Death of consumers? The single most important factor of “new media” in contributing to the closing of the gap between the producers and consumers of media is the fact that the Internet provides each potential artists, journalist, filmmaker, radio or television show producer with a distribution channel with a global reach. While it is true all of the “new media” gadgets make it easier to produce content distribution is king from the point of view of the producer. The stranglehold that mainstream media had on distribution disappeared with the advent of the Internet. This does not spell the end of mainstream media but they have had to learn to partner with their consumers as some of the examples in the above paragraph demonstrated.
Another way the gap between the producer and the consumer closes with “new media” is that the choice and variety that new media provide results in the consumer being able to choose from all the information out there is cyberspace those things that better reflect their needs and desires. With “new media”, the user is the content to use McLuhan’s phrase in the sense they can control what they consume. With mass media they could only consume what the gatekeepers of information, the editors and producers of mass media, allowed them to consume. The “new media” allow the user or consumer to become the editor or producer of the content they consume from the incredible stockpile of information in cyberspace as this description of Internet use.
Consumers have increased expectations for high quality content.
According to http://2020mediafutures.ca/The+Prosumer%3A+Consumer+as+content+producer the consumer is:

* writing content for blogs, online news gathering orgs, Twitter, Facebook, self-published books;
* shooting and editing her own videos/films;
* creating, recording and producing her own music;
* shooting her own photographs
* etc.

Proliferation on user generated (prosumer) content has created competition (on the part of the attention of consumers) for professionally produced content from established content industries.Many consumers have shown that they are happy to create content and not to just passively consume content. Cultural industries will have to create compelling content to compete with the creative urge. As prosumers gain greater skills at telling stories and develop their craft, they will place more pressure on the established content creation industries. The term “prosumer” is widely used in marketing discussions these days, but no one knows what to make of it. Yet another portmanteau, prosumer is a combination of the words “professional” and “consumer.” In essence, a prosumer is someone who is especially proactive on the path to purchase, searching for information, engaging in conversations with brands, pressuring for the best deal and writing his or her own reviews. In the travel industry we see many consumers taking on these characteristics, theoretically creating a legion of engaged, informed customers. But is this always a good thing for travel brands? The answer isn’t as obvious as you’d think.
Consumers are becoming professional, if not predatory, shoppers. In Asia, we know that up to 95% of Internet users research products and that airlines and hotels are two of their favourite categories to find online. The Web has opened up a wealth of information and comparison tools to travellers. Sites like FareCompare.com enable consumers to see airfares stacked against each other; Farecast.live.com actually allows them to predict whether that fare will go up or down! If your brand is strong in the prosumer space, all this will drive engagement in mutually beneficial ways. In Australia, we’ve seen online shopping for designer brands take off as they exploit differences in cost and exchange rates to expand markets. The global financial crisis only exacerbated this trend. The cycle of endless discounting made prosumers acutely aware of how important they are to businesses, and of the bargaining power that comes with this. Prosumers expect to see brands recognizing and rewarding their patronage. Upfront gestures of goodwill (such as a complimentary drink on arrival) are preferred, but consumers are prepared to haggle. More and more, the most travel companies can expect their brand equity to deliver is the phone call to negotiate. To prosper in this dog-eat-dog world of prosumerism, we need to tailor offers more effectively, not give the product away. We need to make sure we link those offers specifically to our brands and the values we want to promote. We also need to look at how other categories leverage prosumerism to greater effect. As the social web has grown and tools like Twitter, blogs, Facebook and YouTube have allowed communications to flow faster and farther than ever before — inevitably causing the world to shrink and real-time to be the expectation — people have changed. Those changes affect most aspects of our daily lives, including our roles as individuals with buying power, and that’s a shift that businesses and their employees need to understand if they want to stay profitable in the future. In simplest terms, people have moved from being CONsumers to PROsumers with far more influence than ever before. The term “prosumer” isn’t a new one. It’s been around the marketing world for years, but in today’s world of the social web, it has taken on a new importance that business leaders and marketers can’t ignore. Rather than simply “consuming” products, people are becoming the voices of those products and significantly impacting the success or failure of companies, products, and brands, particularly through their involvement on the social web. No longer are businesses completely in control of their products, brands and messages. Today, consumers are in control. The leaders of this shift are the members of the social web — bloggers, microbloggers, forum posters, social networking participants, and so on, who spread messages, influence people around the world, and drive demand.

