Genuine Juice

I caught up with Steve Rosenbaum, founder of Magnify.net before the Thursday session of We Media Miami last week.

Prior to his work with Magnify, Steve was the creator of MTV News UNfiltered. Magnify.net, in many ways, follows the spirit of the groundbreaking MTV program which gave viewers the tools to tell stories that were not being covered by mainstream media. The transcript, typed up by our super-helpful intern Kathryn Ryan, is below the video.

Magnify.net founder Steve Rosenbaum talks branding, curation, and the technology he’s following from Genuine Interactive on Vimeo.

Genuine Interactive: You have grown your brand and have been growing your company, and in the process you have also been facilitating other people to do different things to grow their own brand. What insights have you gained and what advice have you given?

Steve Rosenbaum: So the biggest thing I have learned in the last 18 months is that there used to be a big war between professional content, user generated content and consumer content and you had to pick a side. The word that comes up forty times a day now is curation. Curation basically says whatever your brand is, no matter how much content you make, you’re not going to have enough to tell your story in full. So curation basically says make media, tell your story and then gather media from your customer, or user or community and repeat that and share that and then look at the wider web and gather content that speaks to your brand and put that on your website, TV channel or newspaper. This idea of Curation turns out to be very powerful because it’s slightly elitist, high polluted and that makes it sound like quality, but it also says inclusion and let people in. So Curation is the word of 2010.

Genuine Interactive: Probably 2011?

Steve Rosenbaum: I think it will probably be the word for awhile. I’ll put it to you this way, I was just talking to the guys and they called themselves curators, well of course they are, because they put together conferences, and a conference is about gathering things together and people and ideas. I think curation, it’s a positive word, it’s not about winning or losing, it’s about lots of different things coming together.

Genuine Interactive: What types of technology or new toys are you playing with online these days?

Steve Rosenbaum: So we spend a lot of time trying to integrate multiple sets of tools, social media tools for sure, twitter for sure, flicker absolutely, video from lots and lots of sources, and we are now spending a little time on HTML5, because we think that it’s now a real thing, and we have obviously paid a lot of attention to the iphone and iPad.

But really at the end of the day what we are really trying to do is build consumer tools that are simple, easy to use and publisher friendly, and what that means is everything is drag and drop, there is as little real code as possible and as much as the customer facing fun stuff. Because what we have learned about editors and magazine people is, if it’s not fun they don’t use it, even if they say they are going to use it, if it’s not fun they aren’t going to use it or play with it. It’s like software that

isn’t fun, it will just sit on your hardware. So fun is a critical measure. Social media and Fun.