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IN
NETWORKS
An e-book by Antony Mayfield
from iCrossing
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excerpt
2
“...to their eyes, economics was a throwback to another era. One of the
participants at the meeting later commented that looking at economics
reminded him of his recent trip to Cuba. As he described it, in Cuba, you
enter a place that has been almost completely shut off from the Western
world for over forty years by the US trade embargo. The streets are full of
Packard and DeSoto automobiles from the 1950s and relatively few cars
of more recent vintage. He noted that one had to admire the ingenuity of
the Cubans for keeping these cars running for so long on salvaged parts
and the odd piece of Soviet tractor. For the physicists, much of what
they saw in economics had been locked in its own intellectual embargo,
out of touch with several decades of scientific progress, but meanwhile
ingeniously bending, stretching, and updating its theories to keep them
running.”
Economists had been stuck in ways of thinking that glossed over the true
complexity of the world. They treated everyone as a rational player, and
marketplaces as complex but explainable and predictable mechanisms that could
be managed.
It is early days for media and communications on the web – we are only a couple
of decades in, give or take. If a native digital strategy is to emerge, as opposed
to imported values, models and thinking from the age of channel media, we
need to embrace the complexity. That means reaching out for new analogies,
for the experiences and models of people – ecologists, financial traders, lean 3
Search engines and social media have set our attention free, allowing us to move
swiftly through a network of experiences and information that add up to the media
we want. Consumers and audiences aren’t appropriate terms here. They are us.
And we’re all – brands, media, governments and private citizens – players in the
great networks of the web.
This e-book is an attempt to share my thinking and ideas, and those of my colleagues
at iCrossing, as we have worked to make sense of the significance of the web
revolution and what it means for brands. It considers:
• How media are being changed by online networks and our growing
understanding of how they work
• The broad strategies and models that will be important in the next decade
1. EXPECT TO SEE THE FIRST With people’s attention migrating to the web from traditional,
MAJOR GLOBAL BRAND channel media (what Clay Shirky calls “Gutenberg era” media)
APPOINT A DIGITAL AGENCY like television, print and radio, digital marketing will become the
AS ITS AGENCY OF RECORD central discipline in marketing, informing all others – just as TV
IN THE NEXT YEAR
advertising was the dominant discipline in marketing during the
last 50 or 60 years.
2. COMPLEXITY AND The web has not arrived, it is arriving. It will take decades
RAPID CHANGE WILL for the full implications of the web to play out in society,
DEFINE THE CAREER OF commerce, politics and the media. We don’t know if
ANYONE IN MEDIA AND Facebook or Google will be major players in ten years’ time,
MARKETING TODAY.
but we can be sure that complexity and change in the media
landscape will be as important for us then as it is now.
The arguments for – and implications of – these two predictions are deserving of an
e-book all of their own; but for now let us simply leave them as predictions.
What this is not is a manual for social media marketing. I don’t think that that book
can be written yet - things are moving too fast and the current signs are that they’ll
continue to do so for some time.
Antony Mayfield
iCrossing
Generals talk of the “fog of war”; how difficult it is to know what is going on in the
wider battle when you are at a point in the middle of it. When we are thinking about
the future of the web, of media and of marketing we would do well to acknowledge
that our understanding is blurred by the “fog of revolution”.
We do not know what the outcomes will be. The smartest people in the media – who
are furiously innovating and adapting their organisations to survive and (hopefully) to
be successful now that the web is defining their fortunes – acknowledge that they do
not know where all of this will end.
7
We need to stand back from the day-to-day of the web and social media hurly burly,
and to try and understand the fundamentals: what it all means and what strategies
are likely to work.
THE NUMBERS
Let’s start by taking a look at some numbers that suggest something very profound is
happening:
1.4 BILLION (one-fifth of the world’s population) people online in the world today.1
In 2008, for the first time, THE VOLUME OF INTERNET TRAFFIC IN THE
WORLD GENERATED BY CONSUMERS WILL OVERTAKE THAT CREATED BY
CORPORATIONS and other organisations.6
After a certain point, except for the most mathematically gifted of us, numbers cease
to provide us with meaning.
THE MEANS
OF PRODUCTION THE MEANS OF
DISTRIBUTION OF CONTENT
The last time that these fundamentals shifted as profoundly as they do today, was in
the 15th century, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Before that,
content creation and distribution was both labour–intensive, and largely in the hands
of either the state or the church.
The revolution was swift, certainly by medieval standards, with printing technology
spreading across Europe in a matter of decades. The invention of the printing press
allowed Martin Luther’s easy-to-read attack on the Catholic Church’s indulgences
racket, the 95 Theses, to be picked up by a network of printers across Europe.
