How we are made great - part II

 

The graph above is from Louis Gray, via Stowe Boyd.

In part I of How We Are Made Great I argue it is other people that make us or an idea great - other people and their mass behaviour.
Louis argues that bloggers' interactions with their communities and their reaching out to other communities reduces as they become more established.

He's on the money, for me, of course. I discussed similar themes in It's Not How Famous You Are, It's How Relevant
And detailed more risks for those with an abundance of attention, here.

Here's Louis' list of interaction types (together with my use of them).

• Allowing blog comments (yep)
  
• Responding to blog comments (oh yes)
  
• Commenting on FriendFeed about your blog (er sorry,... more laziness than attitude)
  
• Tweeting links to your blog posts (yes)
  
• Digging your blog (again, I'm a little lazy when it comes to self promotion)
  
• Stumbling your blog (see above)
  
• Pimping your blog on others' blogs (yes, in as much as I comment on other blogs and invite bloggers to come by mine to join in conversations here).

In general I try to focus on the ones that are less directly promotional in the traditional sense (digg, stumbleupon) and more on a meeting of minds - where I believe the real promotion happens anyway - comments, responding, reaching out to individuals.

Those who roll back on this are actually putting their fame and status at risk, in my view. They're certainly putting the brakes on its growth.

And when they do this they reduce both their value to their community and the communities value to themselves (I am made greater by my connections, so are my connections, Stowe Boyd)

There's no idea that doesn't get better from sharing.

So I think there's one key interaction missing from Louis' list:

• Tracking who is writing about what you've blogged and commenting on their take on it, on their blogs.

Which is kind of why this is How We Are Made Great Part II and not just a comment on Louis' blog. Hope he'll discover us and join in?

So, to summarize parts I and II:

We are made great by other people. And in order to be selected for greatness we must interact with other people.

Type 4 bloggers would do well to remember how and why they got to be raised upon our shoulders.

As I concluded on /Message in Part I:

"Go careful when you claim responsibility. Remember all those times you tried to turn the flock and nothing happened - or it turned in the opposite direction?

"You were just as responsible then.We make us great."

Recommendation: it's all in the mind - theirs not yours

When I started out in the world of work, as a journalist, we had high principles about the distinction between advertising and editorial.

Where those lines blurred we had a blurred word to describe it: advertorial. An advert dressed up as editorial. A subjective advertising message posing as editorial recommendation.

We thought editorial should entertain and inform, be useful to you. In consumer media it was important to us that our recommendation should not be tainted by commercial concerns (beyond trying to sell newspapers, magazines etc of course!).

Advertising was clearly and explicitly about selling something, nothing more.

The advertorial aimed to do a little of both. And this adulteration made it something of a dirty word to editorial people. Written through gritted teeth, we felt as if we were perpetrating some kind of con trick.

And we held steadfastly to the control of the metadata so we could raise alarm bells for our readers. Warning: You are being sold to. We are being paid to write this. Warning! Suspend your trust in us!

This metadata was expressed through a label 'Advertisement Feature', for example, and the use of clearly different design cues to distinguish it from the pure editorial content. We wanted to be clear this wasn't really our recommendation.

That carries through in most advertising mediums. There is consistent metadata which makes it easy for my 3-year-old daughter to distinguish the difference between a TV advert and a TV programme within seconds. Ads online comply too. We feel guilty if we make google adsense indistinct from the editorial it sits within.

Roll forward. The digital disruption has changed who gets to publish content (recommendations) and who gets to distribute that content - through peer-to-peer networks of trust. We've moved from a centralised broadcast model to an edge-in networked one.

The need for a distinction between advertising and editorial content is an outcome of mass broadcast models. Where control of production and distribution of the message was in the hands of the few, to get your message to the eyeballs meant you either had to own the means of production/distribution or pay for placement.

If you were paying for placement we should be warned that the message was likely to be biased.
So we created a set of rules, both implicit (metadata) and explicit (legislation) to regulate those placements and warn us of the risk of bias.

But it's no longer the case that you need to either own the means of production or distribution in order to get your content OR advert published and distributed.

In the networked world we are all creators of what would once have been called editorial messages AND advertising messages.

And where the payment distinction dissolves, perhaps so does the need for distinction between advertising and recommendation.

Where they meet we find services. What advertising message would you forward (recommend) to a friend? One you think they will find useful. How did you decide to turn that advert into a recommendation?

Well, that's entirely up to you. First it has to be something you personally found useful (a service to you). Being able to change it to better suit your needs (a widget with a personal outcome, for example) makes that more likely. Moulding it to the needs of your own network of trust makes it more likely you will decide it's worthy of your recommendation. Where the content becomes a service, the ad becomes more likely to morph into a recommendation. But there's no certainty.

As JP Rangaswami was suggesting here, recommendation doesn't happen in the mind of the forwarding party, or the person who would distribute. It happens in the mind of the receiver. It's pull. The forwarder, the wannabe distributor, is pushing - is advertising.

I guess that means that one man's advertising is another man's recommendation.

The fact is, peer-to-peer distribution models are likely to make a better fist of selecting the right 'adverts' to forward to the people most likely to regard that service as a 'recommendation'.

So;

• Your service must be adaptable (so the user can make it a better fit for those he would advertise it to).
• Your service must be peer-to-peer distributed (it's the best fit with the networked world and the only way it can morph from advert to recommendation).

Remember, this model is not likely to fit the broadcast world. And not everything digital is a pure networked model.

Models where audiences consume content (eg everything from straightforward broadcast models to youtube - where 1% of creators forge a ugc-powered broadcast model for 99% of consumers) more traditional ad models continue to create value.

But in Total Communities - where 99% are creating and distributing (eg myspace, twitter, facebook, social networks in general) where to take part you have to create part, making it ever easier to turn advert into recommendation is the new alchemy.



