"I used to talk about manipulation," said Bob Cargill, creative director for Nowspeed Marketing. "Now I preach the truth and nothing but the truth. That's a big shift."
The short answer to book publishers is: don’t act like the music labels and turn your companies into a disruptive force that comes between readers and the real product—writing and writers.
In an article in SeekingAlpha, Can the TV Business Avoid the Music Industry’s Fate?, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan makes several interesting points about the evolution of traditional media in the Internet Age. He cites Magna Insights data that illustrates the impact of online video on traditional video:
Regular readers know that I don’t think anything will “kill” television outright, but [the data suggests] that online video will shrink traditional video, as was the case in music. There is a rationale to support this argument:- if the traditional media companies don’t legally make their content available online, then there is the threat of piracy. Think of music labels.
If they do publish their content online, then they shrink their businesses via the threat of cannibalization. This is what happened to print companies, the more aggressive ones actually shrunk much quicker than those who weren’t very aggressive (think NYTimes (NYT), or the Chronicle).
Writing in The Groundswell of Social Media Backl, ZDNet columnist Oliver Marks hits on an important issue regarding the evolution of social media and the hype surrounding its use in marketing:
The awkward ‘brought to you by‘ conversational tone of past generations of TV is increasingly being mirrored by ‘trying to hard’ social media mavens butting into conversations within social media technologies. I’m not even going to address the nonsense being peddled under the rubric ‘branding’ recently.
I've written about the what passes for "conversational tone" in this blog and elsewhere (see The Catalyst for Connection), so I wholeheartedly agree with Marks' point and his criticism elsewhere in the column about the army of social media "consultants" that has swarmed like ants over the landscape, especially since Twitter's launch in the spring of 2006. From what I've seen, far too many of those consultants are nothing more than marketing hacks trying to foist the same old crap on people using these new tools. That just won't work.
The term social media has emerged to provide a broad categorization for a collection of unique, Web-based tools for personal expression and communication, including blogs, podcasts, video and photo sharing sites, social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, and the latest social media juggernaut, Twitter.
The rapid evolution and extraordinary popularity of these technologies has not gone unnoticed by marketing professionals. However, the challenge for marketers who wish to make effective use of social media is in recognizing that these technologies do not constitute yet another channel for the same tired message. (Every time I see a press release disguised as a blog post I want to stab myself in the brain with a pencil.)
What makes social media so uniquely powerful as a marketing tool has far less to do with the technology than it does with an entirely different approach to connecting with an audience. That connection is defined by its one-to-one-to-one nature, a cascade of individual, personal connections that stands in contrast to previous perceptions and definitions audience engagement.
Stop Selling – Start Talking
The problem — well, my problem — with “traditional” marketing communication is that it’s so obviously fluffy and phoney and too often absent any signs of humanity. Yet in my experience so many marketing people seem to think that the audience won't notice. The audience notices. The audience has always noticed.
Despite its startling violence, that routine from comedian and social critic Bill Hicks elicited enthusiastic applause in performances in the early Nineties. At about the same time the World Wide Web launched on a trajectory that would do for long-established business and communication models what a very large comet is believed to have done for the dinosaurs.
A few years later the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto brought into sharp focus the nature of the dysfunctional relationship that had emerged between business and the newly networked consumer in the early days of the Web.
Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can't be faked...Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do. - From The Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999
In 2009, despite the explosion in social media, how many businesses have evolved beyond communication that is official, artificial, and superficial? What those business fail to understand is that businesses don’t communicate, people communicate. The use of social media makes old-school faceless, sanitized, “official” communication obsolete. And the issue isn't just about what's being said -- it's about who's doing the talking.
Be a Mensch
A business is a collection of individual people, a kind of techno-organic network within the larger global network. The use of social media tools allows individuals within one network to engage with individuals in other networks on a more personal, and thereby more effective level.
For a business, the power in social media centers on the ability to allow individual audience members to tap into the thought processes of the individual people behind the products or services a company provides. For that reason the conversation that connects a person from within the business to members of the customer community must be a genuine reflection of the legitimate interests and passions of the individuals involved. The pursuit of those interests and passions rarely follows a straight line, and the creative spark that triggers innovation might be wildly off-topic. That's the nature of human conversation. The challenge for the business is to get out of the way of that conversation in order to allow a genuine human connection to form, a connection based on mutual value to the individuals.
