing" rather than "brand journalism" — a practice that other firms should adopt because it is more accurate and it doesn't snag.

Mediaco Publish is customized for brand publishing. It is built on open-source technologies and industry standard Wordpress that combines custom workflow, multi-channel publishing; tracking and reporting, and all the other features corporations need to be effective digital media publishers. 

Eric Weitner, head of Technology Platforms at Mediaco, used to work at Forbes and helped design its multi-author content management system. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I'm also looking forward to the arms race as Weber Shandwick's competitors announce their media products and roadmaps. The media tech sector is getting interesting.