I’ve always loved the even years…better than the odd ones. Something seems more balanced to me when you can divide by two. And this year my birthday is on 12/20/2012. Auspicious.
Not to disparage 2011. It was a banner year. Many nice projects came my way–with Powell-Tate, The New Media Firm, Richfield Productions, Lamson Media, Sun Mountain Media, the IRS, Ventana Productions, Summer Productions, Calibre, and Five Star Films (RIP Carolyn). And a fabulous doc in progress with Chris Sautter entitled, “South of the American Dream.” I met some inspiring people both through work and through workshops here, in Boston and in Maine. Finally finished my thesis on the media framing of the Cordoba House into the Mosque at Ground Zero (yay!), so my Master’s diploma should be on its way soon.
Here is a video that I made last summer in Maine:
Using mobile phones for HIV/AIDS education might seem oxymoronic to American teenagers. Using mobile phones for anything other than watching Youtube videos, texting, taking photos or even making a phone call doesn’t enter their realities–at least among the ones I’ve spoken with recently. But contrary to Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation Theory, early adopter aren’t always the only innovators and creatives . People who have to wait often value things more than those for whom things come easily.
As Clay Shirkey mentioned in Here Comes Everybody, social media tools have been a boost to the oppressed–allowing a way to practice free speech even in societies that are less than free (Egypt, Belarus). We’ve also just witnessed the birthing pains of a democracy via Twitter reports of protests over the allegedly fraudulent presidential elections in Iraq. But if the power of the crowd is helping to organize without organizations, then The Long Tail is helping to match every product with a buyer.
Chris Anderson, writes that the secret to creating a successful Long Tail business depends on two things: make everything available for purchase and help the consumer find it. These are the rules that propelled Internet companies like Amazon and Netflix into market dominance. After realizing about 80% of their profits on the 20% of items that have great popular appeal (best selling books, hit movies and gold record albums) companies that aggregate huge inventories can push the profit envelop by selling the other 80% of books, videos, music, etc., to niche audiences. For every item, there is a buyer.
While Anderson didn’t write this book to explore the moral issues of a culture of abundance and infinite choice, one has to wonder whether being presented with so many choices can be counter-productive. As explored in the study on whether a display of 6 jams or 24 jams will garner more sales, the display with 6 jams sold more, while the one with 24 left the consumers confused and indecisive.
The Long Tail, in a similar way to Groundswell, a book about the power of the crowd, shows how the Internet is being used as an endless supply of information and connectivity that can be tapped by people and institutions to create more complex products, more targeted product placement, and even prove to be a force for social justice.
For Population Services International, long-tail thinking has a lot of value. But here our message is not to sell products, but to sell ideas. We serve many diverse populations, and each deserves a specialized message to be served up through specialized social media channels or messaging. Whether promoting condom use to teenager girls in South Africa, encouraging the use of mosquito netting among young mothers in the Congo, or teaching South Koreans how to sterilize their drinking water, each population is a tiny segment on the long tail of public heath promotion. And using the technologies available today can and will work. It’s much cooler and hipper to interact with a pda or a cell phone than to check in with a school counselor. Or following a soap-opera on Facebook that espouses the virtues of a monagamous relationship is infotainment. The key to effective social marketing, as evidenced by the key to effective sales in the Long Tail world, will be that the audience is presented with the message that will help it gain better health.
Collaboration and interaction are here to stay. Whether searching for a lost cell phone, tweeting the revolution, or decoding the SARS genome, many hands make lighter work. With tools like blogs, wikis, web 2.0, and Twitter, groups working together, with faster results tackle formerly unsolvable problems. NYU Professor Clay Shirky has synthesized and analyzed the current and future of the internet revolution, presenting the reader with amazing examples of the power of social media in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.
We are now living in an era where information is cheap and readily accessible by most people in the developed world and a growing number in third world countries. The Internet is a tool that takes communication — which was formerly the domain of newspapers and magazines, television stations, movies, radio, and the recording industry, — and amassed it into one place with an endless supply of information and connectivity. The filters and gatekeepers are removed and information flows freely from bottom to top as well as top to bottom.
While institutions used to have the collaboration and coordination ability to create more complex products, such as cars or airplanes, now a restructuring is taking place and the spontaneous division of labor is possible.