I'm going to be talking more about this at WidgetWebExpo in New York next week. In the meantime, please join in the journey by commenting below.

Community defined? You can't take part without creating part of it

My buddy Badgergravling got me thinking with a question on twitter this morning.

I don't know the 'why' of what he wants to know at the moment ( "Still researching content creators vs audience figures/ratio...anyone got examples/figures etc?") but the question itself made me think about our definitions, and valuation, of community.

Wikipedia and YouTube provide great examples of products made entirely from user generatated content. The question often thrown at them is "yeah but, how many people create content compared to those who simply consume it?"

The answer is thought to be a consistently low number (1%?) who contribute while 99% consume. I'll gladly update this with more accurate stats if you happen to have them.

Let me be clear. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The 99% now have something they want to consume, created by that busy 1%. It didn't exist before. It's been carved from that cognitive surplus that Clay Shirky introduced us to. New value has been created.

Of course, it could achieve twice the scale and value should another 1% of the consumers become creators. But then, the theory goes, each time you double the number of creators, you'll scale up the number of consumers, too. That means the ratio of creators to consumers will remain static. Let's call it 1:100 for the sake of argument.

So, the more people who join the community by creating, the more 'audience' you'll grow. Clearly worth getting the tools of creation right then? If nothing else the audience gets to connect with the community through repeated exposure... and that drip-drip effect may inspire some to cross the theshold from audience to community.

All good, of course.

What made me pause for further thought was the fact that I was having this discussion on twitter.

Without creators there is no twitter. Same with YouTube or Wikipedia of course.

But twitter is made with communities of creators as its primary concern, not for consuming viewers. It is built for communities of purpose to form in a networked conversation-driven way, not for an audience to consume what they are creating. It's about small numbers sharing their conversations.

SecondLife follows that formula, too.

In both cases you can't take part without creating part of it.

I'm not about to claim there's no value in products which mix creation with consumption - YouTube and Wikipedia stand as testimony to the folly of that line of argument.

But I do think this raises questions about how uniformly we can apply laws of creator/consumer ratios. The purpose of the tools has a huge influence on this.

I imagine there are some twitter users who only 'follow' (ie only read the content others have created). But I'll make a wild guess: That number is way closer to 1% than the number of people who create content on twitter is.

In really community-focused models (from the architecture up) the creator/consumer ratio is likely to get turned on its head.

And that clearly hasn't done any harm to the likes of SecondLife and Twitter.

So being part of a community is to take part in creating it. All the rest is broadcast - sharing the community's metadata with a world of self-selecting potential members.

It means of course that twitter must come up with a monetising solution which fits the networked world. Can't wait to see which way they jump.

What to blame if response rates take a tumble

Just went to grab myself a bottle of diet coke from my regular vending machine. Put money in - it goes right through and out the other end. It doesn't work.
It hasn't worked for several days now.
When the agency that supplies the machine turns up to refill it they are going to discover it isn't working.
I suspect they won't ask themselves: "hmmm, weather hasn't been so good, has there been some bad publicity for diet coke, maybe no one has any money, are people making their own drinks? etc etc".

They'll spot the machine is broken and do their best to fix it. That will be their first thought.

What is our first reaction when response rates fall?

Is it to consider that maybe, just maybe, the model is broken?

Google is asking.

Models that aren't broken.

All the rest is spam

Scott Karp's post Why Traditional Advertising Formats Fail on the Web paints a bleak picture for those who would continue to interrupt.

What we seek, we want. All the rest is spam.

At the guts of this issue is a big question facing media: What do you do when you don't control the user experience?
Scott quotes Jacob Nielson:

"... when people go online they know what they want and how to do it... This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them."

... all the rest is spam.

Users don't put up with being interrupted or distracted. They find a way around the control you would impose. It's a network, not a one-way street, stoopid.

And Scott says: "Online advertising must create value for users or it will create little or no value for advertisers."

Yep. It's time to think of the ad as content and the content as the ad. It's time to think of models which are a better fit with the networked world, rather than the broadcast one.

War! What is it good for? Mobile marketing, actually...

Check out this video to get a taste of how the mobile and engagement marketing is changing the face of spicy snack marketing in that there Japan!
2D barcodes, mobile phones, kids who want to have fun, spoken to in their language (and I don't mean Japanese, dude) - and all to get them hooked on a new snack.

The recruitment is a bit 'facebook zombies' but, you know, this stuff works for the short-lived community. And if playing this game is its purpose, then the tool is a pretty good fit. To join in you have to buy a packet of snacks - so kids who can influence end up getting more people to buy, who get more people to buy, etc etc.

The same kids even used other social networks they were already members of to meet and organise battle strategy (there's that latent community thing, see below) - and no doubt to recruit, too.

Genius. Evil perhaps, but it's being explicit (honest and upfront) about that!

This is all about tapping into a latent community (you ain't likely to recruit someone you don't already know), not using a set of tools to build one. It's why it has worked.
It has, as Clay Shirky would request, the plausible promise (it'll be a bit of a laugh, and one you can have with your friends), it has the right tools - and ones which the latent community was using anyway (the mobile phone) and it has an outcome that all parties agree is ok with them (buy the snack, join the party).

Via the genius of Tomi Ahonen and Communities Dominate Brands.

Will they still buy when the war is over? Will they still buy when they are bored of the game? That's the risk - but they will have at least bought and paid for the snack. If they like it they'll stick with it. It's only marketing when all is said and done.

The clever bit would be to take those armies and get them involved in suggesting new flavours, helping to shape the next products - make them an evil army of snack creators.

Now I can hear the evil laughter...

Communities of purpose are the business units of the 21st century

Communities of purpose are the business units of the 21^st century.

