Modern Marketing - Blog by Collaborate PR & Marketing

Why Earn When You Can Pay?

It’s been five years since I wrote a manifesto called, 'What Is Open Source Marketing?' where I tried to hint at a different view of media based on the trends emerging at the time.  My main suggestion was that the, ‘love affair between big brands and mainstream media is over,’ and that the Open Source Movement gave an idea about where we might all be heading.  Namely, into a people-powered, super-collaborative world where only the only way to garner meaningful attention was to offer channels through which people could participate with your brand.  Unsurprisingly, some of these observations proved to be correct while others were overblown.  Vast open networks where people can collaborate in whichever way they wish have miraculously appeared.  However, TV networks remain just as powerful, albeit without some of the kudos, and have largely resisted any change - to date.  Meanwhile, the marketing industry has roadtested a gazillion 'open' campaigns, with varying degrees of success.  On the positive side there is the most overly-used, yet still rather dreamy, example of marketing openness, Nike+, a largely open platform where people upload detailed personal information about their running lives to a massive American corporation in exchange for community.  The benefits of ‘openness’ to the sports giant have been considerable as explained by Nike-dude Roberto Tagliabue shortly after its launch: 'As of February, 2008, Nike+ members have run over 50,000,000 miles, logged over 14,000,000 runs and issued over 450,000 challenges. We created the world’s largest running club at nikeplus.com. 40% of community members who didn’t own Nike+ ended up buying. That is pretty tangible.'  And on the less splendid side, there is Walmart’s social network - The Hub.  Only ten weeks after the big launch, the site was shut down after a poor reception because it seemed no one wanted to give this other massive American corporation any information about themselves at all.  (In fact I don’t think there’s any mystery here.  The Nike brand was already part of grassroots running communities everywhere, whereas Walmart were seen to be paying lip service).  Which all begs the question why do some open projects work and some do not?  Clearly there has been no shortage of debate on this subject online over the past few years.  However, I thought the blog post by Jono at Mozilla Labs offered a succinct critique - ‘Openness is a lot of work’.  He observes that overuse of the ‘open’ label has meant that, ‘people are starting to attribute near-magical powers to it.'  Furthermore, 'Openness is a policy choice, not a replacement for old-fashioned hard work. I happen to think it’s a good policy choice in many cases: An organization that is open to outside ideas and criticism will learn faster about its own mistakes. It can build more trusting relationships with its users, because it doesn’t have to keep secrets. It attracts self-motivated contributors, and it get more diversity of viewpoints. There’s that old mantra about how, ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’”.  Jono then decries the rise of some marketing crowdsourcers who assume that just the act of setting up a blog will bring Nike+ style benefits to any project, when the more likely outcome is virtual tumbleweed and awkward client briefings as an analysis of the participants reveals a list of agency friends and family.  ‘Successful open organizations aren’t just unorganized mobs,’ he notes. However, it seems that lessons are being learnt. I put up a Tweet about Jono’s blog post this week and a very lively, little meme began, powered by people who seemed all too well aware, maybe after difficult experiences in the area, of the challenges that ‘openness’ represents for a marketing industry that still prefers to pay than earn.

Linked Data For Dummies

I really liked Michael Hausenblas' imaginative explanation of Linked Data : 'Imagine you’re in a huge building with  several storeys, each with an incredible large amount of rooms. Each room has tons of things in it. It’s utterly dark in that building, all you can do is walk down a hallway till you bang into a door or a wall. All the rooms in the buildings are somehow connected but you don’t know how. Now, I tell you that in some rooms there is a treasure hidden and you’ve got one hour to find it. Here comes the good news: you’re not left to your own resources. You have a jinn, let’s call him Goog, who will help you. Goog is able to take you instantaneously to any room once you tell him a magic word. Let’s imagine the treasure you’re after is a chocolate bar, and you tell Goog: “I want Twox”. Goog tells you now that there are 3579 rooms where there is something with “Twox” in there. So you start with the first room Goog suggests to you, and as a good jinn he of course takes you there immediately; you don’t need to walk there. Now you’re in the room you put everything you can grab into your rucksack and get back outside (remember, you can’t see anything, in there). Once you are outside the building again and can finally see what you’ve gathered you find out that what is in your rucksack is not really what you wanted. So, you have to get back into the building again and try the second room. Again, and again till you eventually find the Twox you want (and you are really hungry now, right?). Now, imagine the same building but all the rooms and stairs are marked with fluorescent stripes in different colours, for example a hallway that leads you to some food is marked with a green stripe. Furthermore, the things in the rooms have also fluorescent markers in different shapes. For example, Twox chocolate bars are...

Now For The Tricky Bit

I started Collaborate Marketing five years ago when I became interested in blogs and the effects of consumers grabbing hold of chunks of the media world that had previously been run exclusively by large profitable MegaMediaCorps.  For a while it seemed that the new digital media wave was going to blow away the old guard.  Instead the media soup’s just become thicker, as everything that can be digitised has been sucked online, constantly adding exotic seasoning to an IP-flavoured broth.  For media and marketing professionals, the world has gone from being a refined a la carte menu of traditional TV and radio fare to a bewildering tapas selection that’s refreshed on a weekly basis.  Indeed, so flexible has the technology become, that some of the new dishes in the networked media world can seem quite bizarre.  The plug-and-play web means a smart hacker can fuse pot plants into his own global energy management system; people can pay real money to have their virtual dogs neutered; others can leave Hansel-and-Gretel style music trails behind them; a social network of people can share credit card purchases; the ‘cloud’ promises mind-boggling opportunities to suck up information about the world.  Now that anything seems possible technically, it’s tempting to think that the hard work has been done.  However, the really tricky part is yet to come.  The next stage is for people to learn how to use all this new wizardry, which can be difficult, particularly when it means unfamiliar types of online collaboration.  While hackers and open source tinkerers like nothing more than linking technical systems or pooling data swamps, most of the world see the walls around them as comforting and reassuring.  Not just inconvenient barriers that need to be smashed down to accelerate disruption.  A common thread of all my consulting work over the last year has been to try and help groups brought together by networked media to operate effectively.  Sometimes these groups are thrilled by the idea of new opportunities to collaborate together.  Sometimes they are appalled at the prospect.  More often they are a little bit of both.  The challenges raised when people are flung together on networked media platforms are devilish and diverse.  For consumers (aka people), sharing the same online neighbourhoods for the first time can feel wonderfully liberating at best, but chaotic at worst.  For professionals in large organisations, the requirement to take the best of the old and mix it with the best of the new can seem like mixing fine wine with Red Bull.  For corporations the opportunity to work across traditional sectors is all too easy to confuse with the appearance of new competitors that need to be crushed.  We’ve rewired the marketing and media world.  Now we need to reinvent the way we work together.