The edifice of the trusted expert takes another hit

Hard on the heels of all that Blue Peter cat naming chaos, dodgy phone votes and competitions, comes news that Maxim (in the US) has published a review of a CD its reviewer hadn't actually listened to (via the BBC... careful now, people in glasshouses etc etc).

Media brands have long known that trust is among our most precious possessions. At least we say we do - and then keep doing things like the above. Yet there are still those who struggle to understand how inevitable the decline of mass media becomes in these circumstances.

In specialist, consumer media (my world - and that of Maxim) we like to believe that our experts have something more to offer than our communities. Often that comes down to access. That's what makes the Maxim thing so wrong - it faked the access. They pretended they had got to hear the new Black Crowes album before you did. And they hadn't. And as a result the opinion was fake. It was a lie. Even the position of authority Maxim could claim from getting this access was bogus - because the access was never there.

THIS UPDATE: (made me laugh outloud!). "Rapper Nas, whose hits include Hip Hop Is Dead and If I Ruled The World, told the New York Post that he was surprised that Maxim had reviewed his album - because he hadn't finished recording it yet. The magazine called his album "radio friendly" and gave it a rating of 2.5 stars out of five."

Guess what all this does to trust...

No wonder people are making use of the power of the network to create their own networks of trust and to set their own definitions of quality (step forward tripadvisor et al). Relevance over quality folks. Live (or die) by it.

There is still a (potentially lucrative) role for trusted reviewers to give you a tip in the right direction, to start a marketing ball rolling in a believable direction. Trust them and you start to believe the reviewer even without direct experience of the product yourself (it's a core part of Dave Balter's thinking, an idea which permeates his book Grapevine, and the activities of his word-of-mouth marketing company BzzAgent).

I'll be keen to hear what Dave thinks about the regularity with which 'expert' opinion is being revealed as untrustworthy when we meet for lunch in London next month, and the impact of trust being created by networks rather than from the centre.

Google Knol: Knol = Limited Knowledge

Is google knol the answer to a doubt that doesn't really need to be raised? You know, the one that goes..."ah but you can't trust what you read on wikipedia"...

Google Knol, illustrated above (and in very limited beta at present), is being characterised as a wikipedia rival. And there are those who claim wikipedia is unreliable so perhaps organising chunks of expert knowledge in easily sorted boxes is just what the web ordered.

I'm not a subscriber to that view. Wikipedia is rarely wrong for long. The wisdom of the crowd is a rapidly self-correcting beast - certainly much faster than Mr I M Expert can be, even if he does bother responding to 'suggested edits and additions' on his Knol.

Knols look like being sealed units - essentially wikipedia stubs that only the original expert author can add to. In this respect (and this one alone) they are more like a blog than a wiki.

But google has a blog search and a self-publishing platform in Blogger. So what's the point of Google Knol?

Perhaps Google doesn't trust itself to deliver the right search results? (rate the likeliness of this below!) Or perhaps it just likes the look of all that juicy un-google-adsensed traffic over at Wikipedia? (ditto).

Let's assume it is simply a way to organise chunks of expert information as unique pieces of knowledge rather than streaming through the dialogue of the blog? Apply all the usual social media functions we'd expert and we could have league tables of the best expert guides to life the universe and everything.

Michael Arrington on Techcrunch tells us: "It’s a new knowledge base for authors. Anyone, eventually, will be able to write on any topic they choose. Google will provide authoring tools, store the information, allow others to comment and suggest edits, add ads with the author’s approval, and provide traffic via their search engine."

But even this doesn't make the best use of the collaborative power of the networked world.

I agree with Stowe Boyd when he suggests knowledge is vested in/created by rich conversations ( a la blogs) rather than sealed off units (a la a Google Knol). It's the whole point about connections creating the value, rather than the nodes themselves.

So perhaps it is apt that google has gone for a conjunction of the word knowledge as its 'unit of knowledge'... a restricted, sadly stunted version.

Media as the interface between human and experience of culture

BMW doesn’t make all of its cars. They use a network of subsidiaries and partners for the messy business of putting together bits of glass, rubber and metal.

But BMW also looks after other stuff which can best be described as the interface between driver and the experience of driving.

It focuses on the high-tech development of electronics; the stuff that determines what it feels like to drive – the feedback through the steering wheel, the ergonomics of the switching, the feel of the suspension, the sound of the engine. And of course they hold the web of suppliers, peer producers if you will, together.