These could be considered the bloggers of their day, and their actions helped
precipitate the birth of Protestantism.
8
But print’s impact on our world went far beyond the political and religious shockwaves
of the Reformation. Over the following centuries the printed word changed how we
thought, and how information was shared.
Here are just a few of the ways that print changed the way we think:
Survival of knowledge: texts survived in the medieval world because before one
calf-skin edition of a book decayed beyond repair a monk would decide that it was
important enough to spend three months of his life copying it out again. How many
texts weren’t worth it?
Glossaries: the idea of cross-referencing to other texts was partly about marketing
– consider it the humble ancestor of Amazon’s “if you liked this book” approach.
Accuracy and errata: texts in the pre-print world became less accurate with
each edition. Every time they were copied, even by the most diligent of monks,
some errors would be added. In the print world, more eyes saw the text, more errors
were spotted and the next edition would have fewer typos and mistakes – steadily
becoming more accurate.
Reliable maps and anatomies: for the first time, a scholar in an Italian
university could correspond with a counterpart in France about a map or a diagram
and know that they were both looking at the same image.
Similar, parallel effects are taking place today with the web. Critics say things like:
“Google is making us stupid.” They fret about attention spans and the ability to write
original essays, just as the Abbot of Spondheim worried about monks losing the
benefits of copying out texts7.
7 An excellent account of the printing press’s impact on the medieval world can be found in The Printing Revoution In Early Modern
Europe, by Elizabeth L Eisenstein. It’s a great read for anyone trying to understand our own media revolution.
MEANS OF PRODUCTION
8 None exists to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing. If you run this site, I hope you don’t mind me using it as a
hypothetical example
MEANS OF DISTRIBUTION
Have a look at all the ways in which for little or no cost you might go about distributing
your latest articles, videos and photos from your My Fabulous Cat website:
Email: You can send content or alerts to people’s inboxes. Email is already so
embedded in our lives that it doesn’t feel like a revolutionary medium, but it is9.
Search engines: People think of search engines simply as tools they use to go
and find things. It’s worth thinking about that in reverse though – as they index My
10
Fabulous Cat articles, they are making them available to people who are suddenly
interested in, say, you and your cat, or just content around cat healthcare, grooming
or whatever else. You’re steadily becoming a useful source of information as you
update the site. Search engines are arguably the most powerful method of content
distribution on the web.
RSS feeds: RSS feeds allow people to subscribe to websites and have new
content sent to them via their inbox, a newsreader like Google Reader, or a widget
sitting on their computer desktop. RSS means that none of the people who enjoy
My Fabulous Cat has to remember to check your website everyday to see if there is
new information: they wait for the RSS tool to bring your cat articles to them. This is
the same distribution method that powers audio and video podcasts.
Bookmarking and sharing: People share content they are interested in with one
another, via bookmarking websites like Delicious or by posting links on their social
network profile, or in the groups and forums to which they belong. If My Fabulous Cat
starts to build up a fan base of cat lovers or people who simply enjoy your pithy, witty
accounts of life with your cat, they will start to tell others.
Aggregators: There are lots of websites that aggregate content from elsewhere
using combinations of search, sharing and RSS distribution methods; sometimes
around a niche topic (e.g. Techmeme, for web industry news, or Marktd, for
marketing industry news) or just around the general interests of their users (e.g.
Digg).
Notably, distribution of online content doesn’t just rely on its creator or publisher. If
third parties find it interesting or useful they will continue to distribute the content
9 For more on this line of thought, see Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody,
FROM CHANNELS TO NETWORKS
It’s helpful to think of the pre-web media world as being one that
was structured as channels, and the web as being all about open
networks.
CHANNEL MEDIA
Channel media is defined as a channel created between the originator of content
(newspaper, TV or radio station, for example) and audiences who receive the content
passively, for the most part.
To be a player in channel media you need to invest a lot, both in creating content and
in distributing it. If you are a newspaper, you create content with a team of experts
in writing, editing, photography and printing, amongst other things. You then need
infrastructure, or access to infrastructure, to create the newspapers and take them
out to newsagents and other outlets who have agreed to sell or give away your
content-laden product.
Once you are set up, however, you have the potential to reach millions of people with
your content. This becomes an attractive proposition for brands, which will pay for
access to use your channels for advertising.
It isn’t just the dynamics of creating and distributing content that have changed: the
way that people use content is also defined by the network. It’s what we at iCrossing
think of as a “network of experiences”. 12
Think about a time you used the web recently with a purpose in mind, whether that
was looking for a deal on a new car, wanting to catch up on the latest news or just
to find something entertaining. It’s rare that you go to one website and click on a
few items, isn’t it? The chances are you will look at a search engine; either Google,
Yahoo!, or a specialist engine. You may follow a few links, have a few tabs open on
your browser and flick through them.
