Category Archives: user-generating

content creating, converging, user-generating, viewing

Making Media: Negotiating a Truce in the Broadcast | UGC wars

I caught the above on Faris’ blog as part of a post on read-write culture.  it’s from the brilliant TED, where here Larry Lessig makes the case for a revision of copyright law, in order to negotiate a truce between two sides: on one, the corporations who create original content and seek to protect it in every possible way, and on the other, a new generation of consumer creators who in response are aggressively challenging copyright law and the very nature of copyright itself.

he argues for a private solution that seeks to legalise (and realise the economic potential) of competition between the two sides, and calls for two changes:

1. that artists expect and permit their work to be made more freely available (for example in cases where it’s not for commercial gain)

2. that businesses embrace this opportunity, allowing the ecologies of corporate and consumer creation to co-exist

it’s a theme that any TV channel controller or magazine publisher (and indeed any editor / aggregator of advertiser-funded content) should be familiar with; how to retain a relevant place in the world as audiences fragment not just to other media channels but to content created by other consumers.

but there’s also a clear consequence for advertisers in this evolution.  if consumers (especially younger tech-savvy ones) are essentially disintermediating broadcast channels and sharing content to each other via their participatory networks, then it follows that advertisers and the brand communications they deploy must seek to engage with these new cultural read-writers within the networks.

as far back as 1991, W. Russell Neuman observed that "The new developments in horizontal, user-controlled media that allow the user to amend, reformat, store, copy, forward to others and comment on the flow of ideas do not rule out mass communications.  Quite the contrary, they complement the traditional mass media" (for more see here).  Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture agrees:

"…convergence culture is highly generative: some ideas spread top down, starting with commercial media … others emerge bottom up from various sites of participatory  culture and getting pulled into the mainstream … The power of grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broadcast media is that it amplifies."

smart advertisers will utilise and integrate both grassroots diversity and broadcast media to communicate their brands; not only to fundamentally communicate with both broad aggregations of audience, but more importantly to be full participants in this re-emergence of the re-write culture.

we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface – think about Carphone Warehouse’s sponsorship of the X-factor; which populates their idents (broadcast amplification) with audio clips from viewers (grassroots diversity).  there’s clearly much further to go, but some brands have started.  the question for every other advertiser remains; do you want to participate in the remixed culture or not?  it’s not, when you think about it, a question at all.

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internet, user-generating

Blessing the Boot and the Spreading of Ideas

One day to go. One game left to play. One victory required to retain
the Rugby World Cup. No one’s ever done it. Tomorrow England could
change that.

It’s not something anyone predicted. Talking to ITV
after the quarter final, Jason Robinson commented that only thirty
people believed they could do it. Those thirty people were the squad:
the same squad that didn’t score a try against South Africa when they
met earlier in the contest.

The fact that this same squad is now one victory away from history bears testimony to the power of self-belief…

And
the sentiment seems to be spreading. A glance at the papers shows the
extent to which this other side of sporting performance – mental
training and belief – has come to the fore.

A profile of
Wilkinson in the Guardian quotes Steve Black, his coach at Newcastle,
who describes how “he has managed to keep going despite all the
setbacks and injuries because he has never stopped believing in
himself”.

But this belief is now spreading beyond mainstream
broadcast media, and that’s where it’s gaining real momentum. More than
a few viral links have arrived in Vizeum’s collective inbox over the
last few days, by far the most surreal of which was the Chipmunks
singing Swing Low Sweet Chariot which you can experience above.

Actually
that’s not strictly true, the most surreal was an invite to bless
Johnny’s boot. Virtually of course. As I write, his boots have been
blessed 208,384 times… you can bless it too, just click here.
The Chipmunks aside, what the bless the boot site demonstrates, is how
this increasingly emergent concept of the mental aspect of sport and
sporting performance can overcome a lack of flair, youth, and previous
results.

It is – of course – testimony to the internet that ideas like blessing the boot can spread so quickly and to so many people…

But
to spread they have to be pertinent to the moment, engaging, and
something that you want to pass on. All three of those things are
orientated not around brands but around consumers, something that
brands could and should consider when creating communications.

Of
course not all virals are positive. One soul within the Vizeum ranks –
who shall remain nameless – sent an email making reference to England’s
over-reliance on a kicking game. But that person is South African, so
is clearly getting more than just a little nervous about that
particular aspect of the English game…!

The England team’s
greatest strength is its mental fortitude; and it is this inner-power –
above everything else – that has carried them to where they now stand.

NB
just checked again, that boot has now been blessed 216,125 times.
Either I’m a very slow at typing, or that idea is spreading. Fast.
Bring it on!