This notion, should you accept it, has profound and far-reaching implications not only the future of publishing but also for advertising, marketing, production and the very process of the creation of value.

It has implications too for how companies should organise to benefit from the new way value is created. Yes, it is disruptive, isn’t it?

This paper seeks to explain why these communities of purpose are of such value and why enabling their rapid, real-time evolution unlocks the key to value creation.

It will consider why this has the potential to be the greatest explosion in value ever created.

And it will propose solutions in which content, conversation and communities of purpose provide the cornerstones. With them I believe we can unlock value now and into the mid-to-long term.

It seeks to answer the question “How do we monetise hosting the conversation?”

Translation: How does media make money in the future?

You can read it in full or download and/or share it below. Hope you'll share your comments below.

Read this doc on Scribd: Communities of Purpose are the business units of the 21st Century

Nine Inch Nails free album: Advert as content, content as advert

Nine Inch Nails are offering volume one of their new album free.
Advert as content, content as advert. Engagement nirvana.

Engagement Mapping: a fairer distribution of ad dollars

Microsoft has come up with a real challenge to google adsense. It's not a new kind of advertising, it's a new kind of measurement and one which is likely to appeal to anyone in the business of branded advertising and content creation.

'Engagement Mapping' is a well-informed punt at the kind of redistribution of value in the supply chain of advertising so many have called for. It goes into beta on March 1.

Mike Teasdale - planning director at Harvest spoke about the need for something like this at the NetImperative publishing seminar I spoke at in November 2007.

Google (and their ilk) gets the lions share of the CPA (cost per acquisition) cake because the final click is most often from search.

That doesn't seem fair because it's not giving enough value back to the creators of the demand. You don't go searching for something you don't already want. Content creators/hosts are doing the job of creating desire.

Example: User sees an in-context and related banner ad. What we do next is... very often not click it. This may well be because we feel interrupted, irritated or whatever. This doesn't much matter to Mike's case. What does, is that the ad has planted an idea in the user's mind. It may have seeded the demand and it has been displayed in a context in which the user was susceptible to that demand.

So there is no click-thru record of me 'responding'. But I do actually respond to it and I am more prepared to part with cash as a result.

More often than not I'll do a search around the terms the combination of ad and content has planted in my mind and do this because I want to do some comparisons - and perhaps because I don't trust one single ad when I can go comparing and do some consideration with communities I trust.

But despite all that - the combination of content and ad has had a large influence on a deal getting done.

Could Microsoft's new tech share out the revenues in both a measurable and reasonable way?

Microsoft says: "Engagement Mapping takes into account for the first time all the various online touchpoints and interactions a consumer experiences before an eventual sale."
“...The ‘last ad clicked’ is an outdated and flawed approach because it essentially ignores all prior interactions the consumer has with a marketer’s message,” said Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of the Advertiser & Publisher Solutions (APS) Division at Microsoft.

“Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.”

Can Microsoft's new system ascribe the right proportion of value (and how do you measure what is right?) to the editorial article that made you think you wanted a holiday, or the next one that made you think you wanted a particular type of holiday, or the next one which made you think you wanted to go to a particular location etc etc.

IF advertising were content and content were advertising we would have a complete (and worthy of the name) engagement model. But I get the sense that Engagement Mapping will only ascribe value to interactions (views and clicks I guess) with traditional-style ads (of the kind that don't fit the networked world, as I discussed here).

I'm not even sure if it has a way of adding in the 'engagement' users have with marketing widgets.

There appears no sign of treating 'content' in the same way as advertising - eg ascribing (and paying) a value to this here blog post because it's made you want to go off and sign up to try Engagement Mapping.

If I'm wrong about that Microsoft, my apologies... I imagine the cheque is in the post?

The proof of the new marketing is in the conversation

I'm a bit of a sucker for conversation (I even draw graphs). That, combined with the fact that I'm speaking alongside Joseph Jaffe at Digital Marketing Briefing in March has proved enough for me to join in an experiment Joseph is running to promote his latest book: Join the Conversation.
His idea is to try to prove his particular pudding by giving bloggers a taste (or Using New Marketing To Prove New Marketing... UNM2PNM if you must).

The idea is that bloggers tell Joseph they'd like a free copy and they get sent one. Deal is you write a review, good bad or indifferent.

The powerful play of course is that you only discover the offer if you already happen to be part of the community of purpose/interest. What I mean is, if I didn't read Joseph's blog - or got introduced to the idea via someone else I trust (or someone else's blog I trust) it's unlikely I'd know about the offer.

It's therefore likely Joseph's message will fall on receptive ears.

But that's not to say everything HAS to be rosey - after all bloggers can be an egotistical bunch and if they think they have better ideas and know where Joseph has it all wrong, they're going to say so. Hold me to that when I write my review!

What Joseph clearly appreciates is that informed debate of his ideas can do nothing but good for both his reputation and sales of his book. Upside - fawning advocates selling the book as hard as they can, worst case, savvy people granting Joseph the level of respect required to give serious consideration to his ideas. Even if they do end up rejecting them they introduce them to their own network of trust.

Is there anyone in new marketing who doesn't market their work this way?

I see just one potential fly in the ointment. The amazon affiliate link Joseph has asked reviewers to include points to the US Amazon site - which can put off many buying in other parts of the world or in other currencies. Pity, because Joseph is donating revenues earned in this way to charity.

What next for advertising and marketing?

The following is an excerpt from a white paper. I thought I'd share this summing-up to see what you think and perhaps entice you to read the full version (Marketing and Advertising Models for a Networked World, see left-hand navigation).

All contributions to the conversation actively encouraged.

Understanding how the world has changed and looks set to continue to change – how we are rejecting interruption and embracing participation, how we are moving away from control from the centre to the dominance of communities, what should we do?