You pull together what you want from the networks, and move through the networks
to find what you want. It’s a long way from the take-what-you’re-given media
environment of sitting in front of a TV with a handful of channels, or of perhaps flicking
through a newspaper or a magazine for something interesting, or even of making
a trip to a library to track down the specialist information from a few books on the
subject you’re interested in.
SC AL E
An individual going online today has, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited choice
of things to look at, read, and become involved in. Whatever their interests, it’s likely
that the web can show them something interesting.
Twenty years ago when I was a teenager, I had the choice of a handful of national
newspapers, a few lifestyle magazines that might be interesting, ten or so legal radio
stations, some erratically available illegal ones and some fanzines (photocopied
homemade magazines, distributed through record shops or at college). Or I could
13
go to the library or bookshop and acquire one of the texts they had in stock (limited
to the mere tens of thousands). If you wanted to get an advert in front of me it would
have been incredibly easy – you just put it in one of these few channels. A few spots
on a music programme on Channel 4, a Sunday morning “yoof”10 magazine show, or
something on Kiss FM would most likely have done it.
Think of the contrast in choice that the equivalent youth has today: virtually limitless
access to music, videos and ad hoc groups in online communities and social
networks. It’s no wonder that this demographic is barely watching TV anymore.
Why would you?
From the perspective of the brand or media owner wanting to understand their
media environment, the scale has increased exponentially. A few years ago a head of
communications for a global company might have had to ensure they were able to
monitor and influence perhaps 10,000 media outlets worldwide. Now they potentially
need to take account of millions of blogs, forums, social networks and other social
spaces online: a near-impossible task, were the old models of media management to
be adhered to.
10 Mocking UK media slang for patronising attempts to create programming aimed at a youth audience.
SP E E D
Information, news, fads, gossip: everything moves faster on the web than it did in the
offline world.
LONGEVITY
Although things move much faster on the web than they did in channel media, they
hang around for a lot longer.
This view encouraged many a crisis-management expert to advise his client to hunker
down and wait for the journalists to shift their attention elsewhere.
The flip-side is that success in channel media has often been built around an
integrated “burst” of marketing activity, to grab the attention of audiences and stand
out from the crowd.
But online, people won’t pay attention simply because you are shouting loudest. In
networks, your target audience may not even hear you – until they are ready. And
if the campaign has been and gone at the moment a customer puts your brand
or product into a search engine box they may just arrive at a microsite that has
effectively been abandoned.
So from a brand marketer’s point of view, the consideration is that “one and done”,
campaign-focused marketing approaches may not be as effective in open networks
as they were in the channel world.
On the web, interaction comes as standard. Even if a news site or brand homepage
lacks a comments section or forum where people can discuss what has been said,
they can find or create somewhere else to do it.
Many columnists have recounted how their job has changed in recent years.
Previously, as a newspaper-sponsored fount of opinion, they were able to throw
together a few hundred words once a week and lob it out to the readers. No longer.
Within moments of being published online, people will begin to cross-examine their
point of view, pointing out factual errors. It changes how the professionals think about
what they write; it makes them think twice before they begin.
Speaking after The Guardian’s Comment is Free website had been launched, the
newspaper’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, noted that on average the paper used to receive
300 to 400 letters each day. It typically printed 15 or so on the letters page. Within
three months of the Comment is Free launch, it had received 72,000 comments from
readers.11
Information, news, fads, gossip: everything moves faster on the web than it did in the
offline world.
15
11 Alan Rusbridger, Lubbock Lecture at the Said Business School in Oxford, June 8 2006 http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/news/archives/Media/
Is+it+all+over+for+bloggers.htm
STABILITY IS REPLACED BY COMPLEXITY
For media and marketing alike, the defining feature of the shift from channels to
networks is that relative stability is being replaced by complexity.
Not only is the number of sources of information and opinion growing exponentially,
the landscape remains in flux: blogs and groups might spring up overnight and
disappear the next day. Today’s über-blogger might be tomorrow’s interested
bystander, if he or she suddenly needs to put all their effort into a new project and
their posts dry up.
So what does that mean for marketing; its models, tactics and thinking having
evolved largely in the world of mass audiences reachable via channel media?
The physicists and mathematicians were shocked by the models that the economists
were using to develop their ideas.
Economists had been stuck in ways of thinking that glossed over the true complexity
of the world. They treated everyone as a rational player, and marketplaces as complex
but explainable and predictable mechanisms that could be managed.
