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May 03, 2005
Little Brother: Building The Yellow Pages of Non-Yellow Pages Information (3 of 3)
Big Brother tells you what to buy.
Big Brother tells you what to buy through big channels called advertising, the biggest of which has traditionally been TV. My Orwellian nightmare is already quite complete without having to add this to it, but alas here I am, the glow of my television’s advertisements for soap, cars, packaged foods and branded beverages washing over me, practically pulling me into the store. Or is it?
Media Networking is an important concept to make sure my Orwellian nightmare doesn’t extend to advertising, too. By pushing production of media to the edge of the network (into the hands of individual prosumers with mobile connected PMDs) we democratize information in two very important ways: 1) What gets produced and 2) How it gets distributed. In my two previous posts I discussed how these changes can increase the truthfulness of media, which can have an impact in some unexpected ways including on civil liberties, and also how this evolution of communication can be a huge opportunity for marketers so long as they understand that they are entering into a discussion with Fans, not pushing a message. Now how about Media Networking as the fully decentralized marketing channel of the future?
Remember when Jim Stengel, Global Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble said “today’s marketing model is broken”? It’s no surprise that the world’s biggest advertiser doesn’t think it is getting a good value from Television advertising. The entire media model is decentralizing right before our eyes. The number of impressions may be increasing, but your ability to capture an audience of any size has increasingly less to do with scheduling and primetime programming paradigms of yore and increasingly more to do with your ability to create wildfire; distribution through a series of overlapping personal networks, Paris Hilton video-style. Get that kind of distribution consistently whether the message is for a bar of soap or a celebrity sex tape, and marketers will beat a path to your door. But of course you cannot, nor do you need to. You have to do something far easier but far scarier for marketers: You simply have to push the creation and distribution of the message to the farthest edge of the network, namely to the individual prosumer with a personal media device. Marketers need to get their heads around the concept of building a brand by sharing it with their customers.
Fans Create Media To Associate Themselves…
First think about how Media Networking leads to a redefinition of media. If I take a picture of my favorite band during a concert and I tag that information with a location, in this case the venue where the band performed, that additional information increases the shelf life of my media far beyond the point in time when I created it. In fact, in this example if my media is findable by other people, I have just created a location-based relational advertisement for the venue. Now what if I know that my favorite band is going to be at a different venue in a month’s time? I can use the same media I created before, attach it to a different venue and create a notification that an event is going to take place. I am using media to communicate, as a Fan, something important about my favorite band.
Here is what I like about this example: You cannot get this information in the yellow pages. I am seeing a lot of hype around mobile search and directory, and it is an important area, but I have Vindigo and it’s really useful and as long as they keep improving it, it is the only yellow pages type of directory I need. Google and Yahoo will offer mobile search products sometime in the future, but they can’t be much better than Vindigo except possibly in user interface and design because the data is homogenous and they all sort of get it from the same place anyway.
…Then Share Their Media With Others…
I am not just talking about a way to build a sort of WikiPages. I am talking about tribal knowledge – the relevance of a community-generated directory is higher to the community than to outsiders. On a more personal level, it is also true that the relevance of user-generated content has concentric rings of relevance moving outward from the person who generated the content. The closer you are to that person, (I mean in concept, like Friendship, but this also now includes geographically) the more relevant the media is to you as useful information.
…As Customer Evangelists…
Here is an example: This past weekend we went to a fundraising thing for our favorite brewery, Stone Brewing Co. For a tax-deductible donation, you get to put a stone from your backyard into this gigantic wall in their new brewing facility and restaurant. I live in a high rise, so I chipped a big chunk of concrete out of my post-tension slab floor. That’s okay, right? I love Stone, btw. Their Ruination IPA is a liquid poem to the glory of the hop. Anyway, my friend Tristan and her husband from Switchvox (which powers our phone system for a fraction of what it would have cost with any other solution) were going to meet us there and so she sent me an SMS to get directions to the Stone Brewing construction site. She called me rather than dialing 411. This is to a construction site, so she knew 411 wouldn’t have an address yet and certainly wouldn’t have a phone number for it. She also knew that the number she could get for the corporate office wouldn’t have helped her on a Saturday anyway. So she called me as the most direct route to the information she sought.
…Who Add To Their Media Their Own Biases…
Think about how often we do this. The yellow pages might give a number for a restaurant, but does it tell you whether it’s a good restaurant? Even if it did, you would trust the opinion of a friend of yours more, and so you call your friend and ask their opinion. In fact, with surprising frequency, we call our friends to help us find places, get recommendations and connect with other people that we know they know. It’s all for a specific purpose and usually is just-in-time; the shortest path to the information we seek.
…Which Others End Up Trusting More…
Furthermore, we experience life based on our common interests and knowledge with other people – when we decide what movie to see, where to work, how to live, who’s cool, what’s hot, what’s not, and why. In fact, we tend to rely on people all around us who aren’t even our friends – every time we ask someone for directions or where the nearest gas station is, we are relying on a flash community of people around us to conduct our lives.
What would a tool that enables, amplifies and defrictionalizes this consumer behavior look like? I have seen it. This is Media Networking. The media I create may be useful to only one other person or it may be useful to many people. If they can access it using a remote control with a map interface to find Stone Brewing Co., a good emo band playing tonight or directions to the rave, that media turns into information. None of this information can ever be found in the yellow pages, and it is, at the right point in space and time, considerably more useful than the yellow pages and 411 combined.
…Which Turns Everyone Into A Storefront…
So back to my friend Tristan. Rather than me having to transpose the content from the back of the envelope I had written it on and push the content to her via SMS, she should be able to go to my channel and pull it across. And so should anyone else. In fact, to Tristan this is tribal knowledge because she expected to find that content there but to everyone else who may happen upon it by browsing the area or possibly searching for “beer” it becomes an advertisement, and one that they didn’t spend any time or money to create because I, a major Fan, did it for them. And customers will create your next advertisement for you.
…Which Means Big Changes For Incumbent Media Companies.
Media is changing is such a fundamental way that everything around it - advertising, directory, search, information, publicity, marketing, promotion – is changing as well. Blogging is just the nascent beginning of an avalanche of change that looks to me like the most exciting and wide-open opportunity facing us today. It will be interesting to see what happens to when a dark horse media titan challenges the status quo of some of the other segments of the $1.4 trillion media industry. I guess I'll say it again if you aren't getting too tired of hearing it: The Location-aware Media Networking Operator (LMNO) is the media heavy of tomorrow.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at May 3, 2005 04:02 PM