The Ideas Marketplace

In this post 'Content sucks - if that's all you sell' I discussed the lessons we might learn from the collapse of content vendors in the music business.
In considering their dilemma (and the media industry's) I thought about how digital communities have better replicated the marketplace experience than bricks and mortar stores have chosen to.
And that made me question how ideas are 'exchanged' in corporations, in particular.
The mass industrialised mindset of Corporations tends towards hierarchy and the silo effect.
And that emerges (in corporate idea-exchange models) in the propensity towards broadcast of information: Centralised, one-to-many flows. eg "I'm here today to tell you about my great idea" echoing around an aircraft hangar...
I believe ideas are improved by more intimate two-way flows - conversations and challenges.
As Alan Moore likes to say "People embrace what they create". Confucius has effectively been saying something similar for 2500 years: “Tell Me and I Will Forget; Show Me and I May Remember; Involve Me, I Will Understand.” (Confucius, 450 BC).
So I'd like to see how ideas might evolve and new ones emerge by applying the model of the marketplace, rather than that of broadcast.
A traditional marketplace does three things:
1. Allows people to buy (AND sell)
2. Allows the exchange of information
3. Entertains
How might we take those elements to create an ideas marketplace within a corporation?
I have some vague ideas about literally allowing people to set up their marketstalls in a selected venue, putting on some related entertainment, and inviting everyone to just wander in and wander around, having conversations (ie not being broadcast at) with people with ideas/information to 'sell'.
It could be how someone wants to change how your IT department works, or loves a book they've read they want to market to their peers, or has a plan for a fantastic new digital play but no one in his/her silo has wanted to know...
But this is a first draft - an early iteration.
I'm bringing the idea to the digital version of the marketplace. Let's talk?

n

Communities Dominate Facebook

Regular readers of this blog will know I'm an advocate for the book and blog Communities Dominate Brands.

And I've been spending a little time recently using and thinking about Facebook.

I do believe that to understand the value of the network you have to be part of it. So if you are someone who reads this blog - please, start thinking about starting your own or at the very least, taking part in the conversation here (by posting your thoughts/reactions/comments).

In that spirit, I've started a Facebook group for those who've read CDB. I'm fairly confident I'll be able to get the authors to join it, so... you know the drill. Perhaps it's an example of an emergent value... we'll see.

Find the Communities Dominate Brands Facebook group here.

Mobile Advertising: Will Hype Give Way to Real Business in 2008?

I promised a link to the notes from the Nokia Mobile Advertising Thought Leadership Meeting I attended in London last week.
They are now available online, along with 10 industry predictions arising from the meet.
Find it all at MobiAdNews.com
And you're welcome of course to comment either here or there!

Selling content sucks - if that's all you do...

The difficulties facing yet another vendor of content marks another milestone (gravestone?) along the road to the new media ecology.
There are lessons for all of us who sell content. There may be lessons for everyone who sells.
Fopp - one of the UK's biggest music store chains - is the latest to be hit by what is reported by the mainstream media as an issue that's all about competition from downloads and online supermarkets:
"All specialist retailers of CDs and DVDs have been hit by growing competition from online downloads and supermarkets. HMV today reported a 70 per cent fall in profits. Music Zone’s demise was blamed on the same factors..."
Supermarket competition impacts at the mass end of the business. Smaller retailers can respond to this. It is not to go head to head with the high volume - top 50 sellers. It is to serve the long tail and respond to local (community) needs. It is to provide a very different experience.
When I was a kid the local record shop (and even the small town where I grew up had one) was one-part youth club, one-part information exchange and one-part market place. I could sell old records I no longer wanted, order something obscure (they couldn't carry everything!), hang out, load up on some vicarious cool, share what I thought, form a band, etc etc
How far removed is this from the experience of buying in a supermarket?
Online vendors of downloads have (where they succeed) replicated this far better than bricks and mortar rivals.
They have understood that communities form around music - communities who want to share (is that the new marketplace of buying and selling secondhand records?) information, recommendations - and just spend time together discussing what they love and why they love it - and marketing their favourites to each other.
But that's not to say a music store couldn't capture much of the same. And by facilitating the physical meeting of communities they could take what online retailers have discovered and make it still more engaging.
Perhaps they have to accept two things:

1. Turn yourselves into a music marketplace - where people can come together to exchange information, buy (and sell/share?), and be entertained (God forbid, perhaps they could even put on the occasional gig?)
2. Offer downloads. Seriously - it is the disaggregation of digital content (the ability to choose which tracks you want, rather than buying whole CDs), that's driving download sales. Convenience is important, price is important. But serving of long-term diverse choice is the biggest factor. And it's the part of the market that is emphatically NOT served by supermarkets.

Fop, HMV, chains in general... seem to have forgotten that the marketplace was always about much more than buying your goods.

Mobile Social Networking - the course

I was lucky enough to attend the inaugural University of Oxford CPD short course on Mobile Social Networking yesterday. Now I'm one of 16 people who has a certificate in it. Now you know it must be going mainstream!
Led by 3G strategy consultants and authors Steve Jones and Tomi Ahonen, and engagement master (and author) Alan Moore, it was packed with insight and inspiration.
I can't tell you the whole story, but here's a few insights, facts and figures that emerged:
1. 2% of the world's GDP (rising to 3% very soon) is spent on mobile
2. email use is actually falling among teenagers as they reject it in favour of sms and IM.
3. Wondered why school-age kids don't want clamshell phones? cos you can't text on them while they are hidden up your sleeve.
4. Non sms content on mobile is worth $31bn in 2007 - that's bigger than all content revenues online, bigger than revenues from Hollywood and bigger than the entire music industry.
5. 100:1 is the ratio of UGC contributions to paid content consumption on the mobile. It's 1000:1 on the internet.
6. 33% of US youth have already uploaded images to Flickr from cameraphones.
7. 43% of Japanese mobile users have clicked on an advert on their mobile phone.

And here's Steve Jones' how-to-have-a-successful mobsocnet application:
1. Phone itself has to be easy to use (the user interface has to be delightful - ensure you reduce apparent complexity)
2. The application has to be emotionally rewarding (facilitates and strengthens peer-peer communciations).

Combine those with Tomi's 6M's and the conclusions you ought to be drawing from the Communities Dominate Brands' boys concept of mobile as the 7th Mass Media - and we start to get a framework to succeed in.