It is early days for media and communications on the web – we are only a couple
of decades in, give or take. If a native digital strategy is to emerge, as opposed
to imported values, models and thinking from the age of channel media, we need
to embrace the complexity. That means reaching out for new analogies, for the
experiences and models of people – ecologists, financial traders, lean manufacturers
– who have succeeded in developing models that make sense of complexity and
allow them to develop successful strategies.
Search engines and social media have set our attention free, allowing us to move
swiftly through a network of experiences and information that add up to the media
we want. Consumers and audiences aren’t appropriate terms here. They are us. And
we’re are – brands, media, governments and private citizens – players in the great
networks of the web.
management system.”
WIRED magazine
Our finely-honed social senses are tuned for smaller numbers than we are dealing with
on the web, though. Research12 suggests that we are able to handle, in our heads, a
friends list of no more than 150.
And as for the kind of massively complex, rapidly growing and changing networks we
see on the web, well these fall within the realm of complexity theory, previously
known more popularly as chaos theory (butterflies, hurricanes, and so on).
This e-book doesn’t aim to explain how networks work, however. If you’re interested,
take a look at the reading list, or pick up Linked by Albert-Laszlo Barabarsi or
Six Degrees by Duncan J Watts for two good starting points.
12 British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published research in 2007 claiming this is the maximum number of friends a human being
can manage. Similar claims are made by Malcolm Gladwell in ‘The Tipping Point’.
“SEEING” NETWORKS LIKE GOOGLE DOES
The web is the most complex and vast thing that people have ever created, and there
is no designer. Just an idea, some rules, and more than a billion and counting people
who are creating content and affecting the shape of the network by their interactions
with it.
In an instant, you know. The network shifts and at the centre, several great, planet-like
hubs become apparent. They are large because they have the highest reputation for
the subject you are examining – that is, they have the most links from other websites
that say that they are relevant to this subject.
In your top ten you have hubs representing an entry from Wikipedia on the subject, a
company that specialises in services related to the topic, some recent news articles
about it and even a couple of pages that have videos from YouTube with experts
speaking about the subject.
People get too distracted with the idea of search engines as machines, and lose sight
of what they are desperately trying to do: make sense, from a human point of view, of
the vast, mind-boggling complexity of the web.
The other point to bear in mind is that search engines are constantly getting better
at assessing the reputation of web pages, websites and content. This is not just a
simple arms race with spammers and unethical search engine optimisers, it is part of
the search engines’ ongoing mission to be useful; to find the useful and to be able to
second-guess what our own decisions and choices would be if we were able to see
and make sense of the web.
21
If you’ve ever worked with someone creating an IT network or web solution, the
chances are you’ve caught sight of a diagram that looks something like this. Person
connected to a terminal, connected to a box, connected to servers, connected to a
picture of a cloud.
The cloud has become part of our common visual language for representing the
web or the internet. Why this is so is completely understandable: the web is so
vast, complex and ever-growing, ever-changing that we can’t begin to represent it
concisely with any detail. But we don’t just represent the web as a cloud on technical
diagrams, we also think of it and our place in it in that way. If we manage a website
then the world beyond our server is opaque; unknown. We know that people show
up on our website – if we’re lucky – from our analytics. These can also tell us the sorts
of websites that link to us, and the words that visitors have typed into search engines
in order to receive a link to us. But beyond that we’re often a bit lost.
Combined Sitemap v001
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22
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–Employee
ourselves at iCrossing
intranet pages
like. One of the pioneers in the field of networks, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, described
exploring the web as an almost magical thing, allowing people to see networks
and connections that were all around them for the very first time. He described a
combination of “cartography and anthropology” being required to map the landscape
of a web around any given subject.
We’re used to being served the top ten or top 100 websites on a given subject by
the search engine of our choice, but the reality of the topic we’re looking at, and the
network around it – the community of interest – are far more fascinating.
Anyone – brand, media owner or individual – looking to thrive online would do well to
understand how networks work, where their own are and how they fit into them.
For networks are how the online world works and they are the essence of the
revolution that we are living through.
You can take a look at some of your own personal and brand networks simply
enough. If you have a Facebook profile and more than a couple of friends there,
try out the Touchgraph application.
SUCCESS IN
NETWORKS
IS ABOUT BEING
PROMINENT,
NOT DOMINATING
OR OWNING IN THE
A NETWORK. GUNG-HO LANGUAGE
OF MARKETING IN
CHANNELS, SUCCESS
OFTEN LOOKED LIKE 24
DOMINATION; HEGEMONY;
OWNERSHIP. IN ALMOST
EVERY CASE, THIS WOULD
BE A VAIN FANTASY
FOR A BRAND.
