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August 25, 2008
Cyberpresence Socx
Some of the most nuanced things that we can encounter come from marketers. But the enduring charm of marketing is, basically, shamelessness.
That sounds bad, but the only problem with shamelessness is that it's hard to pull it off successfully, so not everybody can do it. In the strategy of shamelessness it is still, paradoxically, a requirement to maintain some cool.
This amounts to predetermining what kind of "online presence" is needed, and why -- backed of course by the right tools to generate that online presence. Where should people find you online? who should they meet when they find "you"? and why should they (from their perspective) find "you" the way that they do? Assume that they are wherever they are not because of you but because of what that channel offers them; then determine what version of yourself is appropriate to have appear in that channel. "You" might be different from one channel to another, but the different "You's" need to all be appropriate representatives of the brand you are trying to maintain.
It's pretty much like getting dressed to go out with strangers. But how hard could it be? Humphrey Bogart got to say it first: "The only cause I'm interested in is Me."
The scary part is finding out there's not much mileage in your hype. You remember: there's the famous Andy Warhol saying: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."
As for blogs, it's more like "in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." (I can't remember who it was that said that, but the quote is certainly memorable, and the citation for it is probably retrievable via Google, etc.)
There are different levels of shamelessness, with blogging and online social networking holding down the opposing goalposts. (Incidentally, Archestra is not a blog, although it runs in blogware. Archestra is, instead, just an open studio.)
Surely, blogging is important to marketing, particularly with the aspect of staging a "market" of ideas about what you sell. But blogs are just the booth in the marketplace. Blogs are inherently editorial, and the only reason we would expect one to succeed is because of the popularity of the personality that is the explicit editorial energy of the blog. (Note: not being a blogger myself, I can't claim to have any expertise on making one work; but having subscribed to several in the past, I found that I only go to the ones where I feel like I am interested in the person whose blog it is. Moreover, with zillions of blogs out there, the fatigue factor of going through yet another new blog is a real impediment that makes it just seem unnecessary. What gets me past the impediment is either a recommendation from someone or a sample of the subject handling that shows me the blogger is unusually interesting.)
Wikis are a bit like blogs in that they have a subject focus, and that subject attracts a crowd (you would hope), but the subject focus is maintained by a crowd, not by a singular editorial personality. With a wiki, one always hopes that peer criticism will culture the crowd towards "wisdom", as they like to say.
Finally (for the moment), the point of a social network is that the crowd moves its focus around and shares what it finds by talking to each other. Focal points emerge rather than being prescribed. But the sharing occurs because of people in the crowd who are already interested in each other and keep introducing who they know to other people. This thing about "buzz" is about when the communication gets flowing strongly about an emergent focalpoint.
A marketer should look at how the online forums* perform compared to each other:
- blogs establish relevance
- wikis establish credibility
- and social networks (which I hereby impertinently deem "SOCX"), being where markets actually live, establish importance
(Let's face it, most people who have used the sound "SOX" outside of baseball could not tell you who Sarbanes is nor Oxley nor whether their company would survive an audit. So why should they get to monopolize the phonemes? In the real world, social exchanges are vastly more interesting, and after I've said "blog" twice and a quick "wiki" a few times in a row I'm not interested in two-part five syllable elaborations for the rest of the choices. SOCX it is. Could be lonely, but I don't care.)
* apologies to anyone with a language degree
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:49 AM
The Mystery of I.P., or Not
What mystery?
The rule of thumb is that concepts are not property. The challenge is to wrap "property" around the concepts, so that the property is where people go to find the concepts. Since the value of the property is to some degree related to its scarcity, it is not difficult to understand what to do next.
- Use of ideas can be licensed in certain contexts.
- Information is either confidential or it is not, and you can sell access to confidential information.
- Knowledge is proprietary only if you have the ability to control the context of the knowledge delivery; control is all about packaging (whether the package is a venue, an event, a medium, or a box). You can sell the package; you can also sell delivery.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:27 AM
August 16, 2008
Why Leading Thinkers Won't Be Thought Leaders
In the ideas game, cutting edge thinkers are typically too far ahead of the approval criteria for implementers, and since "thought leaders" derive their credibility from the probability of implementations occurring, most leading thinkers don't become thought leaders.
To get probability on their side, leading thinkers usually have to choose to think about something that approvers already want to implement.
This certainly distresses the notion of "innovation", except within the sense of "infusing the accepted with newness". But that is not an outright knock on anything; it simply points to a reason for having the notion of "pragmatic innovation".
Much leading thought throughout history has been pretty rapidly dismissed as "impractical", which of course should have meant "unable to be put into practice"... But with 20/20 hindsight we are able to know at least that what is undoable for one outfit is merely inconvenient for another. And yet another may have no resistance to the idea at all and let it rip, wherefore the popular "disruptiveness" tag in the vocabulary of the betting pundits who track ersatz innovators.
