Here’s the latest in my ongoing series of essays, Local Media in a Postmodern World:
How Brands Can Behave as People (And Why They Should)
This is one of the most important essays in the series, for it reveals a strategic and tactical shift in the way we behave online. Remember that no one is practicing this fully at this time, but I strongly believe this will become best practices for all companies in the not-too-distant future. Media companies, especially, should be practicing this already.
Stowe Boyd
The brilliant mind of Stowe Boyd has come up with a concept that really fits something I’ve been struggling with over the last few months. The question is how do businesses function best in the network? Here’s Stowe from a GigaOm piece yesterday called “We’re at the customer support stage of social business:”
I believe that brands will try to look and feel as much like people as possible, online. For example, brands have their own Facebook pages and Tumblr accounts. A winning strategy of the near future might be to get Tumblrers to follow your brand’s Tumblr blog, and to make the posts look and feel as much as possible the way your prospective customers’ posts do. This is what is going to replace ads: following.
This is one of the most profoundly insightful paragraphs that I’ve read in years. Those of you helming media companies, for example, need to begin having blue sky sessions to define your company’s personal brand, and then you need to execute that brand across all forms of social media. Local media companies need to become experts at this, so that they can then lead businesses in the community in doing likewise.
At WLEX-TV in Lexington, KY, news director Bruce Carter handles Facebook duties throughout the day. It is experienced newsguy Bruce and his personality that speaks on behalf of his station and his newsroom on LEX18’s most important social media venue. I’ve long thought that this was a terribly smart tactic, because who knows the station’s wants and needs AND the news better than the news director? (Bruce was a client of mine when I worked with AR&D).
I’ve long said that all any business is in the network is a single node, just like everybody else. The network doesn’t “see” any company as bigger than any other node, for all are equal according to the Web. People follow people, or as Stowe is suggesting, people follow brands that appear as people. Here’s more from Stowe:
So the ‘answer’ to the issue of the future of advertising is already starting. Stop trying to advertise on mobile, and instead participate in the streams that people want to use on mobile, and people will follow your brands if you contribute to whatever it is the people are up to. I think this will have profound societal impact. And maybe less billboards.
I really have to applaud Stowe for this wonderful piece of thinking. And to you, dear reader, whether you represent media or any other business, please tune into this vibe. Your future is at stake.
Here are a couple of great lines from a Forbes article by Steve Denning, “Resolving The Identity Crisis Of American Capitalism:”
Once making money becomes the goal of a firm, companies and their executives start to do things that not only lose money for the firm but cause problems for the economy…
…Customer capitalism involves a shift (of) the focus of companies to delighting the customer and away from shareholder value, which is the result of delighting the customer.
The shift to customer capitalism doesn’t involve sacrifices for the shareholders, the organizations or the economy. That’s because customer capitalism is not just profitable: it’s hugely profitable.
The shift to customer capitalism does however require fundamental changes in management. The command-and-control management of hierarchical bureaucracy is inherently unable to delight anyone—it was never intended to. To delight customers, a radically different kind of management needs to be in place, with a different role for the managers, a different way of coördinating work, a different set of values and a different way of communicating.
The shift to customer capitalism also involves a major power shift within the organization. Instead of the company being dominated by traders and salesmen who can pump up the numbers and the accountants who can come up with cuts needed to make the quarterly targets, those who add genuine value to the customer have to re-occupy their rightful place.
What I love most about Denning’s approach is the use of the word “customer,” when many others would use the term “consumer.”
Burn this into your mind and into the minds of those around you: We have entered a new era. Period. It’s not on the horizon; we’re already there. Those who take a leadership position and beat their competitors to the punch are GUARANTEED the top spot in this new era’s business infrastructure. It’s all about the customer today. Making money is the end, not the means anymore. It has to be that way. The beancounters and manipulators are lesser players in the new status quo, because, as Steven Covey wrote many years ago, “You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into.”
Umair Haque wrote in 2004 that in a networked world, the emphasis must be on the product, not marketing. Jay Rosen says basically the same thing in his brilliant thoughts about “The Great Horizontal” and “Audience Atomization Overcome.”
Dylan’s classic song noted that “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” but I’m much more inclined today to say that they’ve already changed. When the brightest business minds of the day — and I certainly include Steve Denning in that group (John Hagel, too) — shift their thinking from hard core making money to hard core customer service, it’s time to give up on an agenda that only defends the past.
Today’s new report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reveals some unsurprising but damning information about news websites that we can ill afford to ignore. Here are the key findings:
- In-House ads, ads selling or promoting a news organizations own products, fill more space across these news websites than any other advertising category.
- The finance industry is represented far more than any other on the news websites studied.
- Discount or coupon advertising such as Groupon was fairly limited.
- Most of the news sites did not feature ads targeted to consumers based on their online behavior.
- News organizations tend to rely most heavily on static banner ads.
- Even though search ads don’t appear on most news sites, Google’s advertising presence is still strong there.
What this says to me is that media companies continue to try and force “their” business model into a medium that rejects it. Moreover, I think this is right where Silicon Valley wants us.
Media, in its purest business sense, is an order-taker world. What we have is so scarce and so important that people call us to spend their money with us. In the good old days, regardless of which form of media we’re talking about, the sales force got into a nice rhythm of sitting at desks and counting the money. Oh I know that people will debate this, but a replacement for that rhythm is what we desperately seek today. We need something to replace it, because if we have to work harder to make and sell our audiences, the price of sale (POS) goes way up, and our business model itself collapses.
Searching for this replacement online, however, has been our mistake, because the obvious benefits of mass marketing are utterly disrupted by the Web, and mass marketing is all we know. All we’ve done is waste our time, and the Pew report makes that statement loud and clear.