I see three immediate routes and believe each is worth pursuing. Each represents a significant shift from traditional, interruptive advertising. Each represents something other than business as usual.

1. Widget Marketing: Make use of the current advertising space and populate it with ads which follow the best practice of virals and widgets.
2. Engagement Marketing: Involve communities in the building of the brands they use – connect them to your authentic voice.
3. No Marketing: Instead, apply the new mode of production the web enables. Communities as producers of that which they desire. No ‘marketing’ required.

Widget Marketing:

Widget Marketing is the easiest to achieve right now.
It fits with the how advertising is currently done – creatives can be done, space booked and paid for.
But we will need new measures of success – not necessarily how many times your ad is seen, or how many clicks it generates (though these will still be important). A further key measure will be engagement – how many people use the tool you provide and to what effect, how many people play with it, shape it as their own, and as a consequence forward it, or display it on their own webspace? While the url remains a significant element of web architecture, route 1 will retain strong economic value.

What should we do?
Create widgets instead of standard display adverts – no matter how in-context and related you can make them. (I appreciate you’ll need a period of both, I’m not suggesting you ditch all that in-context stuff over night).

These widgets must speak in the authentic voice of the people who make the products you are selling. That means involve those people in the ‘creative’. Don’t interrupt the conversation with your own spin. They make the pots, let them sell them.

Each widget should allow a personal outcome. That is, offer tools so the user can personalise, add to, subvert, so that it becomes something they actively want to pass on.
Example: The Pampers campaign in the US at the end of 07.

Because your ad is a widget, the user can place it where-ever they wish – on their own profile page on social networks, for example. In doing this they offer their own endorsement and share it with their network of trust – the people they connect with who share their passions and interests.

It is trust which makes recommended-by-a-friend work – not simply discovery (and it is perhaps the trust element that was missing in the friendspam of facebook’s initial poke at SocialAds).

Engagement Marketing:

This can be harder. It’s certainly harder than selling or creating for display space.

First, sort your head.
Start listening. Let the community take control.
Er, and that’s it really. Everything flows from this change in mindset.

Your brand is not your own. It is ours.

Cornflakes are a breakfast cereal not because that’s what Dr Kellogg ‘made’. Kellogg was in fact out to create a food which would suppress your sex drive.
That’s not what the community of users have decided it is!
Lucky for Kelloggs that they chose to allow that development of the brand!

Engagement marketers work on the assumption that they are dealing with converged individuals – people who are rather more than simple passive consumers – of product or message.

An engagement marketing approach would open up the creation of our widget marketing to the community in the first place. A competition with rewards for the person who makes the most-engaged-with widget promoting a brand, for example.

Further, an engagement marketer would be sitting down around the campfire with the community to help decide whether a widget competition was the right thing in the first place.

Simple rules:
1. Put the community first
2. Listen
3. Change

No Marketing:

In this model there is no ‘advertising’ or ‘marketing’ as we have understood it during the mass industrial interruption.
It has nothing to do with supply chains, value chains, or chains of any kind. It is about webs – of supply and value.
It takes advantage of the match between the way in which both the economy and the web work to create extraordinary efficiencies and ultimately greater value.
To take advantage you must create platforms which bring together co-creating communities who share a purpose and offer them the tools of collaboration.

We're getting better and better (and will get better still) at delivering the right commercial messages at the right time and to the right people, by focusing on communities and making use of social data analytics. And perfecting this has big wins for ad agencies, marketeers, commercial enterprizes and media... and this is a fantastic leap forward compared to the interruptive advertising that has gone before.

But the ultimate wins are about people taking control of the creation of the product they want to own.

If a community is involved in the co-creation of the products and services it has decided it needs to call into existence, this has two key impacts.

1. It has the potential to be a perfect fit. The people who’ve been involved in the co-creation of the product or service that results will love it and 'buy' it (that which we create we embrace, as Alan Moore likes to say). They will also rave about it – recommending it to other like-minded people, attracting more with the same passion/purpose to join their niche global community of collaborators.
2. Doesn’t co-creation of this kind imply a perfect fit between supply and demand? What's the need for traditional ads. The community does its own marketing - and it's powerfully peer-to-peer and with all the ramped-up trust that implies.

What is required to make this function?
1. Communities (what makes great communities?).
2. Tools which allow communities to self-form into groups of their choosing around purposes of their selection.
3. Tools which allow them to share and collaborate to produce.

White paper now available here.

Digital Media predictions for 2008

2008 will be the year the perfect (fire) storm starts doing some real damage.

It’ll be the year in which traditional companies finally react to the alarm bells they’ve heard ringing since the turn of the century – and start shuffling towards the fire exits.

Trouble is, the flames are already licking around their heels.

They’ve heard the consultants, they’ve read the books. Even McKinsey looks like it’s finally read Wikinomics (if not the Cluetrain Manifesto and Communities Dominate Brands).

So I think the biggest economic shift we’ll see in 2008 is the rapid acceleration of old money being invested in the networked world. And they are going to need guidance to get it right. Practical, how-to stuff. (Maybe they should read this before they reach for their wallets).

So in 2008 it will no longer be about the What, it’ll be about the How.

But before we get into that, a quick review of my predictions for 2007 – so you get some idea of how large a pinch of salt you'll need to take the following with.

Those 2007 predictions in full (my comments on them in italics)

1) Access to the internet via mobile will surpass 40% of all internet use (globally).
Yes. 1-for-1. It was 25% in 2006. Now it's up to ??% (Morgan Stanley are predicting that this year 3G users will overtake fixed broadband subscriber numbers). The google-driven Android alliance is going to push this still harder. Half the world now has a mobile phone – and that’s not something you can say of the PC. The dominance of this new pervasive computing will shift how we think about everything.