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advertising, branding, engaging, internet, user-generating

Making Up Your Own Foreign Melodrama

Bb_virgin_subtitle_superstar_2 one of the highlights in what has been a pretty gloomy year for Virgin Media has surely to be their sponsorship of BB, which has consistently outdone the programme it sponsors in terms of entertaining content.

but those clever people at GoodStuff communications haven’t let Virgin stop there.  they’ve persuaded the sponsor (and the creative agency) to let consumers subtitle their own bumpers – the best ones will be played out in the BB final.

to take part you simply go to the Subtitle Superstar website where you can choose a clip and subtitle to your hearts content.

getting consumers to create their content is nothing new, but this has the double winner of 1. demanding creativity within the context of (in BB) a very highly-valued piece of scheduling real-estate, and 2. rewarding the best creations by showing it to an audience of millions during one of the few truly event TV occasions remaining in the TV calendar.

what makes this stand out isn’t that it’s asking consumers to create content; the sorely-missed Tony Hart’s Gallery did that a long time ago, and the age of the internet has made this a staple of the comms planner’s tool-kit.  what makes it stand out is the access it gives consumers to a highly-valued media brand.  like it or loathe it, BB retains a very high stock with 16-34s, and this kind of access isn’t easily come by.  the fact that the access comes courtesy of Virgin Media can only do good stuff for the brand.

as an aside, it’s worth noting that it comes in the wake of a pretty bad week for the BBC, GMTV and their bedfellows who were less than honest with viewings during TV competitions.  failing standards, plummeting levels of trust, a fundamental betrayal (if reports are to be believed) of the nation – and that’s just page 2 of a full-colour supplement on the issue courtesy of the Mail!

…despite the fact that it’s been massively over reported, the fact remains that the TV stations have genuinely been caught with the pants down.  why?  because they were so keen to give viewers the perception that they were involved in the programme, they forgot to make sure they were actually genuinely involved in the programme.  could they really have been surprised when viewers reacted not too happily about it not all being as it seemed.

and herein lies the rub…  the reaction of viewers and the media told us not about the lack of trust between consumers and brands, but about the absolute existence of trust between consumers and brands.  the extent of the reaction bears testimony to the high levels of trust that brands (the BBC it must be said in particular) have engendered.

because engaging with consumers and co-creating content with them has become such a staple of many brands’ activities, consumers are spending more time than ever before engaging with them.  and when any brand asks consumers to engage with them, to spend precious time with them, to commit energy and creativity to them, they can’t be surprised if – when this relationship is undermined – consumers get more pissed off than they would if they didn’t particularly  like a 25×4 colour.

engaging with consumers is two-way relationship.  and if the comms planning and marketing community wants to continue to evolve the nature of brand communications, they better make sure that they live up to their end of the bargain.

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advertising, engaging, internet, social networking, user-generating

From ‘send’ to ‘recieve’ mode; lessons for politicians and advertisers

Houses_of_parliamentpic from solarnavigator.net

There’s been a lot of media-orientated political comment about over the last week.  Firstly Whitehall last Thursday published a report by Ed Mayo, Chief Executive of the national consumer council and Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety, recommending that the Government acknowledges the importance of, and utilises, existing internet-based communities.

The three specific recommendations were that the Government:

  • welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
  • supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it, in a way that maximises the long-term benefits for all citizens; and
  • protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful (and sometimes unavailable) information, and helps excluded groups take advantage

These sentiments were echoed by Tim Montgomerie – editor of ConservativeHome.com – in The Spectator’s Politics column last week where he suggested that the next general election will be remembered as “Britain’s first internet election”.  He notes that “in this new world [of internet communities] the campaign staff of political parties and traditional media will have a much smaller share of power”; and points to the fact that “more Americans have watched Mr de Vellis’s advert [below] than have watched any official commercial”.

Such is the power of a searchable internet, populated by aggregations of communities with their own opinions, wants and behaviours.  It’s a force that both politicians and brands must understand and engage with on the communities’ terms; Montgomerie notes that politicians “still see the web as a way of providing superior distribution channels for unchanged messages.  They are in ‘send mode’ … the political parties that prosper in the internet age will embrace ‘receive mode’.

Try reading that last quote again replacing politicians with the word brands.  There are parallels indeed.

The third element in all of this is the broadcast media; Montgomerie – in citing predictions that “most print newspapers will have closed by 2025” – takes a different position to Tony Blair, who waded in to the debate this week in a polemic against the print media.  Blair believes that “there is a market in providing serous, balanced, news.  There is a desire for impartiality.  The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for news being real is not”.