Shirky gives the reader more than just an overview of the technological advances of the Internet, however. He explores what ordinary people can accomplish when armed with powerful collaboration tools. Using Flickr as an example, Shirky show how old ways have yielded to new: “Gather, then share,” is now “share, then gather.” Only with the efforts of millions of users organizing their own material could a site such as Flickr be sustainable from either a financial or a managerial sense. Shirky explores the state of journalism today, and whether having a publisher who’s financially invested in the tools of mass communication means someone deserves more credibility as a journalist than, say, a citizen sending photos of the London bombings to Flickr? A good case is made on behalf of these citizen journalists to be recognized as valuable forces in society in the downfall of Trent Lott example.
Moreover, one-way communication, from the newspaper publisher or movie executive to the audience has become democratized. Anybody with a computer can be a publisher; anyone with a video camera can become a YouTube phenomenon. But groups that have more members are harder to manage and once you’ve hit 10 or so people, it’s almost impossible to continue communicating in any intimate way.
Shirky explores the actions of groups that spontaneously form on the Internet. These groups involve sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. Users have different motivations for working within the groups: to exercise unused mental capacity, to make a mark on history, and simply to do a good thing. But the benefits to society at large, no matter what the motivation, is vast, with communities of practice, Wikipedia, and ITunesU, for example, as the fruits of collective labors and actions.
More examples of how one individual can change the status quo through collective action— including synchronizing the wills of the passengers who had to sit for many uncomfortable hours on the tarmac, to generating flash mobs that demonstrate an oppressive dictator’s reaction to ice cream-eating kids — enrich the reading experience.
Today millions of groups of people are spontaneously forming to share, converse, collaborate, and act. Many will hold political power, investigative power, intellectual power and social power. The printing press, telephone, television and digital recorder have re-emerged as one gigantic medium that lets people turn words into action, through the power of collaboration: The new hometown paper for a global world.
When people work together for a common goal, rather than just the goal of creating more individual wealth for themselves, good things happen. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams describe such collaborative endeavors as the Human Genome Project, Wikipedia, and even user-created Lego sets. They offer three rules for open source collaboration: “Nobody owns it, everybody uses it, and anybody can improve it.”
The example of the Katrina PeopleFinder project particularly amplifies the good that a self-actualizing creative computing community can accomplish. Here, “three thousand people, lightly coordinated” were able to aggregate information about Katrina victims, and personal messages to those victims, that was popping up in a multitude of places all over the web. These volunteer computer heroes were able to accomplish more in 4 days with a loose, self-made mandate, than the federal government or any other large, bulky, 20th Century institution could have done with millions of dollars in resources and one or two years.
So why is it so hard for institutions to embrace the open collaboration manifested in such success stories like GoldCorp, Wikipedia, The Human Genome Project or PeopleFinder? The record industry, for example, has fiercely opposed the bending of Intellectual Property (IP) laws as they fight against mashups of popular songs. But some argue that allowing sampling would generate renewed interest in many artists who escape current notice due to the plethora of emerging artists.
I recently received a message through a professional list serve that NBC is inviting submissions for a new diversity program. You’re allowed to use images, music, and other elements of NBC shows including The Office, to create a promotional advertisement that promotes diversity in the workplace. This open call advertising contest seems like a good idea on the surface. NBC is releasing its IP for mashups and collaborative filmmaking. The contest is even called WithoutaBox. But some deeper thought on the matter unveils the dark side of the story. Some highly paid creative types employed at either NBC or their advertising partners are being displaced by citizen filmmakers. I simply ask: Does this cross the line from collaboration to exploitation? Are the rights of the NBC staffers being undermined by mashup artists? Are the old rules out the window, smashed to smithereens?
While the motives behind NBC’s contest are not easily determined, I don’t think the efforts of the contestants are all that compelling. The ad agency people shouldn’t worry about being displaced. (Not that I watch very many commercials anymore, having just purchased TiVo.)
There are many instances where collaboration has led to better reporting and greater common good. CNN makes good use of viewer supplied videos and photos in its I-Reports, most recently with the collapse of the bridge in Minneapolis. Bloggers have revealed scandals such as the Mark Foley intern debacle and the unveiling of the widespread dismissal of Democrat-friendly U.S. Attorneys. So on the whole is it seems that collaboration even in the media is in the best interests of society at large.
On July 3rd I attended the Nationals baseball game with some friends, including three boys under the age of 12. Now this was the night before our country’s birthday celebration, and we were in the nation’s capital. The mood was festive even though we were down to the Cubs, 3 to 1, in a pretty slow moving game, even for baseball.