Thought leadership is safe. It doesn't carry along with it the stockades, burnings-at-the-stake, smear campaigns, or other proven techniques used to enlighten leading thinkers about their impracticality. In fact, when you get right down to it, thought leaders are "voted into office", more or less like successful consultants, which means that they are the product of followers, not vice versa. This explains why the best-known thought leaders hardly ever have a hardluck story about finding followers...
In the other camp, leading thinkers sprout of their own accord and may carry on for quite some time with no followers at all. Some leading thinkers get lucky: they wind up being befriended either by a thought leader or by an influential producer who can spell "pragmatic" but isn't worried about it for the time being. But conventionally, the bridge between leading thinkers and thought leaders is the kind of engineering called "R&D".
The problem is that if R&D is not funded well enough, then the bridge may not reach all the way across. So the issue mainly comes down to who will sponsor the way that the R&D is adequately funded.
Leading thinkers really are often into fundraising, but a lot of fundraisers aren't any good at it. In a healthy organization that wants to be progressive as well, the case for funding thought leaders is not so hard to make, but the exceptional organization strategizes funding of its leading thinkers.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:28 AM
August 10, 2008
The Decisive Moment in the Garden of Good and Evil
My Strategy to win the Presidency
So, how do you get it going at such a late stage in the race?
The first part is to pick my Vice Precedent. Eventually, I’ll get caught for something, right? and why not just tell people what it is in advance, especially if it's something that's just more me? Thanks to the internet, people are confused... there’s no longer any sense of priorities amongst most of the self-indulgences that actually get us from Monday to Tuesday and from Tuesday to …
…. oh, you meant vice “president”… hmm, in that case, it would have to be the guy from truTV, Marc Juris, executive vice president and general manager, who showed me that if you can’t be the head, at least keep it on straight. For example, the other day he was saying, "Reality has a connotation of not being real, of being phony… We felt that because (our programming) was real, we couldn't call it reality." There aren’t that many people running around with that kind of clarity now.
The second part is I’m going to play the gender card.
How does that make sense? Wouldn’t you be running against two men?
Well, what difference does that make? The point is, I accuse them of being guys, and then they both screw up their responses to that more than I screw up mine. That’s what voters care about.
What’s the third part of your strategy?
It’s very simple, a call to action, but it might be hard because it calls for breaking a tough habit. When you’re president, you should have a limited number of Stupid Points to work with, not term limits. If you spend up all your Stupid Points too fast, you’re out! and someone with fewer Stupid Points should take over. This might not be the other person from your party who is hanging out in the other wing of your big white house. Think about it, if it’s your party at your house, and your party gets seriously boring, people need to be able to go to another party at somebody else’s house, right? Really, it’s not such a new idea, but we can’t be wimps about it.
Is that it? Any other parts?
Well, aside from the challenge of getting enough ME-dia attention, I’m working on getting an additional line added to the list of nominee names on the ballot, right below the third party candidates. If I’m successful, it should just say “Surprise Me: __________________”
(Happy Birthday Diana! xo - M)
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Foucault Funk
The Michel Foucault Postmodern Blues (here)
Category: Stuff That Totally Speaks For Itself. (here)
Some actual music, too. (Copyright Gary Radford, Marie Radford, and Stephen Cooper.) (there)
But if you can't drag your butt to the site, there's at least this excerpt:
Verse three is based on Foucault's response to the charge that his work changes constantly. Foucault responds: "What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same:"
That's what I call a smackdown.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 3:15 PM
August 2, 2008
Antiquity in the Garden of Good and Evil
Scientists unlock mystery of 2,000-year-old computer
As reported in 2006 by the CBC (i.e., Canada, yesterday) a then-recent study in the journal Nature had revealed the device known as the Antikythera Mechanism to be actually a complex means of tracking the movements of astronomical bodies for use in navigation.
As reported in 2008 by the American newspapers (i.e., USA TODAY), the same device, known as The Mean Sun Wheel, held 30 bronze gearwheels marked with instructions, allowing the user to link the cycles of the heavens to "the very mundane Greek games" (i.e., the Olympics).
Tthat particular usage, scholars believe, was primarily by wealthy sponsors of the games, for scheduling purposes -- putting the wheel in the same class of "information technology" as satellites, but not in the same class as television broadcasting, with which advertising spawned the Olympics Hype Cycle -- used for tracking the movements of earthly bodies -- nowadays far more important than a mundane thing like weather.
The only question here is already asked and answered: whether the 2,100 year old Mean Sun Wheel, given that it still works and all and doesn't even need batteries, can hold its own against a much bigger machine: marketers. Marketing's vanguard, the American press, took two years to find something in it that rated worth mentioning again. Maybe it's time to move to Canada.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack