Seeding & Weeding

In this video Techcrunch's uber-blogger Michael Arrington gets a group of Valley entreprenuers to talk over 2.0 emerging trends.  There's a lot of very good chat, especially when talking about the role of publishers in a user-generated world (at about 15mins).  Rojo's Chris Alden says publishers should  now see themselves as curators whereas Jotspot's Joe Kraus' says that publishers should now look to 'seed and weed'.  The idea of a publisher as a gardener, setting up an evironment for others to play in but making sure that no one pulls up all the flowers, is helpful.  It's also a step on from the idea of 'seeding' that has caught on in the marketing industry where people are hired to drop...

....contrived comments into public web spaces to create a bit of link-love - otherwise known as astroturfing.  That's a practice that barely made sense when user-generated communities were small and niche.  But in today's world of exponential, mega-networks such as Cyworld which publishes an eye-watering 22 billion page impressions per month, YouTube's 100m videos per day or the blogopshere itself - tacking some seeding to the back end of a campaign is just no longer good enough.

Comments

[Karl Long]

I pulled a bunch of quotes from that video as they relate to social media and marketing:

http://blog.experiencecurve.com/archives/web-20-ceo-quotes-from-techcrunch-video

Cheers,

karl