After a few innings the crowd started getting bored, and one of the dad’s offered to take the boys inside for some ice cream. While this group was making its way out of the stands, the marketing people down on the field started rocketing t-shirts into the crowd. (Have you seen these t-shirt guns? Kind of like a rocket-launcher, but instead of rockets, rolled-up t-shirts are fired into the crowd.) One of these t-shirts landed right in front of 10-year old, 4’5” Lee; he reached for it. An older man didn’t see the 10 year old and inadvertently kneed him in the eye while he grabbed the shirt. Most people, I think, would give the t-shirt to the 10 year old. Our big bully guy didn’t. He took the t-shirt for himself. The crowd booed him for a few seconds, but then turned back to the game, and the boys went out for their cones.
Good Marketing is Very Sportsmanlike
About 30 minutes later a green-shirted stadium guy came to our row and spotted Lee. “Are you the dad?” he asked my friend Tim. “Yes.” “Well here, I’d like to give your boy this,” he said, and handed him a brand new official Nationals baseball.
Lee shyly accepted the gift and continued watching the game. Tim, Paige and I talked about how wonderful this gesture was for about five or ten minutes. How any negative feelings about the bully in the crowd have now been dissipated by this generous act of the stadium and the Nationals team to a small boy. About how Lee will remember this game forever as one when he scored a team ball, etc., etc.
According to knowthis.com, “Marketing consists of the strategies and tactics used to identify, create and maintain satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both the customer and the marketer.” Whether in the visual or virtual world, the basic tenets are the same. In this case, a season-ticket holder, who is not sure whether he would spring for seats in the new stadium, (i.e. make a major re-purchase) was positively influenced by the marketing efforts of a losing franchise.
Or, should I say, the efforts of a franchise whose strength may be in places other than on the field. For the act of the green-shirted guy plays on all three influencers of a buyer’s decision: internal, external and marketing. The negative feelings of a few minutes earlier were quickly mitigated by the speedy act of the stadium guy in the green shirt. Tim needs to decide pretty soon whether to spring for four seats in the new stadium, which, even in the $15 seats, represents about $2400 for 20 games for a family of four, including peanuts, cokes, beer and the requisite ice creams.
Now as a blogger, I’m chatting about this incident, providing good word of mouth marketing that is further elevating the reputation of the Nationals. The bully guy knows who he is. Maybe next time he’s battling a little kid for a t-shirt, he’ll let the kid win. And who knows, maybe the stadium guy will give him a team baseball–and give Tim four seats on the third baseline. Now that would be a home run!
Americans revel in the fact that in our land of opportunity we have choices. I have 26 different brands of bottled water in my grocery store, 450 channels of television and music on my cable, and 930 news sites on my browser’s RSS feed. I can download any of 5 million songs today into my Itunes. In 21st century America, we’ve all got a gazillion choices of what to wear, where to eat, what to do, what to read. But enough is enough. I’m experiencing informational overload and I’m starting to get sweaty palms.
Sometimes too much information or too many choices are a bad thing. I appreciate all the new community powered sites that allow blogrolling, and the fact that Technorati is uncovering the link farmers as the shysters they most certainly are. But sometimes too many choices make for bad choices and can be detrimental to your mental health. In fact, googling “too much information” uncovered an actual scientific experiment by some phychologists trying to determine if there is such a phenomena. Not surprisingly, there is. “If the number of variables to be considered exceeds human processing capacity then the worker will drop his or her mental bundle and become unable to proceed,” Professor Halford said. Forgive me if I’ve got the processing power of a 12 year old, but the variety and quantity of Gen 3.0 search engines are making my head spin.
I checked out Swickis for Avian Flu, avant guard filmmaking and Michael Moore. WhiteSpider has a wonderful aggregation of blocks and websites on Avian flu. Michael Moore or Cut Lab, not so much. (I chose Michael Moore simply because he’s in the news right now with his film Sicko, and I’m going to see that tonight). Clusty had more than 59 million results for Michael Moore, 8 million for Avian Flu, but nothing relevant for Cut Lab. IPhone, however, got 696 million results. Everyzing by Technorati is my favorite new media search tool. Michael Moore had 6542 hits in audio and video in 1.422 seconds. Cut Lab seemingly had 9859 hits, but on closer inspection it was just the meta tags that had cut or lab. No real CutLab material was there.
So while there seems to be a lot of wonderful work going on in the world of search optimization, what really is of value to me today? How would I attempt to get through the millions of relevant results for Avian Flu? I think right now I prefer Google. It’s my old reliable standy, that, for my personal needs, does its job very well. But I’m excited about the new ways data is being mined and processed, and I hope that someday soon, my computer can tell me which bottle of water is the best for price and nutritional value, what channel I should turn on for relaxation, or which new story is most relevant and of interest to me.
