Battle of Kruger Park - survival of the most adaptable

If you want an illustration of how the media world has shifted look no further than 'The Battle Of Kruger Park'.

It's a YouTube piece of user generated content which you may or may not have had forwarded to you by a friend (that's how it came to my attention in the latter part of last week).
It's wobbly, definitely not HDTV, shot by tourists - ie non-experts.
It is UGC in its purest form.
Yet already it has had more views than the first epidsode of the BBC wildlife series Planet Earth (as compared in Sunday's Observer).
The Observer recorded it at 10m views in its edition on Sunday August 12. This morning (Monday 13th) it's on 12.3m.
Planet Earth got 8.7m on BBC1.
It's not about mass media any more. The audience for beautifully shot and crafted aggregated content (a BBC documentary, for example) remains - but it is being outstripped by the audience for disaggregated content shared by communities of shared niche interest.
And when that niche interest plays out across the globe, the numbers become of the scale that the old mass media can only dream of.
Why?
It meets the need of a niche interest; the distribution network is exactly that (a distributed network - not a centre-out model); it allows the community to join in - comment on, respond with a video of their own, etc.
But it's also a sensational piece of 'entertainment'.
Quality takes many guises. Most of them have little to do with production values.

We have always, as a species, witnessed extraordinary events. Now, as a networked species, we are able to share them.

The camera/video and the means to publish and distribute what you capture with them are close to ubiquitious.

At some point in the not-too-distant it's conceivable you could see almost anywhere in the world almost anytime you wished.

Guess that'll finally nail some interesting questions... such as - do UFOs exist? Is Bigfoot more than a stuffed toy? And... is the referee right?

I am part of a community, therefore I am: Your identity is co-created

I've often discussed psychological self-determination (who the hell do you think you are?) with Communities Dominate Brands' Alan Moore.
But I can't recall posting about it. Well, today I have an excuse. Al's added a very short video to the blog he shares with co-author Tomi Ahonen. You'll find it HERE
It kind of sums up the notion quite neatly - for those who love their sound bites.

The argument goes something like this: when communities were fixed in location, your identity was created by your relationships within that fixed community. Your identity was equally fixed.

Your identity is as much created by those around you as by yourself.

In a socially-networked world, the creation of your identity becomes a process which is contributed to by more people, more often, and from very varied backgrounds.

The community you exist in shapes your identity from its perspective and from your own.
Your identity may vary from community to community.

If once you were the blacksmith's son and village blacksmith-in-waiting, now you are a huge variety of identities - depending on the community you are interacting with at any one time.
Our identities become increasingly multi-faceted.

Example - on this blog my identity is relatively serious, thoughtful. On facebook... more playful.
I'm displaying a different facet of a complex identity.

The community I feel I am part of when writing this blog joins in the construction of my serious and thoughtful persona on FasterFuture (by your comments, and I guess expectations of a certain consistency).

The community I feel part of on facebook also joins in the construction of my persona there - by the way it acts, by its response to what I do, by the tools it offers me.

The push and pull of the forces forging my identity in all elements of my life are communal. I interact with a community, therefore I am...

Each community creates a different facet of that identity - and in doing so makes a contribution to subtley reshaping the core.

Simple example: Becoming a father changed my personality. I had a new role to play and a new set of relationships - with my daughter, with my wife (now a mother, too) with other fathers, other parents etc etc. Each interaction changed me in small but important ways.
And I believe it made a change at my core.

This may be an extreme and emotionally-loaded example, but I do believe that the co-creation of facets of your personality have more than a superficial impact.

Perhaps this is why 'the edglings' that Stowe Boyd decribes, or Generation-C that Alan and Tomi describe, have a different set of wants - and aren't satisfied by the norms of mass production/media.

Through new mobile, fluid, co-creating communities they have 'found' themselves.
And they have found they want to share in, to be part of, to engage with.

Understanding which facets of personalities you seek to engage with, understanding that you are dealing with personalites created from converged facets... these are the real challenges for those marketing and/or creating social media in 2007.

White Paper Wiki: Power of the Network

The Power of the Network = The Power of We
Why Media is the new business ecology

David Cushman, August, 2007

In this paper I aim to describe and explain the emerging new ecology, why it is happening and what that means for the business of business.

I’ll discuss the things that are failing – and try to explain why.