Look at these two equations and let me know which one has the most benefit to you? 1. Message 1,000,000 to possibly reach 100 2. Personally reach 100 who influence 1,000 who influence 10,000 who influence 1,000,000. From Redefining Reach: The New Marketing Equation, by Matt Dickman, 2008
That connection is unlikely to form if the people representing the business in the conversation behave like an under-quota insurance salesman at a cocktail party. You wouldn't want to get stuck talking to that guy, so don't be that guy. Talk shop, talk about projects you're involved in. Share your insight and expertise, but don't abuse your connections, and never, never, never resort to fluff.
Each of us is an individual node in an ever-expanding global network. Social media tools allow us to create and manage our own connections. The level and extent of that personal interconnection is unique in human history, That's a tectonic shift in the business environment, but businesses can survive the resulting tremor if they learn to unleash — and trust — the individual voices within and learn to participate in, rather than attempt to control, the conversation that is the catalyst for that connection.
The argument Nicholas Carr makes on the difference between printed books and their digital counterparts (see Clutter) rests on the idea that "A change in form is always...a change in content."
There is no question that the experience of reading a printed book is significantly different from the experience of reading an ebook, regardless of the device used in the process. But is the experience of reading an ebook or any long-form online content inherently distracting? Or is the problem simply our failure to adapt to the new reading environment?
A reader is under no obligation to click a hypertext link that appears in the middle of a sentence. Nothing prevents a reader who wants to concentrate on an ebook or long online article from shutting down email and messaging applications and taking other measures to create an environment conducive to reading and concentration.
Distraction is distraction, digital or otherwise. So isn't the issue really about getting better at tuning out -- or turning off -- the distractions? Is reading a book on a crowded bus, train, or plane, with the various stimuli and distractions associated with those environments, so much less challenging than reading online?
There is indeed a great deal of information clutter in our lives, and Mr. Carr's concerns certainly have merit. But blaming the inability to concentrate or a deterioration of intellectual or cognitive abilities on the availability of information is like blaming obesity on food. Cheeseburgers and pizza are incapable of forcing themselves down your throat. Information is similarly constrained. The selection of what, when, and how much information we consume is a matter of making healthy choices based on the individual ability to metabolize that information.
Mr. Carr closes his post with the following comment on software writer Tim Bray's plans to digitize all of his books:
When Tim Bray throws out his books, he may well have a neater, less dusty home. But he will not have reduced the clutter in his life, at least not in the life of his mind. He will have simply exchanged the physical clutter of books for the mental clutter of the web. He may discover, when he's carried that last armload of books to the dumpster, that he's emptied more than his walls.
Swapping a collection of books for a digitized, networked library is a matter of storage and interior decoration. And while such decisions can affect one's quality of life, they are a reflection of one's taste, not of one's capacity for critical thinking or intellectual prowess. Mr. Carr appears to assume that Mr. Bray's decision will render him incapable of the levels of concentration and discrimination necessary to take advantage of an all-digital, on-demand library. That's just unfair.
Writing in his Enterprise Architecture blog, James McGovern makes an interesting and disappointing observation about the state of blogging.
Recently, I have noticed much of my stimulus has changed. The blogosphere is moving away from conversations and towards simply using it as a platform to communicate thinly veiled media relations sanitized press releases where all forms of communications are void of conversation.
I have no problem with marketing people adopting blogging and other social media tools. But it drives me up the freakin' wall when I see exactly what James McGovern describes. Ultimately, those who treat social media as a collection of new tools for the same old crap will fail. Good riddance.
The confluence of technology, society, and culture continues to change the world in profound and unexpected ways. Smallification seems an apt and concise description of that change. It's about the Long Tail. It's about the Flat World. It's about Web 2.0. It's about decentralization and democratization. It's about seeing the world as as complex adaptive system in which technology increasingly empowers the individual to form innovative connections that reshape culture, society, and the marketplace.
