Book Review : Crowd Surfing

Crowd Surfing by David Brain and Martin Thomas is the perfect read for busy executives who need a succinct update about networked media and its affect on marketing and business. All delivered in a refreshing 'let's not get too carried away' tone. The points that stayed with me were the discussions about Apple, which despite apparently ignoring all the 'rules' of openness and transparency, continues to attract the most passionate levels of brand advocacy and even fascination. This highlights one of my ongoing themes with clients that there are no rules in new networked media environments and every organisation should be looking to find its own style with sensible experimentation. IMHO, the reason that Apple works in the modern environment is because they provide the tools that people use to pursue their passions, whatever they may be. Which is entirely in keeping with the spirit of today's empowered consumer. And furthermore, Steve Jobs seems to make a habit of understanding the landscape and creating new modern marketplaces that have the old guard begging him to relieve them of their profits. Which gives the blogging community much to drool over. So in short, Apple's networked media - or crowdsurfing - strategy is to make the tools that people use to operate in networked environments. Just like the people who provided the spades during the gold rush.

Comments

Oh please don't start on the Apple worship. I get enough of this on other marketing blogs. Here is my experience of Apple's networked media strategy:

Many, many people who bought an iMac between 2004-2006 will know about the vertical lines issue: single pixles of cyan, magenta or yellow stretching across the screen and refusing to budge. (just search Google or YouTube, there are many, many entries). These lovely lines also seem to appear just after the warrantee runs out: no Applecare contract = unlucky = £600+ screen replacement.

The fact that Apple's own message boards filled up with nearly 1000 (and that is a conservative guess) "me too" messages, didn't make them think 'ah, there is clearly a quality control issue here, we ought to sort these loyal customers out.'

They just deleted any messages referring to the problem from their site. Resulting in customers who were using Apple's channels to communicate a problem, simply creating their own hate sites. And someone successfully suing them in the French courts.

And here is the best bit: not only did they delete all the comments about the problem, they didn't even read them first. One of them actually told people about a piece of free software for controlling the fan speeds, which sorts the problem out.

Don't talk to me about Apples online media strategy.

Posted by: Rory MacDonald | September 27, 2008 at 03:40 PM