And I’ll offer a solution.

In the spirit in which it is written, I also offer you the chance to edit this paper. In time it will become its own example of the power of we.

So you will also find it available as a wiki here (http://scratchpad.wikia.com/wiki/Media_is_the_new_business ) where you are at liberty to add to, enhance, grow or challenge.

I will regularly copy the latest version to the location you discovered it at.

You can also download a copy here (find it also, under 'resources' in the left hand navigation):

Of course, those of you reading this here, are welcome to add your comments directly below, if you prefer.

The Church of Brands: A metaphor for control

Once brands were Churches. The good people of the parish needed our guidance. We kept telling them they did, and they had nothing to challenge that world view against.

We preached from the pulpit. There was no q&a. The flock would only read one book – ours! We owned the means of producing and dissemminating all relevant sources of information.

And because the people valued this and had faith in this, they came to us – in their droves – and very regularly. They paid our way, too.

So our Church became the place to be – the place to organise the socio-economic fabric of the community around – the marketplace, the entertainment, where we lived our lives.

More: (http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/07/church-of-brands-and-marketplace-of.html )

The power of the Church was vested in its control of information. Along came Gutenburg and his pesky printing press – and centralised control of information was over.

It meant alternative messages, and alternative texts. It meant information could be created – and shared - without the need to build a huge stone edifice or a hierarchical priesthood. The power of the Church was instantly diluted. Its role changed for ever.

The result was the biggest shift in thought since writing was invented - an end to centrally created and dispersed information as the only source of knowledge.

The result was an explosion in brilliance; a new era of creativity; a fast-forward for inventiveness right across the board. Critically, the people had discovered new ways of creating trust. They learned they could have faith in the information of others – not just of the Church.

Biggest change since records began…

Well… at least since the arrival of the printing press…

The arrival of the internet – and latterly the lowering of the technical barriers of using the internet (blogs) is as big a change in information control as Gutenburg’s printing press.

Now everyone can be a publisher. And they can do it for free.

And that would be a pretty radical shift if that was all there was to it. But it’s not – not by a long, long way.

Books are a broadcast and, essentially, a mass media model.

Blogs are networks of information and, essentially, serve niche communities.

It’s not just that people can publish – they can also self-select the niche communities they wish to engage with.

More: http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/05/famous-for-15-people.html

In the process of one blogger linking to the work of another, new value emerges, for example:

1. Two-way flows of information.
2. The creation of trust, validation and reputation
3. Decentralised, self-forming adhoc communities of interest
4. Zero hierarchy or silo restrictions.

Reed’s Law (1) states: (1)The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network because the number of possible sub-groups of network participants is 2 to the power of N, -N -1, where N is the number of participants. This grows much more rapidly than either the number of participants, N, or the number of possible pair connections, which follows Metcalfe's law)

so that even if the utility of groups available to be joined is very small on a per-group basis, eventually the network effect of potential group membership can dominate the overall economics of the system.

When the power of the blog meets the power of the network, rarely-predicted values emerge – conferences get organised, advertising models get engaged, new products are made, new thinking is stimulated, new peer-to-peer models of engagement derive. And as quoted in the opening chapter of Wikinomics (2), in the case of Goldcorp Inc – it transformed a $100m gold mining company into a $9bn one.

Put very simply, the arrival of a networked world means effective access to the the wisdom of crowds. None of us is as clever as all of us.

The death of mass media

Mass media has little remaining purpose. It fitted an industrialised mass production world. It served the needs of advertisers selling mass produced items.

It assumed that one size fits all.

No wonder response rates in mass media are falling – we fast-forward past the TV ads, we tune away when the radio ones play, we ‘stop seeing’ the banner ads on websites, and advertisers themselves are wobbly about print because they can’t directly measure the response.

But in a world of disaggregated content (ie each element of content, if digitised, can be served separately, to each individual) the demand for huge numbers of eyeballs (a mass audience) seeing your content in order for huge numbers of eyeballs to see adverts, is over.

100% ad efficiency is available in models such as google’s cost-per-action. I sell an item – I pay google.

The rise of the community

I've grown up with the 6pm and 10pm TV news. It's hard for me to imagine a world without it. And perhaps there will always be enough common shared interest between people for this bastion of the broad to remain.

Perhaps.