THERE ARE NO
MONOPOLIES
ON THE WEB.
SUCCESS IN NETWORKS
LOOKS DIFFERENT.
IN NETWORKS,
PROMINENCE IS
SUCCESS.
Other nodes earn their prominence in the network, the community of interest around
a given story, by being useful. They take the information to a broader audience, giving
it a summary of the story, or perhaps adding some analysis of their own, and linking
to the original source and the video on YouTube.
For example, sites like the BBC, Digg and Engadget are prominent in the broader
network around technology-related stories. A Google search for “technology blogs”
or “technology news” will show you who it sees as most prominent in those networks
at the moment. In search engine marketing, people will talk about “search equity”: the
relative scores each website has in Google’s analysis of the network.
The better the Google algorithm – the maths that makes it work – the closer this
search equity equates to reputation, or brand equity, on the web. If one of those news
sites were to cut down on the number of stories it runs, begin to run me-too stories,
or post news a day after everyone else, it would start to fall down the search
display rankings.
In the channel media world, getting attention for a brand was straightforward.
Expensive, perhaps, but straightforward. You employed an advertising agency and 25
the combination of their relative creativity and your spending power bought you space
in the channel: pages, portions of pages, back covers, seconds of airtime, multiple
mentions by a DJ. If your target audience was consuming its media of choice, it
would be hard for the people you were targeting to avoid hearing what you wanted to
tell them. They paid for their content, in part, with their attention to your
brand messages.
I recall attending a briefing for global brand managers at a major company a couple
of years ago. Waiting my turn to speak, the presenter before me was addressing the
room on the subject of pop-ups and “roll-over” adverts. He explained that while these
types of ad got a bad press they were still a valid approach. I raised an eyebrow at
that: I’d never heard anyone do anything but complain about the irritation of pop-up
ads getting in the way of the page you were trying to read.
The executive explained that if pop-up ads were creative enough and properly
targeted people welcomed them. He had an example of recent work for a client he
wanted to show us. Changing the image on the 50ft screen behind him from his
PowerPoint presentation to his browser, he went to a test page to demonstrate.
The page loaded fine, except there was no ad. He tried again: nothing. Checking
the settings, he seemed to blush suddenly and announced – I still can’t believe he
actually said it – “Ah. I’ll just turn the pop-up blocker off.”
The pop-up ads that were definitely fine for his target audience were not fine for him.
He didn’t want them getting in his way when he was online.
These days, many web browsers come with pop-up blockers enabled as standard.
You turn them off if you want to allow a website to open a new window on your 26
machine.
Now people are beginning to use ad-blocking software that whites-out the banner
adverts on a web page. There is even a new plug-in for the popular Firefox browser
called Add Art, which replaces the ads on a web page with works of art.
Media owners have begun to attack this as a form of stealing - which it may be, but
users will make their own choices ultimately about whether they allow adverts onto
their screens.
15 John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is credited with being the originator of this phrase.
“Ask not what your
network can do for you, 27
It’s not just a case of understanding where things are, either. Once we see the
communities that are relevant to us we need to understand how they work, to
understand what people do there and what the rules are.
For instance, we might see that Wikipedia has an entry on our brand, and on other
issues that are important to us. We can also see that anyone can edit an entry there,
so why not add some of our own information and links? While we’re at it, why not
delete that blatantly biased criticism of our latest takeover attempt?
“Ask not what your networks can do for you, ask what you can do for your networks”
Once we have understood our networks we need to ask: “What is a valid role for us
here?” and: “How can we add value?”
Courting critics: Dell, Lego and Starbucks have all introduced the social media
equivalent of the suggestions box: public websites where people can submit and
discuss ideas about new products and improvements to their service.
Sponsorship: If there are enthusiast sites you might consider offering to fund
them openly.
Co-creation: Better than slapping your logo across the top of a few social spaces,
or footnoting with “brought to you by”, working on projects with community hosts or
communities themselves can be an effective way of engaging with your network. Ted
Rheingold, who runs the successful Catster and Dogster social networks, says
he prefers to work with brands to create new features or content for the community
rather than just take their money for an ad.
Content: It could well be that you are already producing a great deal of content that 29
would be useful to your networks, if only people could find it or access it easily. Re-
working content so that it is findable, portable and easily distributed can
work wonders.
Blogging: Blogging is worthy of an e-book of its own. There have been many poor
examples of corporate blogging, but there are now also many strong ones. Starting a
blog can be a powerful way of joining in the networks around your brand, and a great
way to remain live (see below) and to learn from your networks.
There are almost certainly many more ways to be genuinely useful – but like I said,
this isn’t a text book, nor am I even attempting to be exhaustive on this subject.
If you are engaged with your networks and being useful in them then you’re live in
your networks. But make sure you are live and aware across all of the networks that
are important to your brand.
“any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Memes propagate
themselves and can move through a “culture” in a manner similar to the behaviour of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles
a gene.
RE-ENGINEERING BRAND MARKETING
Living through this media revolution, we need to focus on the core principles but keep
learning, and keep adapting our approach.
The fundamentals are so completely different from those which preceded them.
We must acknowledge that, as this change (that Rupert Murdoch credited with the
power to destroy countries) unfolds, we will need new ways of understanding what is
happening.
30
When you start to think about things from the perspective of networks, this language
jars. People don’t consume content: they read it or watch it, and then often do
things with it such as remixing, forwarding, or linking to it. These aren’t audiences or
eyeballs. These are individuals.
16 cont. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian
principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology
of building arches.”
A lot of the language of
channel media marketing
sounds militaristic. We
monitor (from on high)
consumer behaviours.
We penetrate markets.
We dominate
mindshare. We execute
campaigns.
Demien Entrekin said that networks don’t have people, people have networks. It’s a
mantra we should repeat to ourselves so that we don’t start thinking of the web, of
our networks, like we’re looking at a machine. We’re not: we’re looking at a collection
of human relationships and interactions. Channel thinking or “channelthink” is the
term we use to challenge ourselves in the team at iCrossing, when we sense we’re 31
making assumptions based on our offline experiences or habits.
There’s no need to be embarrassed when this cultural bias reveals itself in our
language, but by pulling ourselves up short on it we encourage thinking that
acknowledges the shift that is happening right now...
And that seems to make sense. But what about customer service? When there are
people discussing problems with your brand in forums, is it PR’s job to go in and
respond? Maybe that’s fine when there are a handful of these instances a month – but
what happens when the numbers grow? A full time PR on it? Surely there would be a
case for customer service to get involved?
But not so fast. What about ecommerce? What about marketing? The social web
demands a response from all of these disciplines, and probably a few more besides.
Falling back on a fantasy of integration is not enough, either. An advertising or PR-led
approach, for instance, would be likely to be overly biased towards channelthink –
creative-led approaches, media relations and so-on.
On the web and in networks, players vie for the attention of users. As I have outlined,
this attention can be seen in a number of ways. We are mainly interested in links and
traffic as evidence of, or clues to, the places that are winning attention.
Brands, like media organisations and individual bloggers, compete in networks for
the same attention. They may complement each other, they may enhance the user
experience overall, but there is only so much attention to go round.
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The image below is for me a powerful illustration of the shift to attention markets.
17 I first read about the Telegraph newsroom on Jeff Jarvis’s Buzzmachine blog. Take a look at the original post for a journalism
professor’s view of the place.
Most striking is the “media wall”, the vast bank of screens that hangs over the
newsroom. The largest – four times the size of the others – is simply a live image of
the front page of the website. It serves as a kind of massive reminder to the journalists
that the game that they are in has changed: they write “web first” now. Whereas just a
couple of years ago news stories would appear on the website as the print edition hit
the streets, now stories go online first.
The reason for this is a recognition that the Telegraph no longer only competes for
attention with other papers at the newsagents: it competes globally, online, 24 hours
a day.
Next to the main screen is a smaller one that scrolls through data about the popularity
of articles on the Telegraph website. It lists the top articles for news, business, travel
and sport, alternating them with a summary of which ones are ‘winning’ this hour, this
week, this month or even this year.
The use of live attention data is highly innovative in a media organisation like the
Telegraph. It is utterly appropriate, reminding journalists that they compete for the
attention of readers even within the pages of their own website.
In the global attention markets, the Telegraph, like several of its UK news
counterparts, is winning big – aided no doubt by being in the English language, but
also by its high editorial standards. Some UK newspaper sites get up to 70% of their
traffic from overseas, the majority at present from the United States. 33
New traffic is delivered mainly by search engines and a handful of influential social
media sites, such as the infamous Drudge Report (which according to some
studies18 delivers traffic equal to Google’s). If you open up the Top Stories section
on Google News, the search engine’s news aggregator, you can see just how stiff
the competition is - some hot stories are covered by a couple of thousand sources,
ranging from UK news sites to China’s Xinhua English-language news service.
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What can marketers
take from its experience?
We should ask ourselves;
how good is our data about
our content – our press
releases, our promotions
pages, our branded
content? If we are getting
information in real time,
are the creative teams
aware of it? Are they
responding suitably?
