The Oprah Winfrey Network Will Be A Learning Experience For Many... Including Us

This morning I am reflecting and flowing positive energy about  Oprah Winfrey's new Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) cable network .... and the learning experience that this will be for many stakeholders... including me here at New World Communications...with my own fledgling web television "channel". 

Don't laugh. Not when you see this where this poor African American girl born to a teenage single mother from rural Mississippi has taken her life... and millions of other peoples lives and from all walks of life. Wow, I am filled with joy just thinking and and feeling The Oprah Winfrey Phenomenon.. and the lessons it teaches... Multiple stakeholders...are watching to see what lessons come next...beginning on January 1, 2011. See her December 10th "sneak peek". 

One lesson that I am already getting.. is that in this new chapter...members of Oprah audiences will be encouraged to create their web television "channels"...See her page encouraging viewers to do this. Oprah brilliantly intends to leverage "crowd sourcing" and the power of audience web video to fuel innovation and develop extraordinary content ...that she already knows will "bubble" up. Look what she did with Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz and Nate Berkus and some of the members of her own audience.  See my recent  blog about this citing Chris Anderson's TED Talk about the Power of Web Video Fueling Innovation. And also see front-running examples of this coming out of the poorest nations. See my recent post about this...focusing own excellent community-authored television coming out of India. Oprah also got the new learning right when she rapped the entire world around her conversations with Eckhart Tolle and his bestselling book, A New Earth. See it in my New World Virtual Bookstore  (I facilitated an Oprah Book Club group and extended the experience using web conferencing after Oprah modeled the experience using Skype. )

The other lessons to learn from are to be found  in the industry conversations about the new world television business model... that is now taking shape before our very eyes. See Bloomberg BusinessWeek's December 9, 2010 article for example: "Oprah: Will the Queen of Talk Be Cable's Last Word"...by Ronald Grover and Andy Fixmer. Read and learn about how commercial television is paid for and how success is measured and you may discover some of your own lights becoming turned on. 

My own "lights" sure are. The great thing about experiential learning.. is that you can learn from one best practice and practically apply it to another... while putting your own spin on top of that. That's what Oprah even talked about in a recent interview by someone she learned from, Barbara Walters herself. 

So, if this time around we don't learn from Oprah Winfrey about how to create our own "blue ocean"... then our brains must be already dead.....so Rest in Peace ...but if me you are still excited and empowered by what the Oprah message is really about... creating joy and success and helping the world ourselves... then let's connect and talk about moving forward to do that...Stay tuned... and in the meantime let's connect at 425-780-6872