Prosumers are the online influencers that business leaders and marketers must not just identify but also acknowledge, respect and develop relationships with in order for their products and brands to thrive. The bottom line to connect with prosumers and to get them talking about and advocating you, your brand, products and business is to deliver content that adds value to their experiences with your brand online. Then, don’t be afraid to let them take control and spread your messages. That’s where the power of the social web and online influencers to drive word-of-mouth marketing farther than ever comes into the picture, and that’s the ultimate goal for business leaders and marketers. Prosumers present an attractive opportunity for service providers to capture consumer spending. Not surprisingly, prosumers showed significant interest in having both a personal mobile network in their home and a shared calendar that can be used to coordinate the schedules of family members, friends, and coworkers. In the personal arena, they were also interested in the ability to view home security cameras while on the move, and to watch TV programs on their mobile devices. On the professional side, they are interesting in maintaining connectivity to the corporate network while at home or on the go. In addition, to avoid carrying two phones, they want to use the same mobile tools (such as email, address books, and other unified communications features) in both professional and personal pursuits.
Prosumers are not just above-average consumers of technology—they are influencers. They have broad and deep relationships, use social media, and freely share information and opinions about the technologies they are using. As a result, their interactions open untapped markets to accelerate adoption. Courting the prosumer segment is a strategy to help miti-gate the risk of failing when entering new markets or introducing new services, helping to drive new service innovation. Prosumers also act as a conduit for migrating solutions from one domain to another. We have seen this happen before—email and smartphones, which started as business solutions, rapidly became primary means for consumers to stay in touch with friends and family. Short messaging service (SMS), instant messaging (IM), and social networking were adopted by businesses almost as quickly as they became available for personal use.
Today’s marketers face a more difficult challenge. For one thing, consumers are far more empowered and elusive than they used to be. The past decade has seen huge changes in how people shop and buy, in how they interact with companies and brands, and also in what consumers demand from their brand partners (from 24-hour customer service to corporate social responsibility). It is our conviction that the most successful brands in the future will be those that create the deepest points of engagement with the New Consumers. In order to do that, brands need to recognize the triggers that will be most successful in activating consumption and building brand loyalty. These triggers are not the same hot buttons that fired up hyperconsumers in recent decades; instead, they are connected to a more mindful approach to consumption and to the values people have begun to crave, including authenticity, purity, naturalness, simplicity, sustainability, and rootedness.
The term “Pro-sumer” first appeared in futurologist Alvin Tofflers 1980 book, “The Third Wave“. It is used to describe the merging of the producer and consumer in the “third wave” – the information age. The book accounts a history of the producer/consumer relationship during what Toffler terms the three waves – the agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and the information age – stating that the second wave divorced the producer and consumer and replaced it with a market where the majority of goods are exchanged and individuals are no longer self-sufficient. In the third wave, Toffler theorizes that the market will encounter change, where a fusing of the two previous economies will occur.
According to http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac79/docs/pov/Prosumer_Alert_102810_FINAL.pdf prosumers are disproportionately found in Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs). Thirty-five percent of prosumers classify themselves as working in very small businesses with one to five employees (see Figure 4). Only 10 percent of non-prosumers characterize themselves as working in an SMB.
This is significant to service providers for three reasons:
1. Knowing that prosumers are concentrated in SMBs allows service providers to target their messaging.
2. SPs can create new products and services that are a good fit for SMBs as well as their prosumer employees.
3. Understanding prosumers’ work environment provides greater opportunities for service providers to create better prosumer channels.

The web is fast becoming a shoppers paradise, changing not only how people buy, but how often, when, what, why and where. The web takes shopping out of the shops and in turn, that takes the shops out of shopping and brings them right into your home.
The huge stores that sell consumers discounted products, on the other hand, are producers of wealth, racking up record profits for themselves and their shareholders. Producer-thinking invests money with the idea of making money and building equity, which are the keys to wealth creation. Today, thanks to a paradigm-shattering concept called pro-sumer thinking, average people can enjoy the best of both worlds - they can produce wealth while they consume!
Global prosumers are best defined as the 25 to 28 percent of consumers who regularly make or break products and brands, or create market shifts. The prosumer thinks differently than Baby Boomers when making buying decisions--research shows it takes only a small number, approximately two to three percent of global prosumers, to create a new trend worldwide and generate the marketing buzz that can make your commercial effort a boom or a bust.

Prosumers revel in options, and want to feel they are doing the smart thing. What's smart depends on the context and the individual, but typically means being well informed, knowing what's available and checking out the opinions of others. When it comes to consumption, prosumers regard low prices as smart, unless they're trumped by better value for a higher price, where value includes elements such as customer service, design and brand. This makes the prosumer--your customer--choosy and fickle.
According to http://keysplashcreative.com/the-evolution-of-consumers-to-prosumers/ The high level steps to leveraging the power of prosumers are as follows:

1. Identify the key online influencers for your product, brand, business or industry (i.e., the prosumers).
2. Acknowledge those people (e.g., send product samples, ask opinions, etc.).
3. Join the online conversation where those people already spend time.
4. Develop relationships with those people by interacting with them, providing useful information, and being accessible and human.
5. Leverage the opportunities of the social web by creating your own branded destinations such as a blog, YouTube channel, Twitter profile, Facebook group or fan page, LinkedIn group, podcast, etc.