But deciding ‘what is real’ will no longer be the preserve of politicians and brands communicating through broadcast media.  In both the advertising and political arenas, that will be for us all – as co-creators and consumers – to decide.  There will be – as there has always been – two key questions; who owns the message and who owns the media?  In creating content we all have the potential to own the message, something politicians and advertisers will have to come to terms with.

As for who owns the media – that remains to be seen…  Different strategies will emerge.  This week HMV appointed digital agency LBi to create a new social networking site to take on rivals facebook and YouTube.  Good luck with that!  Gideon Lask, e-commerce director of HMV said “The HMV social networking site will be an important element in our customer engagement strategy”.  All admirable, but what’s wrong with utilising the networks already out there?  His brand – like politics – is still in ‘send mode’, I’d suggest that the sooner ‘receive mode’ is engaged, the better.

Sources:

‘The Power of Information’ – a review by Mayo and Steinberg

‘The next general election will be won and lost on the internet’, a Spectator column by Tim Montgomerie

Blair’s Feral Media speech – full text as reported by the BBC here

‘HMV appoints LBi to create facebook rival’ as reported in Campaign

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internet, planning, social networking, user-generating

It’s not what I post on facebook; but the fact that I post, that counts

Mark_zuckerberg_facebookpic source: Paul Sakuma / AP File

I’ve been wanting to write a post on social networking for a while now but it’s taken me ages, mostly because I’ve been mainly engaged in rampant friendgeneering.

let me explain.

about a month ago I joined facebook, an act which quickly and forever changed my internet browsing habits.  it became and remains the first and last site I visit in any online session, and keep it on in the background whilst tabbing thru other sites.  a straw poll suggests that I am not alone.  this is significant.

the other key behaviour I noticed myself adopting in the early weeks of facebook was some very serious (and along with my housemate, competitive) ‘friendgeneering’ – a term coined by my colleague and friend John V Willshire in his Artrocker Blog, to describe:

"the accumulation of friends that everyone goes through … because (a) it’s like engineering in it’s very methodical, processed, designed nature, unlike making friends in real life and (b) I have too much time on my hands clearly, and can sit around thinking of terms like ‘friendgeneering’"

now whilst it’s certainly true that John has too much free time – the phrase actually very succinctly captures the various acts of friend-collection I went through, and only stopped when I felt that a certain critical mass had been achieved (note: I don’t know why I felt I’d reached my personal critical mass – would be interesting to find out if other users had similar experiences).  I felt uncomfortable until ‘enough’ of them were there with me, and feel a great deal more comfortable now that they are there.

it’s a concept Faris Yakob – writing on his blog TIGS – described in a post in which he termed continuous partial presence:

"…everyone is always there. The most important feature of instant messenger programmes, in some ways, isn’t the actual messages – it’s the buddy list. With your buddy list there, you’re always in a group, you’re friends are always present, whenver they’re online. This is why it was so compelling, to begin with, to younger people – kids are far more likely to hang out in large social groups. This continuous partial presence is oddly satisfying, and also a feature of services like Twitter and Jaiku"

in her book Watching The English, Kate Fox describes how the mobile phone has had a similar effect:

"The mobile phone has, I believe, become the modern equivelant of the garden fence or village green.  the space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent ‘grooming talk’ with a tightly integrated social network of family and friends"

what both of these commentaries identify is the fact that the content of the status updates, photos, and now videos (and more) I put on facebook, aren’t as important as the act of putting them up there in the first place.  it’s the contemporary equivelant of "good morning, send my best to X" that was typical of times gone by, and just as reassuring.  indeed – as Fox suggests – the origins of my ‘comfort’ at having my friendgeneered buddies continually partially present, may be ancient indeed…  as old as the highly communal nature of homo sapien society itself.

this last fact alone is reason enough for advertisers and brands to take facebook and it’s rapidly expanding contemporaries very seriously indeed. it fulfills and deeply ingrained social need, and I fully anticipate that I will become as inseperable from my social network of choice as I am from my mobile phone.

but the reasons go beyond human social need…  the act of media planning in many regards is – at it’s basest – the identification and communication to, aggregated audiences (for obvious reasons I exclude direct forms of marketing from this description).  between October 06 and April 07, facebook increased it’s base from 500k to 3.69m; over the same period readership of the Sun dropped from 3.1m to 3.0m (source NRS).  facebook and social network sites per se are big, growing and committed aggregations of audience.

to that end, you can try putting an ad on facebook, but I wouldn’t recommend it; facebook is a place and space for friends, and a pushed media impact from a keen brand is an invasion – unless a brand suceeds in rewarding my just for watching it (for example Virgin Media feeding me live Big Brother updates, rather than a banner asking me to sign up now)…

the commercial model aside (till another day), other ways exist for brands to capitalise on this bigger-than-the-Sun audience (globally) of which I am a proud and active part; a facebook group created around your brand – or something for which it stands – is a great deal more involving that a bit of flash, and also acts as a badge for a social network user should they choose to join.  plus, with the opening up of application development to third parties, brands should be asking themselves what applications they could develop to graciously and appropriately feed and enhance online activities.

brands that understand how to talk to an audience in this way understand that it’s not how many friends you can reach; but how you talk to them, that counts.