It also looks after the customer experience – showrooms, aftersales, marketing. The branding. How you feel about being a BMW owner.

All brand-related areas of competence (design, purchasing, service, etc.) remain the responsibility of the BMW Group.”

Aston Martin has an interesting attitude, now that Ford has sold it.

The chief exec, Ulrich Bez, can see a day when a 'car maker' like Aston only controls the brand and marketing - everything else (design, R&D, manufacturing) can be outsourced to suppliers, according to an interview in Car Magazine in May 2007.

Car manufacturers are not alone in this approach. Hotel chains rarely own bricks and mortar and certainly don’t build it. They act as the interface between guest and experience – they do the branding, they train the staff, they set the standards etc.

This idea has set me thinking about how it could be applied in my industry, media.

What is the production line process of building a car or the bricks and mortar of running a hotel when it comes to media?

Perhaps it is the creation of content? While we are currently geared to making content, what if we were not – what would we do instead? Regular participants in the conversation of this blog will know I have a view on this.

Perhaps this is another way of groping towards some new conclusions?

What does it mean to act as the interface between humans and content? And isn’t this what we have always done? Isn’t a magazine a way of shaping someone’s experience of content?

Perhaps it helps to think about what the selection of that content does to shape our experience of culture.

What is the equivalent of developing ways of nuancing our communities’ experience of culture (in the way BMW nuances the experience of driving)?

BMW has a Point Of View. It knows what experience it wants to generate. It selects technologies, invests in development, chooses materials, positions its brand, to respond to this POV.

The question from a community perspective is how this POV is arrived at in the first place? We have to assume BMW gets meeting the needs of their community substantially right. Failure to do so means no more car sales.

But what we also know about BMW is that the customer can indulge in a reasonable range of co-creation (ie customising) of their vehicle. The value in this for the customer is in creating something they cherish more.

Surprisingly – despite the clear marketing value for BMW in allowing people to shape their vehicles – BMW doesn’t give you a cut of the value you create. Still – while they can get away with it, I guess why not? What am I on about? Ok, bit of a meander here but, if I opt for the better alloys on my beemer my car looks better – I love it more, more people see better-looking BMWs, more demand is created both in a broadcast way (each car out there acting as a rolling billboard) and in a recommended-by-a-friend way (the most powerful selling technique there is). And yet BMW want you to pay extra for this. Neat business model!

Anyway, back to the nuancing of experience.

Let’s say the selection of relevant, quality, materials is equivalent to a media brand curating a range of relevant, quality, materials.

The customising element? We then allow the individual to choose from among these quality materials to customise the experience of the culture to their own tastes.

Our role becomes one of aggregating materials against a brief agreed with /determined by our community of passion. And there are various social tools available to us to allow the community to engage in the co-creation of this brief.

Does this mean we must cease all content production? Not necessarily. Boeing, for example, still makes the tail-piece on its latest airliner while working with a peer-producer network to create the rest. It has chosen to retain control of this because it’s technically tough to do and gives them control of one element which the rest of the peer-producers in the creation of a plane would find hard to replicate. In short they can’t build a plane without Boeing.

Perhaps this indicates the kind of content media companies should concentrate on. It can’t be the stuff that is easily replicated by everyone else. It must be the exclusive and the hard-to-do. It must be the piece that a new media, purely ugc-reliant company could not replicate if it sought to put together its airliner.

So do we have some guidance?

Regarding the role of media as the interface between human and culture leads me to a handful of conclusions:

1. We should curate content compiled against a set of shared values, shared values which have been co-created with our community of interest. This content to include that produced by all sources. This represents our nuancing of the relevant culture.
2. We allow individuals (and self-forming groups within the community) to customise their experience – nuancing their experience still further and making that experience one they are more likely to market on our (and their) behalf.
3. Manage the web of peer producers – create the platform, manage the interaction of those contributing to it.
4. Contribute hard-to-do content. This is the one piece no one else can easily replicate. It’s our Boeing tail piece and represents a barrier to entry as compared to purely user-generated-content models.

I should emphasise that this is my first wild stab in the dark at this notion of media as cultural interface. And I could really do with your help… definitions of hard-to-do content… ideas for managing the web of peer producers… etc