17 lessons for the new marketing

There's a question I ask publishing teams planning on building websites or digital services:

What do you do if you don't have any content?

It's a question aimed at editorial peeps, generally. People who have a pile of 'content' they see as assets. As publishers, when we go digital our first response is to consider how we should re-use/re-deploy that asset.

To do without it takes your thinking to interesting places. It's the kind of thinking that results in Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, networked solutions playing to the power of networks and the nodes and connections (that's us folks) who create those networks.

Bill Drummond's 17 project (picture by grewlike via flickr) is, I think, asking the same question; about music.

To paraphrase Bill, now that you can access pretty much all of recorded music ever it's lost its magic for us.

Recording music (particulary the hits) was and is part of the mass production/mass media culture that the broadcast world nurtured and sustained. But the emerging networked world has less need for it and places less value on it (Why Hits Must Have Less Value in a Networked World).

His 17 project gathers choirs of 17 people. Their creations, their output, their performances are never recorded. They don't even have an audience. They are a unique, relevent experience for those who take part. And this delivers a far richer experience than listening to a long-since recorded (and therefore closed and finished) piece of music.

The networked world wants unfinished symphonies. Participatory culture is leading us to 'us' as the eighth mass media.

Think of this in the context of social networks and how messages are spread, in which we compare how communities of purpose gather to share in the co-creation of messages, to the old broadcast notions of audience and static, controlled messages.

What Bill is doing is taking us to a place where music exists but isn't recorded. Music without content. Music of course, before the broadcast/industrial age was made by the people listening to it, or at best, experienced in a unique (one off) form by small groups for whom it was relevant (carnival dancers, wedding banquets, village feasts).

The grand orchestral pieces for whom an audience was required to sit listening politely (the precurser of electronic mass broadcast) coincided with the arrival of the industrial age. The first stirrings coincided with the printing press and accelerated as the age of mass production began to pick up steam (literally).

In the networked world we are wise to ask:

• How do we publish if we don't have content?
• What is music without recordings?

So, if advertising is to marketing as content is to publishing then we should also ask:

• How do we market without advertising?
  

If you want to change behaviour but can't run a traditional ad campaign, can't come up with your 'on brand' message and broadcast and control it, what then?

Perhaps one clue to successful connection, successful relationships in the networked world is in offering/hosting/participating in unique, relevant experiences. Co-created experiences, shared with those we think will think its cool, too.

I don't suggest publishers shouldn't make use of the content they have. Nor should marketeers completely ditch their use of advertising. Advertising (even broadcast) has a place.

I do say publishers/marketers will make better use of content/advertising when they start from the premise that they should use neither. Use the idea as a tool to unleash your networked thinking.


The conversation on this one had already started, via twitter. But please join in by posting your comments below. When I floated an idea or two about this blogpost...

Richard Marshall asked: "Do you think it's important that the reader/consumer knows it's marketing or not? Advertorial versus content+ads?"

It's an interesting question because it reveals our distrust of marketing/advertising. We expect that the message from the centre is lieing to us (at the very least spinning the facts) and so we insist on warnings that we may be being played (eg we insist on transparency).

The new marketing should be less like traditional advertising in this way. If the message can be taken and adapted in order to be adopted it is being done so by people you trust - not by some distant third party (the brand?). If you can't trust your friends to be transparent with you - well that's perhaps down to your own choices - you can't blame the centre for that.

In the new marketing therefore the question of transparency, the need to know whether you are being marketed to or not is less relevant. Your friends (your social graph) are distributing their version of the message to you - and only if they think you will think it's cool, too.

David Bausola remarked: "Marketing is listening. Advertising is talking. Can't have one without the other. Did I just imply advertising will never die?"
Richard asked: "What do you call conversation between consumer and brand then?
And David came back with: Brands are deities not entities, so have to pray for help. Brands need to be nihilists so that people can prey on them
Seriously,people talk to each other. Brand has to inspire their conversation. How can Brand have dialogue when it's not an entity."

Looking forward to the discussion continuing... please add your thoughts below! Let's make this a shared, unique and relevant experience for those who wish to participate! Pass it on to anyone who you think will think it's cool, too!

The definition of user-friendly. It ain't digital

My 3-year-old daughter took her first ride on a bicycle today. Here's a picture of her doing it. I didn't tell her where to put her hands, or how to make herself go forward, or how to steer. And when I fitted a bell she needed no instruction either.
I showed her once how to brake. She never needed to ask again. And she was off at a pace that had me jogging to keep up at times.
Makes me question how relative the term 'user-friendly' is - particularly for those of us who work in the digital space.
I've often said 'user-friendly is as use-friendly does', by which I mean eBay ain't user friendly but if you want to build an auction site you'd best make it work in a very similar way because it is how we have learned what user friendly is as far as auctions are concerned.
ITune is another example. User friendly? Is it hell. You've just learned how to use it and so anyone who wants to rival it has to take into account that it's the defacto way we interact with our music.
But a bicycle? Needs no explanation. And mechanical things are so good at that. So what is it that mechanical engineers and designers understand about us that digital designers regularly fail to?
Could it be that they put the human interface first?
What are the most user friendly devices you can think of? I'll make a wild guess that none of them are either electrical or digital.
A door perhaps, a seat? If you know of a digital service that can match the simplicity or effectiveness of a device from the mechanical world please do share...
This is not to say that mechanical design is always right, simple to point out that nothing digital has yet been as right as the best of the mechanical.
Hurrah for the humble bicycle.

Journalism Leaders forum - join in Q&A with live webcast

Just a quick plug for an event Alan Moore at Communities Dominate Brands is involved with.
On Tuesday February 6, there will be a forum in Preston (University of Central Lancashire) to discuss leading journalism into a digital age.
Details of the event (it's free) and how to get there are all in Alan's post on CDB.
Sign in as a guest through the link that follows for the webcast: join the debate (putting in your own questions) here: http://breeze01.uclan.ac.uk/journalismleadersforum

What users want from modern digital offerings

I compiled the below list of recognised current trends when thinking about the boxes that need ticking when developing a social-networking mobile internet offering. But they probably apply to all current digital planning.

Granted, my thinking is probably a bit focused on Generation-C (the under 27s this year, the under 29s, next) but then, they are the most likely group to take-up a 3G mobile offering anyway - I'd have thought. What other trends do you think ought to be considered?

Check the list and add your thoughts by posting below.

• Users want to tag their world (3G, geolocation)
• People are making use of new social networking tools to re-establish a ‘we-species’ (as in communities everywhere, but with 3G geolocation these communities can be focused on where you are right now, with the fluidity to allow you to connect with new communities as you move through your world).
• Users want to remain permanently connected to their communities (through text messaging if not ‘online all the time’.)
• People are (naturally) creative and want to co-create their content if we give them the tools.
• People want their opinions to matter – and will rate things (including content others have created).
• People are increasingly used to using several channels, increasingly at once.
• They demand speed of response.
• They have an open-minded approach to change and to experimentation (creative hacking).
• Access to mobile internet is accelerating and looks set to overtake fixed line. Design for it!
• Convergent technology is helping to drive much of the above.
• Crowd-sourcing draws on all these to create contributory communities willing to help develop products which can self-perfect. This can inform all digital development.