2) A UK national newspaper will close its print operation. And a series of one-time print only magazine brands will become digital only (pick a number between 25 and 100).
No. Can’t give you chapter and verse on this. It hasn’t happened in my back yard. It still feels like it might.

3) Broadcast TV on your mobile will become commonplace. Sky will offer it as a bolt-on upgrade to your home services.
Yes. Even down to the Sky offer


4) Microsoft/Google/Yahoo (one or all) will launch a mobile phone.
Yes-but-no-but-yes (Android is the closest we’ve got to this)


5) All mobile operators in the UK will follow 3 and offer fixed price mobile internet access.
Yes. Even 02 is offering this in packages for the I-Phone now


6) A mobile operator will seek the edge by launching a fixed price for all services (ie £40 a month for all-you-can-eat internet, voice, text, mms...TV(?)
Not quite. Virgin is closest with a broadband, TV home phone and mobile package for (you guessed it) £40 a month. If only they’d thrown in all mobile data.

7) More than 10% of internet users will blog.
Almost. It’s actually reached 8%.., come on world… you’re lagging!


8) A citizen-journalism TV channel made up entirely of video shot on and uploaded from mobile phones will launch.
Yes. Flashbox TV did exactly this.

9) TV on demand will revolutionise how you consume TV and send advertisers into a blind panic.
Yes (for me it has!) I think this is widely recognized now, and my viewing has changed. Has yours?


10) A slow-burn campaign for users to claim back their digital identities will turn to a riot of noise by the end of the year...
Evidence so far: The response to Facebook Beacon, the UK Government losing ‘our data’, increasing influence on services which only use your data while you are using them.

All in all, not too bad I reckon. How rose-tinted are my spectacles? Post your comments n the usual way.

So given my track record so far – take the following with a pinch, dose or truck load of salt depending on your PoV! I’ll try to offer a concrete-ish example in each case so we can say whether they did or didn’t happen when it comes time to reviewing them at the end of next year!

10 Digital Media predictions for 2008

1) Aggregation will be the key buzz word in media. The BBC’s beta homepage let’s you take control of how you view their content. By the end of the year they’ll ‘get’ that you can’t maintain a reputation as a ‘destination’ in the networked world unless your node is strengthened by its connections to others.
Example: Expect a BBC-curated collection of externally created (including, UGC) feeds and widgets. And this will prove the model – allied to a wide range of social, community-driven functionality, that emerges from established media brands.

2) The new advertising: This is the year in which engagement marketing will finally start taking significant chunks of spend. Mobile is already leading the way with a successful start for Blyk.
Example: Expect forward-thinking traditional companies to set up units to specifically make money with EM. Expect new companies to set up to do this alone. Crash course in EM here. People might even start understanding how viral works

3) Talking of which…Widgets. Widgets play to both the aggregation trend AND the engagement marketing trend. Widgets just had their first conference (Widgety Goodness). Widgets rule Facebook. Widgets carry the promise of widgetising ourselves! Imagine a widget which carries your personal ID – your data - which you can plug into a site as and when you wish – and take with you when you leave. You want your data back? You got it!
Example: Expect to see the likes of google, nokia, Microsoft acquiring widget makers and the engagement thinkers behind them. The digitization of the web disaggregates discreet pieces of information. RSS allows the user to re-aggregate. Widgets lower the technical barrier so everyone can be their own aggregator. And in that context, it’s going to accelerate…

4)A shift in thinking away from the url as destination and towards search as navigation.
Example: Ads in other media will stop carrying urls – more will refer to places to look for services (eg use Macdonalds calorie counter on Facebook Mobile....

5) And talking of Facebook… I think it’ll emerge that Microsoft’s dabble with Facebook is less about cracking digital advertising – more about the future of the desktop – the future of computing itself.
Example: I dunno – Microsoft’s replacement for vista comes across like a newsfeed?!?

6) Tools will emerge to allow online videos to end their TV envy.
Example: Tools which allow everyone to mash up video, add comments into/over the video stream, save and share their own versions... all with technical barriers low enough to be used by anyone (just like commenting on a blog!). These will be available in/on engagement marketing widgets, viral efforts and YouTube itself. And finally 'rich' media will no longer be poor.

7) Games consoles and game user interfaces will have increasing influence on the UI of both hardware and web experiences. This will feed into the design of services for mobile and web.
Example: Expect the fall of the traditional mobile phone nine-number interface, and a pc without a qwerty keyboard.

8) Celebrity will take a dip. Once we talked to neighbours about neighbours. Our friends were the gossip, our friends were the news. Then community took a kicking from the interruption of mass production and command and control economies. Our fascination with celebrity filled the friendship gap, they became our make believe friends. But now we have tools (such as the facebook newsfeed) which make our friends our news once more.
Example: Celebrity-obsessed media is likely to suffer. Viewing figs for I’m a Celebrity start to fall, less Celebrity Dog Walking type shows being made.

9) On the threat-to-newspapers theme, I think the Sun will go free – on the streets of London, at least.

10) Peer-to-peer collaboration will continue its disruptive march. This will go in any and all directions. So let’s pick one to expect to happen by the close of 2008.
Example: OK, someone will launch a peer-to-peer bank in the western world.
UPDATED DEC 20... the wisdom of the crowds (see comments) tells me I was really good at predicting the past on this one! eg http://www.virginmoneyus.com. Have offered a replacement in the comments you'll find below.

And one for fun… Amazon will regret its Kindle, e-book because it’ll get hacked and that'll make book content as free and accessible as music has become. Scarey for Amazon.
Then again, perhaps its closed nature will make more of us realise the tactile value of a real book – which any of us can pass to any of us – or sell to any of us.

So that’s my gaze into the future. What’s yours?

Take That: And out of darkness of the audience comes the light of the community

Oh, alright it sounds a bit cheesey - but hell, I started thinking about this while watching Take That at the O2 arena. If ever there was a case for cheese begatting cheese, then this was it.