Broadcast - and news aimed-at-all is part of that - works on the premise that you can't please all of the people all of the time. So you try to please as many as you can, for as much of the time as you are able. That's broadcast, that's mass media.
But in a world of digitised, disaggregated content, the available response to an individual's requirements means they can be pleased all of the time. The networked model the internet provides means all of the people can be pleased all of the time.
The question for media companies is: Where is the news team which can serve this long tail of individual demand?
Answer: All around us - in the form of user generated content - communities of co-creators pulled together by their shared interests.
So what we used to call news needs to be redefined:

News is:
1. Personalised, real time, community-created, shared information.
2. Best gathered at the point of inspiration (on that handy converged device - the mobile)
3. Best distributed to the point of need (and, taking advantage of the always on, always with you nature of that same converged device, that's best served by mobile, too).

This draws from the understanding that it is the community that best serves its own needs. An individual cannot get this from a disaggregated collection of digitised information. They can from a niche community of shared interest. The community emerges as the dominant force.

Why it’s about more than just content: Applications to the marketplace, services and production.

1. People want to co-create. Consider an e-commerce site. If it doesn’t allow the community of users to share their ideas about what it should sell, rate what is on sale, come together to propose improvements to what is on sale etc etc - you're locking out all the value of the network. Let members of your community pitch next year's ideas, rate them and shape them - and big up the things they love. If they score down some items - don't sell them. The community has spoken.

2. Two-way flow of communication beats the market: How do you know what your users want NEXT. The market shows you what they want now, and also what they don't want - but it can never tell you what next year's hit or miss is. Your community can - if you're engaged in a two-way flow. This is genuine 'consumer insight' based on real conversations with real people - not on generalised assumptions that "we know our market".

3. Convergence of buyer/seller/product developer/user/employee: If the employee and the user is converging in the concept of user generated content - the same can be said of communities of people trading together. eBay writes this large: The buyer and the seller converge. The buyer is also converging with the developer/designer (think BMW cars for a solid example happening now - the customer customises). This is a 3-dimensional version of a person - not a one dimensional "treat me as the customer... and only the customer" approach. In a 'shop' community environment one person can be a buyer/seller/developer/user/employee

4. Trust is communal: Trust is now created in a wiki-way. The social tools of 2.0 (eg diigo) make it ever easier for people to share what they think of a product or a supplier with their community, rapidly and in a way that is much more readily trusted by most consumers than old-style marketing messages. Sony tells you its PlayStation 3 is the dog's. The community tells them its made a heap of mistakes (1.1m views on YouTube of How to Kill a Brand 1.1m of PS3 vs Wii - apple style). How does your shop help the community decide what to trust?

All of this can be applied not only to the co-creation of content, but also to the co-creation of services – and ultimately to products.

And for those of us who thought content was king, we must understand that it is now the community which is in control. Enabling networked communities offers media companies a new path and a flourishing future.

A new definition of media brands

• A media brand is a platform for a community with shared interests.
• Focused on the interests of this community, we should aggregate content and offer services.
• Services are best delivered at the point they are needed – and that is always, always mobile!

Note the reference to the 'aggregation' of content, rather than the 'creation of'. I'm not suggesting media companies shouldn’t bother with the creation of content. I am suggesting it's no longer our primary function.

Our legacy of content creation can get in the way of putting the community first. We can't resist the urge to broadcast - to select what the audience is offered and spin it to our tastes.

This often reveals itself in the way we display content. Media brands put the content they create first, tip their hats at some user-generated content (always given second billing) and actively prevent the sharing of other sources of content the community might actually prefer.

A blank sheet of paper approach would open our eyes to simple facts such as:

• The best content for the community is welcome - be it our own, rival media brand owners', or user generated content.
• The community should judge which content gets highest prominence - and which gets booted into touch.
• Groups should be allowed to form which set their own parameters for what equals interesting and 'good'.

This requires some bravery on the part of the media brand owner. It means that only if our own content is good enough/a good enough fit with the community will it score the highest ratings and get top billing.

But what would you not want to learn from this?

Why We Media wins

Taking the platform/community-first approach reveals the extraordinary power that the new platform generators could generate. It is critical that the creators of those platforms (ideally, the co-creators of those platforms) understand that they are NOT in control of these platforms – that they don’t set the agenda. They must allow these platforms to be dominated by the communities they SERVE.

