« The Mystery of I.P., or Not | Main | Management Improvisation »
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 August 25, 2008 8:49 AM