Yes, I admit it, I was one of the very few straight men at Take That on Friday. I'm not ashamed.
I'm not a convert to their music. I'm not about to rush out and buy the back catalogue. And I was only there because my wife's friend was ill.
But the event, the experience? Unmissable.

And it turns out, it was grist for the mill of this blog, too. How so?
1. Engagement Marketing as right experience.
2. Community emerging from audience
3. The blurring of online and offline realities.

The O2 (see I've already started calling it that...) is an awesome venue. 16,000 seater. Giant. Not the kind I usually enjoy. I pointed out the gap between the stage and the audience to my wife. It looked like an insurmountable void. How would performers reach out to connect, I mused, as the arena filled up.

It turned out they didn't need to. Audiences don't passively wait to receive. They reach out too. It's why the crowd buys so many luminous things to wave in their darkness. They are reaching out - saying "I'm here, I'm part of this - I am a participant". It's why we wave mobile phones - and way back when, why we waved lighters.

Live concerts perhaps were never an audience experience - they were always a community experience - complete with 'all together now' singalongs.

It's what O2 realised when it bought the white elephant of the Dome and made it the wonderful experience it has become. That experience goes down to every member of the team. We ate in a chinese ahead of the gig, within the 'dome'. Staff persued us down the stairs after we had eaten to ask us what we thought. They were ensuring the experience was all we'd hoped.

As we entered the venue and a few searches were carried out, they were done by people wishing us a great evening.

As we left the venue we were expertly guided to ensure footfall flows never jammed - and again every member of staff hoped we'd enjoyed ourselves. It's a consistent and compelling message.

BUT, I'm a big Bowie fan. And when my mate (who works for O2) told me he'd played there in November I asked why I hadn't known. "You're not on O2 are you?" No I'm not. But now 02 has just pissed me off. Signing up with them would now feel a little like having too - because they are holding me to ransom over access to the Dome.

Since they are also holding us to ransom over the I-Phone (and I'm told that's a very long term deal) I suspect I'm going to feel extremely, reluctantly coerced into signing next time around. Hmmm.

And the blurring of offline and online... fantastic video imaging which merges with real life action on the stage... could it be magic? (sorry).

My Vodpod, clues, and the power of the blogosphere

I was blown away this morning to find an email in my inbox from the CEO of VodPod, Mark Hall.
It was as a result of one line I wrote on this blog yesterday, a throw-away mention that I'd like to have added a particular video to My Vodpod (which you'll find in the left column of this blog) but that it wasn't working at the time.

Pre-Cluetrain companies might have set the bots looking for references to themselves and then sent out automated 'please accept our profound apologies for this inconvenience' emails to all and sundry. You know the sort. You get them from google from time to time.

Mark did rather better. Hope he won't mind me quoting from his email - I'm guessing he gets the open-silo'd approach to markets as conversations, since he uses such a human voice.

"Hi David-

I'm at Vodpod, and saw your note on your blog about Vodpod hanging. Apologies for that, we had some problems with the service overnight (our time).

"We launched a year ago today, so typical we'd encounter some gremlins on that day, in the middle of the night of course.

"Seeing your post led me to your blog... I'm going to be in London next week... and wanted to suggest getting a coffee if you happen to be in the city during that time.

"I'll also be over at LeWeb on Tuesday and Wednesday next week if you happen to be there. Would love to talk to you more about Vodpod, and what we're doing generally."

"Also: we just released some nifty new blog widgets, details here.

"Again, apologies for the problems last night.

"Cheers,
Mark".

And I'm impressed. I feel even better about Vodpod than I did before. I'm talking about it some more (hello? THIS is marketing). I'm even happy to hear about some new widgets Mark tags on to the conversation (some more marketing - which I'm happy to be complicit in!)

What a great illustration of the power of the blogosphere and proof of the idea of marketplace as conversation.

For those of you thinking this is all very well but how could we possibly ever deal with every customer this way? Imagine the value of this one conversation between Mark and I - now that it's being shared.

Yes Mark - I'd be delighted to drink coffee with you. I'll be contacting you right away!

Established media will have last laugh in social networks

There remains a reliance on clicks on ads on the web. It's the core revenue stream for most building digital enterprizes. Even social networks.

And yet, as Dana Boyd points out, they only engage a tiny percentage of the people/audiences/communities in question.

Some highlights from her post (which references Dave Morgan's blog post about AOL's survey):

"Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often. That tiny percentage makes up the vast majority of banner ad clicks."

"Who are these “heavy clickers”? ...they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content. Yes, these are the same people that tend to open direct mail and love to talk to telemarketers."

You could conclude that banner ads aren't reaching anyone new. The same old people are just being reached through mutliple channels. And they aren't any more likely to buy as a result.

Whatever the case, it's pretty clear we need something better.

While there is an increasing understanding that community, not content, is king, this understanding clearly hasn't reached as far as what we do about advertising.

For example, the exponential growth of social media is often judged successful because it means loads of people (users/eyeballs et al) are being dragged together in a huge fishing net of their own making. And there they are expected to flap helplessly, mouthing breathlessly, while the factory ship slaps banner ads all over them.

This mentality comes from the Property Developer approach to site building. If you're building it with a view to selling it on, all you are likely to consider is catching those fish and getting them to market before they go rotten.

Even the mighty facebook has suffered from this. The site's lean towards opt-in as default (which has driven its viral growth and that of its apps) came unstuck when it was applied to their Beacon advertising model (where opt-out as default would appear to have been the preferred option for freedom loving fish). Watch video below for how the privacy rules have changed in response.



And so, the idea that capturing the fish in your net (to sell to the next guy) is your prime function is seriously restricting the value creating capabilities of social networks as we have experienced them. It is seriously restricting the amount of thought being given to this.

