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.

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.