The old mantra of "earn a quick buck and earn a quick profit" no longer rings true. Prosumers' loyalty has more to do with a company's reputation, reliability and relationships than it does with marketing campaigns and advertising slogans.
The prosumers rise to power in the areas of pricing and customer services is a direct result of connectivity. In the area of customer service, this connectivity results in heightened expectations regarding the quality and time frame associated with customer-to-vendor contact. An instant is good; minutes are acceptable; maybe even hours, but a day just won't cut it with today's prosumers. There is also an ever-expanding trend to view shopping not merely as the satisfaction of a consumer's "needs," but also as recreation and entertainment. From this recreational prosumers viewpoint, the need to tailor and customize the offering, price and value to each consumer is even more apparent. But simply offering more choices is not the entire equation; indeed, too much choice will make your prosumer unhappy. The prosumer in the communications market is highly likely to embrace broadband and new digital services. They are likely to buy a bundle of services from one company, but are also very likely to switch from one provider to another to get the best service or offer. Incumbent as well as emerging services providers should make the prosumer a segment of high focus, due to the prosumers willingness to switch providers as well as the high average revenue per customer. To reach prosumers in the communications market and win their business, service providers need to employ a new set of customer acquisition strategies. These strategies must work to increase and enhance the buying options the prosumer receives from the service provider including, but not limited to, more service and pricing options and an added number of customer interaction options. Further, these strategies must support the fast and high quality service delivery requirements of the prosumer. To put it simply, the prosumer demands that service providers deliver an entirely new buying experience centered on customer personalization and buying convenience. To reach prosumers in the communications market and win their business, service providers need to employ a new set of customer acquisition strategies. These strategies must work to increase and enhance the buying options the prosumer receives from the service provider including, but not limited to, more service and pricing options and an added number of customer interaction options (e.g., call center, Web self-care, retail site, etc.) Further, these strategies must support the fast and high quality service delivery requirements of the prosumer. To put it simply, the prosumer demands that service providers deliver an entirely new buying experience centered on customer personalization and buying convenience.

According to http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Identifying,+knowing+%26+retaining+your+customers%3A+the+%22prosumer%22.-a0178746704, to deliver this new buying experience, a service provider should embrace five distinct offer management and customer acquisition strategies:

Creative offer management. Service providers who wish to address the prosumer segment should embrace an enterprise product catalog (ECP) strategy that weaves the product catalogs of customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), billing systems other similar operations systems into a single product catalog focused on facilitating offer and bundle design creativity as well as the rapid introduction of new service and bundle options.

Partner relationship management. The prosumer demands a service bundle with a rich mix of service options. To deliver this bundled experience, a service provider may need to integrate products and services provided by a host of business partners. For example, the launch of a broadband bundle with a new service capability based on mobile gaming technology may require the integration and synchronization of networks and ordering between a service provider and its gaming partner. This calls for service providers to employ partner relationship management systems and processes where multiple partners and supply chains can be integrated in the product development lifecycle and fulfillment lifecycle in order for a service provider to deliver the bundled experience.

Customer-centric sales experience. A prosumer's decision to select a particular service provider is dominated by intangibles and not driven by technology alone. These intangible factors, which include convenience and personalized attention, work in combination to form an overall customer experience. Further, customers are increasingly impulsive and self-centered, willing to switch providers on a whim. Service providers must employ systems and processes designed to give customers immediate attention and satisfy their quick decision making, while simultaneously delivering customer personalization. This calls for service providers to use new business models to maximize value through the customer service lifecycle.

Multichannel customer interactions. To address the customer-centricity and personalization demanded by the prosumer, service providers must expand as well as enhance their multichannel sales and support capabilities. Prosumers want access to their account and to sales anytime, anywhere, anyhow. Service providers must embrace selling through multiple channels that can be tailored to support the unique experience the prosumer expects at each channel including call center, retail site, e-commerce site and resellers.

Bundled order management. Time is of the essence to the prosumer. Bundle orders must be delivered with full awareness of the prosumers aggressive time expectations. To meet these expectations, service providers must employ an order management solution that tightly orchestrates the fulfillment of multi-level, multi-line item service orders for bundled services across multiple fulfillment points that reside inside and outside the service providers enterprise.

Prosumers represent one of the faster growing and highest value segments in today's communications market. By focusing on implementing four distinct offer management and customer acquisition strategies, a service provider can build the unique buying experience that addresses the characteristics of today's prosumer. The result will be a service provider who is able to gain a considerable share of this lucrative market segment.