Friday, April 25, 2008

Two-way flow networks make humans the medium

Print, Recordings, Radio, Cinema, TV: Mass media has been, and remains, about one-way flows of communication. Broadcast.

The mistake we often make when talking about the internet (and mobile for that matter) is to describe them as mediums. They are networks. There is a difference.

The internet and mobile are tools to enable communication and reduce the cost of groups forming (helping to realise the potential of group forming network theory). These are the communities of purpose I described in Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21st Century.

What difference does this make? A significant one for marketing.

Because we treat the internet as a medium, we place our advertising on it and in it. But the ‘media properties’ of the internet are to the medium as paper is to print. It’s the enabler. Paper is what makes magazines, books and newspapers possible. No one advertises on wood pulp.

Anyone who ever read the Cluetrain will have understood that marketing is about conversations (markets are conversations).

Conversation involves two or more humans connecting and communicating.

So where are you going to 'place' your marketing message? Where all the humans are, where all the conversations are going on?

Sounds sensible doesn't it?

Social networks (the media property hits of the internet) are where conversation appears to be happening (online at least). So the response has been; let's cover them in banner ads?

That’s not placing the ads in the relevant medium.

It’s a little like putting notices on trees and wondering why no one is acting on them when they read the newspaper that's made from those trees when pulped.

We're advertising in what we perceive to be the medium (ie the social network) when the medium is actually the conversation occuring between humans.

Justin Kirby at Digital Media Communications would say humans are the medium. The ads have to be in what's made from the trees, not the trees themselves! Your ads have to be in what’s made from the connecting tools of the internet – in the conversation.

So banner ads on the ‘media properties’ of the internet are effectively placing ads around ads. Delightful. Would you enjoy a site made entirely from adsense code?

Of course some people do notice the ads, some do click on them (0.1% isn't it?) and more still have a seed planted by an idea that they act on later. The activation likely comes after a conversation.

The human beings (the nodes in these networks) are your access points to other human beings. They are where the connections are made, they are the conversations, they are the marketing.

Figuring out ways to engage them in your product or service, to make them natural advocates is not about constructing a social network around it and hoping they'll thank you for it. It is more about reaching out to them as human beings in the hope that they will have good things to say about you when they do what humans do: connect.

They do this in social networks of course, but they also do this on telephones, in person, by fax, by email, by im, by text etc etc...

The one consistent element is real humans talking to one another.

If the human is your message, then that message gets carried with them – marketed - no matter what the medium.

Food for thought.

And good news for content. The content that convinces – no matter what the source, remains crucial.

Good experiences are content, too. Content, as Cory Doctorow said, is what sparks conversations. And I think we’ve illustrated how important that is.

2 comments:

  1. David. Nice post again but I've got to say I disagree with you on a couple of big points. And couldn't bear to let them pass til we meet.

    1. The conversation analogy is just that: an analogy. The point that Cluetrain was making is that the old one-way interaction (what we do to them), with its illusions of control is no longer viable, NOT that it was all about what we and our consumers (literally) talk about.

    2. Human social networks are NOT fixed and unchanging like electronic or informational ones. However much we'd like it to be otherwise, human social networks are constantly shifting. "Nodes" tend to appear only after the fact (this is the whole Influentials debate).

    3. Information is not the prime shaper of behaviour whether it comes out of a DM piece or a human mouth (behaviour tends to be the prime driver). This makes messaging much less important than it was in the old pre Cluetrain world.

    So where does that leave us? Let's talk and see what you think

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  2. Hi Mark, fantastic to see you commenting here and I am very much looking forward to meeting next week.
    Not sure I have all the answers by any means (my ideas, just like my groups, are often fuzzy edged!). Indeed, re your second point, (as outlined in my Communities of Purpose White Paper) I agree groups are (at least should be) fuzzy - evolutionary in nature. It's why I score twitter over facebook, for example.
    I use node in this context to represent the point at which conversations intersect - ie a human being. I don't seek to place one as having a higher value than any other in this respect.
    Your more critical point, re what inspires behaviour, is of even greater interest to me - it's a real challenge to my current conclusions about the value of both content and conversation. And I am genuinely fascinated to explore further. best dc

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