If you build your social functions with a view to staying with that community for the long run the question of what replaces banner ads (and indeed, what replaces advertising) becomes much more important to you. The rest (the gathering of a huge audience to banner-ad at) is just smoke and mirrors.

So it is left to those of us who have long-established relationships with communities - which we wish to continue - to really activate the power of the network, to understand and implement the new ways in which value can be created - to forge the new business ecology.

It matters more to us. We aren't the ones selling our communities.

Established media is therefore very well positioned to end this story laughing loudest.

Will it be engagement marketing, will it be marketplaces as conversations, will it be the co-creation of products and services, does all this amount to the same and still require a lifeboat of banner ads?

Probably. What is certain is that it will be different from business as usual.

SecondLife: Welcome to reality.

Fabulous post by Joseph Jaffe about how brands should set up in SecondLife as a fast track to discovering how bad they are at relationships. Unmissable!
Resonance with Starting a Fire On the Village Green

Facebook's SocialAds: Jam today and tomorrow

SocialAds. The clue is in the name. What they do is the simple thing we see replicated elsewhere - serve the right ads to the right people at the right time.

That's a given. It's a big, big step in restoring response rates against the swan-dive of interruptive advertising.

But SocialAds have added something extra. Something, er, social.

They get that word of mouth is the single most effective sales pitch there is - accounting for between 60 and 70 per cent of all purchase decisions, depending on where you find your stats.

So an in-context, related ad is great. But an in-context related ad from a friend? Well that's a different league.

Ratings and recommendations of products from people you trust. Blyk understands this and we'll see exactly how it deploys that understanding as it rolls out its mobile model.

The idea makes use of the self-forming networks of trust that social networks create.

This is particularly effective when you add the understanding that people now have more trust in their peers than they do in brands, authority... the centre.

Recommended further reading on this:
Jeremiah Oywang at Forrester (Here).
Doc Searls (Here)

Now, I could argue that google's adsense does all this. It is in-context, related and served to the right people at the right time (if I'm searching for X and an ad for X is served against it - I'm the right person at the right time). What about the social bit? Well, my friend could forward me a link to a bit of content - that comes with his recommendation. I follow it and get served the ad when I see the content. It's kind of arrived in front of me with his recommendation.

However - there's no automation in that process. In SocialAds there appears to be.

The other element of their new business proposition is Facebook Pages, which allow businesses to have their own facebook profiles (and they are free) - so you can interact with consumers (fan-sumers as Jeremiah describes them - though I feel that underplays their role somewhat). I guess this is the equivalent of google's blogger?

They don't appear to have a way in which users of products create their own ads to share, or get invited into co-creating communities. Pity.

But these could be precisely the things that spin out of brands making wise use of the the two-way flow Facebook Pages are able to deliver.

The Facebook play is based on sound strategy for two reasons:

1. SocialAds are an easy sell for the current marketing mafia. They 'get' in-context related ads. They hear that social networks create trust. They know that trust begats sales. Where do I sign?

2. Facebook Pages offer more engaged (enlightened or willing to experiment) brands an easy opportunity to touch the network themselves (rather than simply witnessing its exponential value generation and handing over their cash). As they learn what it's like to be part of the communities which define brands, they will better serve the co-creational aspirations of Generation-C, Net Gen, the Edglings... the people who are inheriting the earth. Along the journey they should discover that these people want to help rate, shape, create, co-design, engineer and market. And they'll want rewards and ownership. Facebook Pages offer them an easy intro to the new business ecology and in an environment where connecting is made easy.

So it offers both a wedge of cash from the old guard right now (SocialAds) and a ticket to the future for the new (Facebook Pages).

It sounds like a winning combination to me.

This from the facebook blog (I would point you to the link, but it would only work for you if you were a member of facebook... as google's adsense may wish to point out)

What they say: My first reactions in red:

"Today we announced an entirely new advertising solution for Facebook. Right now, we want to make clear what's changing—and what's not—for you.

"First of all, what's not changing:

• Facebook will always stay clutter-free and clean.
• Facebook will never sell any of your information.
• You will always have control over your information and your Facebook experience.
• You will not see any more ads than you did before this. See anymore ads? I didn't 'see' any in the first place. I appreciate they were there, but they didn't register.
  

Here's what is changing:

• You now have a way to connect with products, businesses, bands, celebrities and more on Facebook.
• Ads should be getting more relevant and more meaningful to you.
• You now have the option to share actions you take on other sites with your friends on Facebook.

Engaging with businesses and buying things are part of your everyday life. Advertising doesn't have to be about interrupting what you're doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it. We believe we've created a system where ads are more relevant and actually enhance Facebook.
Ah, so they get the engagement over interruption thing. But I'm afraid this IS just about serving the right people with the right ad at the right time. Yawn.

You now have a way to connect with things you are passionate about. We've launched Facebook Pages, which are distinct, customized profiles designed for businesses, bands, celebrities and more to represent themselves on Facebook.

We noticed people wanted to connect with their favorite music, restaurants, and brands; but there was no good place for these types of affiliations to exist. Now, there is a place for them and you can become a fan of whatever pages you choose in order to interact with your passions in new ways. You can post reviews for a local restaurant, buy tickets to a new movie, or be the first to get a heads up about new promotions.

Ads will be getting more relevant and more interesting to you. Instead of random messages from advertisers, we've launched Social Ads. Social Ads provide advertisements alongside related actions your friends have taken on the site. These actions may be things like "Leah is now a fan of The Offspring" (if I added The Offspring to my music) or "Justin wrote a review for Sushi Hut" (If Justin wrote this review on the Sushi Hut page). These actions could then be paired with an ad that either The Offspring or Sushi Hut provides.

A sample Social Ad.