On a More Positive Note
Guy Kawasaki, author of the blog “How to Change the World,” helps blogging neophytes refine their skills in this emerging communications channel. For example, in an interview with David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, the importance of linki-ness and RSS feeds are explained. Making it easy to let both Technorati and your blog-fans know when you’ve posted new insights, opinions, and knowledge is a common courtesy that will also help you get noticed and highlighted on search engines. Sifry goes on to explain good blogging etiquett. He states that, “The hyperlnk is becoming a new form of social gesture used between people” in their blogs to signify respect. It also, obviously, allows readers to examine the whole conversation that was going on before they arrived to the site. I really appreciate the ability to really get to know who these bloggers are, their expertise, and the relationships that exist out there in cyberspace.
Like Citizen Marketers and Naked Conversations, Sifry suggests the best blog practices: post often, write about your passion and area of expertise, link prolifically. He then reveals advanced blogger applications, which I am still struggling with myself: tagging and rss feeds. So while I still awake, I’ll go back to the wordpress tutorials. In my dreams I’ll be conjuring up an Iphone that will do my laundry and drive me to work, and add tags to my blog.
A paradigm shift is happening in the already frenetic world of the Internet as Web 1.0 morphs into the next generation. No longer is the Internet user passively consuming whatever the authorities deem appropriate for the masses: In fact this citizens’ revolt manifests itself in the 48 million Americans who now contribute to the content of the Internet. Today, the communications vehicle that was formerly the domain of corporate America and the 4th Estate has evolved into a sounding board for its consumers and subscribers. The revolution has begun: Web 2.0 has been unleashed.
The differences between the first generation of the Internet and Web 2.0 are remarkable not only in the technological advances such as the widespread dissemination of video content, interactive components including blogging, contests, and wikis, but in perhaps most amazingly, in the pure democratic, egalitarian nature of the Internet itself. Easy to use tools enable those from eight to eighty to publish web pages of their latest vacations, or contribute to message boards on how to be a better grandmother, providing a two-way experience on the information superhighway. People are creating, discussing, inventing and promoting their passions. And considering that a web page from an average citizen takes up the same space on a computer screen, and is accessible by the same number of people as the home page of the New York Times, it really is democratic.
Media Redefined
Social Media is bottom up, interactive and collaborative communications characterized by freedom of expression. The old media is out of favor with fewer and fewer people believing in the authenticity of their stories. In fact, when Anna Nicole Smith died in March 2007, news of the Iraq war, the crisis in Darfur, the continuing plight of Hurricane Katrina victims, and all the other real news was put on the back-burner as CNN and other cable news media devoted the vast majority of their reporting on a former playboy bunny/drug addict in order to get ratings. The news media, pressed by corporate greed, has sold their souls to the corporate devil. So in my opinion, the disintermediation of the regulatory authorities and the overthrow of the publisher are warranted, if not overdue.
What does this mean to the marketer, the advertiser who pays to place his advertising message in the traditional media spaces? While recent studies conclude that Tivo is not significantly affecting the number of advertising viewers in the television world, there is a fall off in newspaper readership and sister websites that negatively impact marketing dollars expended in these realms. Public relations professionals and marketers need to heed the lessons learned before the disintegration of trust in advertising follows the demise of the news media.
Word of mouth (WOM) and “linky-ness” have replaced “sticky-ness.” Engagement is the 21st century measure of brand loyalty. These days a company builds communities by interacting with their consumers. Like an old fashioned fan club where writing a letter to a celebrity was rewarded with a signed 8×10 glossy, the 21st century consumer wants to be rewarded with insider-tips, the chance to test market products before their release to the general public, or having one of their own videos featured on a corporation’s website.
Power of the Individual
In this brave new world of Web 2.0, the individual rules supreme. In 1993, New Yorker cartoonist Peter Steiner quipped, “On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.” Today the intelligence of the aggregate public is able to sniff out a poser: Corporations cannot simply create a viral marketing phenomenon. Only an authentic voice can succeed on the grass roots level, in the weeds as it were.
The “Dell Hell” story described by McConnell and Hubba in their book Citizen Marketers shows what can go wrong when an individual is mistreated by a multi-billion dollar corporation. In this case, the individual was a popular blogger. So when citizen Jeff Jarvis revealed his huge unhappiness online, a goliath was forced to its knees. One man’s campaign resulted in $100 million dollar upgrade to the Dell customer service division. Now that’s a pretty loud bark.
