Friday 22 December 2006

R U really POTY?

I am in two minds about Time magazine's decision to make "you" its Person of the Year. On the one hand I am delighted that a traditional magazine is trumpeting the arrival (nay, overnight dominance) of media based on consumer-generated content, and is acknowledging that so-called prosumers are an important factor in the economy and society. And it's a great ploy to get free publicity. Cuteness sells. Bravo.

On the other hand, it's a cop-out, and an inaccurate one at that. The whole point of POTY was to explore the impact that a specific individual has had on the world over the past twelve months, typically the person who had hogged the media most. And while the award in the past tended to go to someone deserving of role-model status, Time has sometimes acknowledged that bad guys also have huge global impacts.

But to declare that "you" are the person of the year is stretching a point. Firstly, the whole notion is falsely based on the idea that all Time's readers are internet users, and that they also post content online. Er, OK, perhaps Time has readership studies to back up that one, but I doubt it -- the thrust of the editorial is that we all are persons of the year, whether we read Time or not, because we all contribute to online content and communities.

In a typically American moment of self-referential stereotyping, Time manages to disrespect the majority of the world's population. True, YouTube and other forms of social media are wickedly popular in America, as they are in the Far East, but they are unlikely to find a place in the world's history books. There's a presumption that prosumption is impacting the world more significantly than, say, medical research, genetic engineering, religion or politics.

Well maybe it is, if your world is the world of traditional media. In the past couple of years the single biggest agent of change in the publishing industry has been citizen journalism, mainly in the form of blogging and photo/video posting. Bloggers with no editorial oversight or journalistic training have sucked away big audiences from career journalists, forcing traditional media to launch their own blogs, podcasts and RSS feeds, and causing celebrity hacks to work a great deal harder. I recall haranguing MSNBC's Chris Matthews during the US presidential elections two years ago because though he had actually started blogging he did not have an RSS feed. Today, TV journalists plug their blogs on air like they used to plug their books, and seem to be as interested in their Technorati rankings as they are in their Nielsen ratings.

The impacts of prosumption are also being felt in the movie, music, and stock photo businesses, all of which are having to rethink their business models. And of course marketing and PR, never at the forefront of innovation, have started trying to figure out how best to reinvent themselves to exploit changing consumer data-acquisition behaviours.

Will the ripple effects wash over all of us in one way or another, whether we are active social computing users in a G5 nation or not? They probably will, because you can't tweak information flows without also tweaking corporate or organisational cultures. An online customer is an informed customer; a networked online customer is an empowered customer; and an empowered customer cannot be abused by vendors. Large organisations are unable to fragment themselves to provide one level of service to the sophisticated user of technology and a completely different level of service to all others. And since the sophisticated user of technology probably has more spending power than other customers, businesses have to change in order to earn and keep their loyalty. Everybody benefits.

So maybe the career journalists at Time are on to something after all. We unschooled bloggers had better watch our backs.

Friday 8 December 2006

Virgin/EMI puts on a virtual concert

Any company targeting the up-to-twenty-somethings that does not already have an online marketing strategy is probably doomed. And if that online marketing strategy does not include harnessing the power of web 2.0 social connectedness (a small part of which is engagement in virtual worlds or videogames), they are probably not really serious about market success.

If you are a fan of Stacy Orrico, you are probably 14 years old. But she’s sold 3.4 million albums already, and her record label, Virgin/EMI, is keen to get closer to her target market. So they are holding a concert tomorrow (Saturday) where the fans can hear songs from her soon-to-be released CD. The difference is that it is an online virtual concert, performed by Stacy’s avatar, in the kid-friendly virtual land of Whyville.com.

While quite a number of corporations have “done the virtual world thing” and set up shop in Second Life, this is a first for Virgin/EMI. And while Second Life is a rather adult world, Whyville is “an edu-tainment virtual world for the tween-age generation” so it is ideal for Stacy’s target audience of 8-15 year olds. Up to 6,000 of Whyville’s two million strong tween-age population are expected to attend the concert.

Of course there is an immediate commercial edge to the concert: audience members can buy songs and virtual souvenirs. And in keeping with the trend for things virtual to carry a greater value than things real, there’s going to be an auction for charity in which you can bid for the virtual clothing worn during the concert by the avatar. Count on many costume changes.

In an interview with ClickZ, Aaron Simon, director of marketing for Virgin Records said, "It's something that is so important when you're a teen artist to really get in front of your buyers. In front of your fans." Apparently interactivity is built in to the program, with audience members being able to raise their virtual hands to ask a question, with a lucky few being invited up on stage to meet the diva in person, so to speak.

With online presence being vital for musicians, performing virtually is going to become almost a mainstream phenomenon.

I’m a tad envious of Whyville, and even more so of Second Life: back in the 1990s we created an online 3D world that was not unlike what Second Life has become. It was specifically designed to be an alternate venue for commerce and entertainment, with undercurrents of political and social intrigue that would have done well in the 21st century. We even had rock groups lined up to perform in virtual stadium concerts. Sadly, our financial backers got cold feet at the last minute, having never really believed in the project, and we put the world on ice.

Still, that was 1996. Better to be way ahead of your time than way behind it.

Thursday 7 December 2006

US marketers are still oblivious to Web 2.0

Zoomerang has published a study which reveals that even though Web 2.0 has hogged the business headlines (for what, a couple of years now?) 8 out of 10 marketing professionals still are not even familiar with the term. At the other extreme, one third of those who have latched onto what is going on are using web 2.0 approaches in their marketing, and most of those (70%) are having success.

Assuming the study is correct, what does this say about how in touch with their markets most marketers are? Marketing is all about understanding consumers and reacting to (if not anticipating) shifts in interests, attitudes, values, and behaviours. It is hard to imagine that web 2.0 (which, despite what its detractors may say, heralds a megashift in consumer culture) has gone unnoticed by the hordes of marketing wonks, their agencies, researchers, and advisors. I could accept that they don't really understand it or that they dismiss it as a temporary anomaly -- but that they have never even heard the term web 2.0 is just scary.

Corporations (particularly of the kind reviled by The Cluetrain Manifesto) are notoriously slow to catch on to or care about what their customers or potential customers are doing. You sort of expect that level of indifference in the folks in Finance or Production or even in the boardroom. But if anyone should be intimately in touch with the chaotic changes in the consumer world, it's the Marketing people. Maybe there's a new digital divide to think about: those who care about what is going on in their professional area have tuned into digital media; those who do not are still waiting for the memo from corporate.

Tuesday 5 December 2006

MIT's $100 laptop finally ships

Clearly not named with marketing in mind, the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) $100 laptop 2B1 Children's Machine laptop developed by MIT's Media Lab has finally made it to the real world. The first few hand-built units of this machine made it from Taiwan to the US a few days ago. It's a little green-and-white device that looks suitably toy-like. I hope it is robust, given its intended market.

The technology is interesting: it's intended to be both a computer and a wireless router, so that each machine forms part of a mesh even when the laptop is closed. It comes with a small solar-powered repeater that can be nailed into a tree to get better range. The laptops run Linux using AMD's Geode processor, and have 128MB of memory and 500MB of flash memory rather than a hard disk.

Apparently a bunch of Central American countries have put in a purchase order, so it's going to get out there as soon as production-line versions are available. Congratulations to Nick Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab, and of course to OLPC.