Behind the scenes, we've instituted a system that tailors ads to you and your interests, which should make ads more appealing. Advertisers never have access to who is seeing their ads, personal information about you, or even what social actions accompany their ads. In other words, all of this completely respects your privacy, while providing you with a better Facebook experience.

Hmm wonder what kind of social data analytics they have going on at the back? Can they discern the most viral within each community, and offer them for sale?

You now have the option to bring actions you take outside of Facebook back in. Just as Facebook shares your on-site interactions with your friends through News Feed, we now give you an option to let News Feed share your off-site actions with your friends as well.

This is the notification you'll see whenever another site wants to send a story to Facebook.

For example, adding the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to your queue on Blockbuster.com might be something you want your friends to know about, so you can have a marathon. As usual, you have complete control over this information. Affiliate websites always notify you of any stories they want to send, and you'll have two opportunities—one on the website, and one on Facebook—to opt out of that story. Facebook always gives you the choice to decline a story the next time you log in.
They've watched and learned from the likes of the Visual Bookshelf and Blogfriends apps.

We want Facebook to reflect and enhance all your real-world relationships—the movie you see this weekend as well as the friends who are seeing it with you. If you have any questions or suggestions for how we can improve this, let us know.

Well yes I do: Take a look here.(How Facebooks SocialAds should work, but probably won't)

It's war: Brand vs Fans. Hmm, I wonder who'll win?

It seems the lessons of mash-up culture are still not being learnt. The desire to control can be crushing. But there always comes a point when the pips squeak. And in a networked world the squeeks are loud, long and globally shared.

How long is it going to be before this film starts to circulate through non-official and entirely out-of-THEIR-control channels? (first one to spot clips on youtube et al, please comment below!)

The row over Damantus, a movie made by German fans of The Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000, centres on German copyright law and who gets to own IP. Read the BBC report. It looks like "it'll never be shown in front of an audience". Maybe not. A community? quite possibly!

If this dispute couldn't be resolved by those 'in charge' I'm willing to place a hefty bet on 'leaks' taking control from them.

And while I'm happy that'll happen, I'm depressed that those who are doing all in their power to prevent that from happening will actually benefit from it.

The Games Workshop and the Warhammer 40,000 brands can only benefit from the exposure and engagement with the brands that this co-created film represents. Watch this.

Hey, come to think of it, maybe this is just a deep-cover viral scam...

By the way, google are thinking of banning my blog. Honest!

It's all about connections and connectedness...

As Euan Semple says at the very start of the video you'll find below, it is all about connections and connectedness.
It is my good fortune to know both Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands) and Euan Semple (The Obvious). Both blogs are listed in my recommended list, left.
But Alan and Euan hadn't met.
The video here is of a brief part of the conversation that happened when they met for the first time when I introduced them at the British Library this week. I was thrilled to be the connection in this case.
Their conversation ranges from the power of the network, through blogs and blogging, why they blog and what they get from it, through politics, education, engagement marketing, the loss of control (if the centre ever thought it had any anyway...) identity and trust.
It's worth 10 minutes of your time - if you're interested in how the network is disrupting where-ever it touches.
There's even a cameo appearance by yours truly... when Euan takes charge of the camera (sorry, converged device, it's a Nokia N73).
So here is a bit of content, created at the point of inspiration (ie we started talking, I thought, let's record it) which scores high on relevance for this blog and my aims in sharing the Power of the Network message. But it ain't quite BBC TV quality.
Your comments, as always, are actively sought.

By the way, those still waiting for the Tomi Ahonen presentations from my Mobinar last week - we haven't forgotten - aiming to get the first ready to share tomorrow.

Facebook: Open to persuasion?

Both Scott Karp and Badger Gravling have posted about Facebook's plans to make your profile searchable outside of facebook (eg by google) in recent days.

Scott's concern is that facebook has started opening up its network without consulting with that network - and even went so far as to test and implement without a nod to their nodes!
Scott points out that the default mode is to make your (it has to be said, very limited) profile available to search engines.

Personally, I don't have a problem with making my node on the facebook network also a node on the wider network of the internet. But then, you'd expect me to say that, wouldn't you?
I expect it to be another way my connections with interesting people and thoughts will be amplified - with all the emerging value that entails.

That said, I do understand why some people would NOT want to be involved in that widening. It's clear from recently successful networks that control over how closed or open your personal group within a network is, is very valuable to many. Think Cyworld (Korea), think LinkedIn, and (usually) think Facebook.

Seems to me facebook is scrabbling around trying to work out how to monetise its huge community (note this is a community, or series of communities, NOT an audience). Increasing the potential traffic and page impressions (a result of opening up to search engines) is a very standard interruptive advertising response.

It's attempting to gauge success in terms of Sarnoff's Law: ie The more viewers, the greater the value.

But it's a serious under-estimation of the true (Reed's Law) value being created in the facebook network.

Examples such as the student group who turned over HSBC give a pointer to the value on offer - if only facebook could tap it.

I had the pleasure of dinner with Alan Moore (co-author Communities Dominate Brands, and the man who coined the term 'engagement marketing') last night.

He had just returned from time spent working with Xtract in Helsinki. And it occurred to me that the combination of facebook, Alan and Xtract could prove very powerful.

A quick snapshot of how great the potential, is demonstrated by Robert Scoble's 5000-strong facebook group and explained by him in this video. (watch here).

An aside: Robert's video is pitched as exclusive content available only to his facebook friends - yet when I add it to my vodpod (see left navigation) it seems that content is made freely available outside of the facebook wall!).

So I took a look on Facebook to see how I might go about contacting the right person to get the conversation going.

I ended up having to pretend I wanted to place an advert in order to be able to send any kind of message to HQ at all!

Seems like facebook values its privacy...



If anyone has any clue as to how to crack the 'contact a human being at facebook' code, please do share.