Taking full account of the market means properly understanding our brands’
networks, how they operate as markets, and how we can be effective in them. That
means not just having a handful of insights and a great one-at-a-time creative idea. It
means being able to listen closely and respond. It means having several competing
strategies and waiting for one to stand out, then having the resource to back it
up quickly.
Community-driven sites, social media and social networks are media formats that
have emerged strongly in recent years. My favourite example of a success story is a
website called Dogster, a social network for dogs (well, for their owners), which has
the sister site Catster.
Dogster is stable, having been established in 2004, it’s profitable and together
with Catster it has 750,000 members. It is a website that has found a niche and
successfully occupied it.
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Most importantly for our purposes, its founder Ted Rheingold – still very hands-on
– has been very open about his experiences of building the website and how he has
made it a success. I caught Ted speaking at a conference in 2007 – here’s a summary
of some of the lessons he shared from half a decade of building a successful
social network.
Stay close to your community: You have to listen closely to everything that
your community says. If you are paying attention, or ask the right questions, they will
tell you what they want.
One failure Ted mentioned was when they launched a sort of “Hot or Not” for dogs,
where people could vote on how good-looking they thought each other’s animals
were. It sounded like a great idea, it may even have come from somewhere in the
community, but when it went live people were offended and made their feelings
known (“How dare anyone tell me my dog is a mere 8!”). The site pulled the feature.
Impact horizons: When Ted started Dogster he was developing new content and
features with project times – from spotting a need to getting something out there –
of about a month. As revenue began to come in from premium subscriptions and
sponsorship deals he began to invest in more ambitious projects with longer lead
times.
Suddenly, it seemed, the failure rate for projects began to increase. When a review
of projects that were failing was conducted, a common factor was quickly spotted:
almost all of the failing projects had taken six months or more from idea to public
release. They were failing because the community had moved on; was interested in
other things. Their needs had shifted.
Ted calls this effect: the impact horizon. Ever since, he has been working on bringing 36
down the development time for new features to as close to a month as possible.
The king of the manufacturing world is – and has been for so long – automotive.
Almost nothing is more complex to produce, and yet produced on such a large scale,
as cars. They have thousands of components, intricate designs and engineering that
constantly evolves, and all the while the people who buy them expect to have their
precise choice available to them, and for it to be utterly reliable for many years.
Ford-ism, and for that matter Ford itself, is no longer pre-eminent in the auto sector.
Last year, a few years ahead of its own targets and projections, Toyota became the
largest car-maker in the world. This Japanese corporation entered its domestic car
market in the post-war years with small models. It intentionally steered clear of direct
competition with what, at the time, seemed like unassailable American colossi: Ford
and General Motors.
Toyota sits between the complexity of a supply chain and the complexity of the
market and manages both with a minimum of waste, delivering a high-quality product
based on pull; demand from the customer.
This is how we can think of lean marketing and media, then: with brand and media
owners in networks aware of their end users’ needs, and adapting to them as
they change.
These are the two main things I think lean manufacturing can teach media
and marketing:
Being big, but agile: The company is so responsive to local – indeed individual –
customer demand that at any time it will have a dozen different versions of the same 37
model on sale around the world, each optimised to the demands of the local market.
Its production lines are so lithe and adaptable that it can produce four or five different
models on the same track in the same day, each destined for a specific customer – a
customer whose order at a showroom hundreds of miles away prompted that specific
unit’s production.
The miracle of lean manufacturing means that all of this is possible while maintaining
only a few minutes’ inventory at the factory: that is, with no costly onsite warehouse
full of car parts. The supply chain – the manufacturers who make the parts that make
Toyota’s cars – are so aligned, so embedded in the system that the whole network
acts as a single organism to deliver the finished product.
Principles-led: In one of Peter Day’s brilliant BBC podcasts last year, the CEO of
Toyota explained that the company has always been open with its methods. People
from competitors and business schools regularly tour its plants, and some Ford-ist
competitors have tried, and failed, to copy them. The reason, he says, is that they try
to copy the process but don’t live the principles. He explains that you have to be truly
committed to driving out the waste everywhere in the organisation, and to working
with suppliers to make their systems better so that they can succeed and in turn
make you more successful.
*
Disclosure: At the time of writing, iCrossing works with Toyota in the US and UK. This analogy, this line of thinking,
was developed and discussed publicly before this relationship began.
I don’t think I will be stealing very much of Jeff’s thunder (he blogs regularly on the
topic on his Buzzmachine blog) if I were to expand a little on some of the ways we
think about Google from the point of view of re-engineering brands and marketing for
the age of networks19.
We’ve already talked about seeing the web’s networks from the perspective of a
search engine. But for our last source of inspiration, let’s talk about Google itself –
not Google the search engine, but the whole company that has grown up and out
from that first game-changing breakthrough, the PageRank-driven search engine.