But givean all that, there is NO business (model) in the world of We Species we now inhabit (see Alan Moore's work at Communities Dominate Brands) (3) which does not benefit from the application of the ideas of We Media.

Not only does my definition of what a Media Brand now is (ie a platform for a community of shared interests) apply to what we think of traditional media plays, it is also equally essential for any business model - full stop.

So the ideas encapsulated in this post 'Does a straightforward transaction site need a social play?' and in this 'A new definition of media brands'. can, indeed MUST, apply to any wannabe business model in this post mass-media/industrial age.

Media companies are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new way of doing business which is emerging from our new community dominated ecology.

In 'A new definition of media brands' I argued:

• A media brand is a platform for a community with shared interests.
• Focused on the interests of this community, we should aggregate content and offer services.
• Services are best delivered at the point they are needed – and that is always, always mobile!

I'll offer this update: "Focused on the interests of this global niche community, we should provide the tools to allow the co-creation and aggregation of content, products and services."

Media companies (and I am deliberately not distinguishing between new media (eg google) and traditional media (eg emap) because I think both have advantages) are uniquely well placed to benefit from the cultural shift towards community (evidenced by social networking etc).

Those with expertise in specialist niches may well be the best positioned of all. They are best suited to activating and engaging the long tail.

Why?

1. New media companies are brilliant at connecting (socialising) us digitally, traditional media companies have big audiences to activate/reach. Traditional media companies have tons of insight to help identify the new business opportunities (by which I mean opportunities to help build and join with co-creating communities).

2. Combine this with our experience in building communities (not particularly connected ones in the case of traditional media, but communities none-the-less) and you have a position of significant advantage in the age of constantly-connected communities.

In a new economy dominated by social consumers (prosumers) the niche global community platform creators hold the cards.

Notes

• (1) Reed’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed's_law
• (2) Wikinomics: http://www.wikinomics.com/
• (3) Communities Dominate Brands: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/

Further reading

• Communities Dominate Brands (Ahonen & Moore): http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/
• Wikinomics (Tapscott, Williams & YOU!)
• The Tipping Point (Gladwell)
• Smart Mobs (Howard Rheingold)
  
• The Wealth of Networks (Benkler) http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Download_PDFs_of_the_book

Resources reorganised - your suggestions for more, please!

I've reorganised the 'resources' section you'll find in the left-hand navigation of this blog (a fair way down the page!).
Now the items included (downloads and specific links) are loosely categorised under the following:

• Disruption
• Engagement
• Futurology
  
• Mobile
• Networks
• Thought Leadership
• Tools
• Video

I hope you'll find them useful. And if you have a suggestion for something else that should be included (something you've found useful!) please share.

Cultural shift: email vs blogs and wikis

Alan Moore (Communities Dominate Brands) draws our attention to an Interesting report from Information Week

It reports from the Enterprise2.0 Conference in Boston:

"Joe Schueller, who's driving P&G's adoption of new collaboration tools asks: How about e-mail, which Schueller describes as the biggest barrier to employee use of more interactive and effective tools.
"As a sender of an e-mail, I control the agenda of everyone around me," Schueller says. E-mailers decide who has permission to read a message... Blogs, in contrast, beg for comments from those most interested."

Schueller gives us a great example of how the hierarchical and centralised power and information structures of a company have come to prevail in its dominant choice of communication tools.

Email is, essentially, a broadcast tool. It's perhaps why it is losing currency with Generation C - who now show a marked preference for text (shorter and far more immediate - replicating better the dynamics of a live conversation) over email.
Their obvious preference for social media of all kinds derives from a preference for persistent conversation over the 'post-it' note of an email.

What simple and elegant examples of empowerment and emancipation of the network derive from this: Why email when you can blog? Why email when you can join a wiki? Why email when you can text? Why email when you can twitter? Why email when you can post on a Facebook wall?

Email, of course, retains some value for direct one-to-one external broadcast transmissions (ie, I need to get a post-it note on Mr X's screen at Company Y). Its value for internal groups, or social customer interaction is clearly far less.

Perhaps it is simply because of this: Email has the advantage of privacy. The flip side is that it is not the right choice for sharing, collaboration or empowering networks.

That's a lesson for internal communication - and for all those who understand there is a network of power just waiting to upgrade their ideas.

Anyone for a ban on email?