Beginning with newspapers and continuing with television and other forms of media, we’ve built websites that serve (we think) the business model of mass marketing, and that has been nothing less than suicidal. So far downstream are we in this error that we can’t even imagine anything different for now, so let’s begin with a few basics:
There are so many things I could say about what we need to be doing, but that would take all day and then some. The point of this Pew report — and many others like it — is that what we’re doing isn’t working, and that’s being kind.
We’ll never get out of this hole unless we first stop digging.
A great many people (e.g. here, here, here) have commented about Tim O’Reilly’s dramatic question in response to a White House weekend blog entry about legislative efforts to stop online piracy. The blog entry/press release includes the assumption — as stated by the copyright industry — that legislation is needed to give them the power to control “their” intellectual property, because it’s harmed theirs and the nation’s economy. O’Reilly, however, isn’t so sure.
“In the entire discussion, I’ve seen no discussion of credible evidence of this economic harm. There’s no question in my mind that piracy exists, that people around the world are enjoying creative content without paying for it, and even that some criminals are profiting by redistributing it. But is there actual economic harm?”
I wish to point out that this question is an outstanding illustration of the philosophical concept of deconstruction, a key process involved in postmodernism (to which this blog is dedicated). Deconstruction is the great threat to our hierarchically-driven culture, because it proves that much of it is based on unproven and self-serving assumptions, like the one to which O’Reilly is referencing. In the one-to-many media world, it was easy to get away with this, because the channels available to dispatch sweeping narratives was extremely limited. Today, that’s not true, and it’s only just begun. The essential function of a hyperlink is to practice deconstruction, and a culture armed with this ability will not sit still for anything resembling bullshit.
Respected observer and friend Jackie Danicki, Director of Social Comms for Weber Shandwick in New York, posted another assumption on Facebook yesterday. An article in her hometown paper began with this sentence:
“With the first drug-related warrant of 2012 under its belt, the Chillicothe Police Department continues to investigate drug crimes and work on making the city safer.”
This prompted Jackie to state, “How blindly these people accept and repeat the disproven idea that the war on drugs is making ANY community ‘safer’. Disgraceful.”
This is another postmodern example of deconstruction, and we’re going to see it more and more as The Great Horizontal advances. Can the public actually know more and better than it’s elected representatives? As the Wicked Witch once said, “Oh, what a world!” It’s what I call “The Evolving User Paradigm,” and it’s going to bite every institution in the rear end sooner or later. 21st Century businesses will be driven by the quality of their products and services to an increasingly hip public. You won’t be able to buy your way to the top by lobbing spit-shined horse droppings at “consumers.”
As Doc says via Project VRM, Caveat Venditor.
A few days ago, something remarkable happened that I thought I’d share. It’s a testament to the wonder of hyperconnectivity for my generation. I think this kind of thing will only be experienced by those who’ve not grown up with the Web, so these kinds of stories will gradually disappear, but that’s just a guess. Here’s what happened.
Neal Lynch, the brother of a high school girlfriend contacted me via Facebook inquiring if I had been a member of the River City Singers from Grand Rapids, Michigan during the 1960s. Facebook is the source of reconnections so plenty these days that this one would simply blend in with the others were it not for the fact that I’m able to pass it along to you. Neal lives in California, and the circumstances under which he contacted me are remarkable all by themselves, but The Great Horizontal — the connected culture we’re just beginning to know — is what made this possible.
I wrote back that I was indeed a member of that band, whereupon he sent me two photographs of myself and my two brothers playing our music in his basement. He was 12-years old at the time and shortly thereafter picked up guitar and has been playing ever since. The photos were made from old Kodak slides and are the only high-resolution, digital color pictures of the three of us playing together. The ONLY ones, and I’d never seen them before. These pictures blew my mind, because I was able to zoom in and closely examine facial expressions. The experience really took me back to when I was 18-years old. All that I am, I was back then. The experiences I’ve had in the last 47 years have shaped only what I do, but all that is really me — the gifts, the spirit, the emotions, the soul — can be seen in these pictures.
I sent copies to my two brothers and heard back from older brother Jim (the guitar picker). He told me that he was so blown away that all he could do was go sit in his back yard alone and think about our lives as a bluegrass band. I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Words cannot express my appreciation for the way Life has engineered this and especially to Neal for contacting me. In the picture to the left, you can see me, as my daughter told me via Facebook, “lost in the music.” This is true, but “lost in the music” can also be a form of “hiding from everybody,” which took a big emotional toll on me over the decades that followed.
My two brothers and I are not close. The Vietnam War broke up our band, and we all went our separate ways. It has been one of the biggest regrets of my life, because I really did and do love my brothers. That fact is inescapable when examining these pictures. We were really good, and to quote Marlon Brando, “I coulda been a contender.” Bluegrass is a music meant to be played, not just listened to. I haven’t had a banjo in many years, but this may inspire me to find something at a pawn shop. I’m playing an old Gibson Mastertone in the pictures. That instrument is worth a lot of money today.
This event in my life has reinforced everything I believe deeply about the enormity of this “second Gutenberg moment” in the history of Western Civilization. We may spit and snarl and fight it all the way, but this “Great Horizontal” is transforming everything about our culture. The more open we become, the harder it is for anybody to live a double life and to present bullshit as a cover story for one’s life. We have to rethink everything, and I envy those who are just entering adulthood, for life will be very different for them when they reach my age. The naysayers shout down change, usually because they have something to lose in terms of their position vis-a-vis everybody else.
I’m incredibly hopeful for tomorrow, because truth weighs far less than falsehood, and we’re all ridiculously overweight. That’s what my view of postmodernism is all about. These pictures have helped me in the ongoing journey to find my truth, and I am forever grateful.
With the exception of the essays entitled “TV News in a Postmodern World,” all material created by Terry L. Heaton and included in this Weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