It’s all about the user: From a brand marketer’s perspective, Google is the anti-
brand. It was not designed or concocted, it was iterated: it emerged from a focus on
the end user. It tells marketers two things: the importance of listening, and the value
of incorporating feedback into the business to be marketed, particularly that gained
from the product development and customer service areas.
Innovation by the numbers: The complexity of the web and the speed with
which it evolves is mirrored in the way that Google works. Innovating, and innovating
at a furious rate, is the only sane strategy for a company that wants to stay at the top
of as competitive a game as Google’s. Stand still for a moment and the edge moves 38
away from you.
Google doesn’t just talk innovation in the way that some businesses do, it
understands what innovation takes. Huge numbers of ideas are soliticited, recorded
and ruthlessly whittled down. The ‘kill rate’ of ideas is massive, with very few making
it to the execution stage. Of course, the commitment to allowing employees one
day a week to pursue their own projects is key to making sure that people aren’t
developing silos around their own business area or technical specialism, but instead
are connecting with others, trying to find ways to make their new ideas live.
19 Umair Haque uses Google’s example in talking about new strategic thinking for business.
Almost chaos: A Fortune article called Chaos by Design explains how Google
works hard to avoid hierarchies, departmentalisation and all the things that diverge
people’s attention and energies away from seeking out new ways to serve the user or
customer. In 2003, the company hired Shona Brown, author of a book on business
strategy and chaos as its vice president of operations. She was tasked with bringing
some management structure – but not too much – to the fast-growing company.
Brown describes her sense of nervousness as her measure of whether there’s too
much structure and process in place for the company to stay close to the chaotic
state that gives it its verve. “If I ever come into the office and I feel comfortable, if I
don’t feel a little nervous about some crazy stuff going on, then we’ve taken it too far,”
she told the magazine.
Speed above all else: Innovation is mostly about execution; doing it. Google
knows that its strength – even more so than its collective brains – is the strength of
its will to execute combined with its awesomely powerful technology infrastructure.
That’s why it’s happy to release services in beta, preferring to refine and develop a live
product with its early adopters, rather than hone a release candidate with an internal
testing team.
That is a helpful, liberating fact. As any blogger will tell you, things are moving too fast,
the outcomes are too uncertain for anyone to wait to have all the answers, to have a
whole picture before they act or share their thoughts.
This time next year, I’m sure that thirteen whole months of the iPhone App Store
will have helped accelerate the use of social media and the wider web on the move.
I expect the unexpected on that front: new ideas and uses of the web that haven’t
even occurred to us.
40
Web use will have grown even among the edgiest of innovators and earliest of early
adopters, while more and more people will be growing in the confidence and extent of
their use of broadband internet at home.
What will not have changed are the fundamentals of the revolution discussed herein:
the web is changing (in reverse importance) marketing, the media, commerce and
society. We are living through a revolution, and the best way to make the most of it is
to hold hands and have some fun as we feel our way through the fog.
I hope this e-book has been useful to you in some way: even if it just set off some
trains of thought that lead you somewhere interesting.
If so, please do let us know – we’d be keen to hear where you end up.
Antony Mayfield
Monday 1st of September, 2008
Antony Mayfield is
Vice President, Head
of Content & Media at
iCrossing.
Prior to joining iCrossing UK (then Spannerworks) to establish its Content & Media
division in 2006, Antony worked in corporate and brand communications for over
a decade, most recently as a director in the Bell Pottinger Group, in its technology
specialist brand, Harvard.
42
He is a regular public speaker on issues around social media and marketing, and
writes on his personal blog Open (Minds, Finds, Conversations) and iCrossing’s blog
Search Sense.
Please feel free to copy, share and reference this e-book. All
we ask is that you acknowledge ICrossing as the source and
link to http://www.iCrossing.com/ebooks when citing
the publication.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
43
SOCIAL MEDIA Media that users can easily participate in, share
and create content for, including blogs, social
networks, wikis, forums and virtual worlds.
Clicking on the links will let you buy each book from
Amazon.co.uk, or take you to the relevant download page.
BOOKS TO BUY
Linked, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi
The Origin of Wealth, Eric Beinhocker
Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky
The Printing Revoution In Early Modern Europe, by Elizabeth L Eisenstein
BLOGS
47
Buzzmachine, Jeff Jarvis
Bubblegeneration and Edge Economy (Harvard Business), Umair Haque
Groundswell, Forrester analysts
Web Strategy, Jeremiah Owyang
Search Sense, iCrossing UK
Great Finds, (iCrossing US)
Open, my personal blog