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internet, social networking, user-generating

Welcome To The Post-Information Age

where content is free to create, distribute and consume
where everyone is a journalist
where everyone is watched
where everything is recordable and recorded
where everyone can contact anyone
where social networks rival commercial broadcasters
where value is in knowledge not just reach
where everyone can be seen and heard
where authourity records and reassures citizens
where citizens question the assertions of authourity
where opinions are facts and facts are opinions

as the saying goes; ‘beyond good and evil…’
just one word of caution…  be careful what you say.

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internet, user-generating

The Content Creation vs Consuption Ratio

Michel_creationofadam
a study today by Hitwise – sent to me by Steve, a guy I work with who blogs at Open House – has identified the degree to which people consume rather than create user-generated content in a Web 2.0 world.  analysis of online surfing data by Bill Tancer showed that only 0.16% of visits to YouTube were by users seeking to upload rather then consume content.  similarly only 0.20% of visits to Flickr are to upload pics.

this shouldn’t come as a surprise.  the history of media (and indeed the history of our culture and society) is one of content being created by the few and consumed by the masses.  we can speculate to what extent all early homo sapiens were intuitive cave painters, but early on it was established that a few created cultural and social content for the mass.  from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling to Josh Schwartz’s OC (the last episode of which was tragically broadcast in the UK last week – it had so much more to give!), the few have always created for consumption by the mass.  the figures today simply reflect that universal constant.

this cap on creation was historically down, I suppose, to two factors: firstly ability – not everyone is a Gaudí or Tolkien.  but secondly it was determined by an individuals capacity to create and the resources available to them.   Classical artists were commissioned and funded by the Christian Church, Schwartz was commissioned and funded by Warner Bros.  creation comes at a cost (be it resources or time), and not everyone can afford.

the latter of these influences has been eradicated by a combination of the fall in the cost of production and production tools, and the ability for the first time – courtesy of Web 2.0, for an amateur to distribute that content  on a mass scale.  today’s figures can’t and shouldn’t undermine that…  Web 2.0 allows anyone to create and distribute movies, pictures, art and opinions.  the effect on our culture and society is already being felt and will only increase.

but crucially the former cap still applies.  despite what most of us would like to hope, not many of us has the potential to create content which will be as universally lauded (or as profitable) as a Donatello or a Shakespeare…  a fact of life for which I suspect commercial media distribution networks are more than a little thankful.

the original Hitwise article can be read here.

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internet, user-generating

Entertaining hijacking at a time of mourning

Oc_castI was going to write an entry mourning today’s decision to axe The OC at the end of season four, which is about to screen in the UK;  but on conducting a quick scan on the web to see what others were saying at this (sad) time I discovered something much more entertaining.  reading the Guardian blog on the subject I found that the entire conversation had been hijacked by people posting comments re the prevalence of Jews in the US broadcasting industry.

now that’s more than a little off-piste for my little media blog, but it does highlight the extent to which internet discussions are free from the conventions of traditional publishing.  in the latter, a subject is extensively (or otherwise) explored and described, opinions given and conclusions made.  there is no such rigour on the web…

in the above’s case the discussion veers widely off course to the dismay and despite the pleadings of those wishing to grieve:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is a forum for those mourning the passing of the OC. This is not a space for anti-Jewish rants. I wish to dialogue with others who share my depression at the passing of a true phenomenon. Those of you who cannot empathise with those of us who are grieving, there are many other places on the GU blogs where you can express your views".

Posted by TomBrown on January 4, 2007 05:41 PM.

no chance Tom, the rules don’t apply.  as many a brand has learned to their detriment, the internet is not the place for rigorously researched and tested messaging, at least not if you want consumers to own, discuss, and distribute it on your behalf.  and quite right too; consumers own internet content – the cut it, change it, re-edit it, and then of course they may distribute it for free on behalf of a marketeer.  you can’t have it both ways.  as William Gibson so succinctly put it; "The remix is the very nature of the digital."

its worth noting that this flaw is conversely on of the traditional media’s greatest strengths.  whilst the Guardian’s blog veers wildly – if entertainingly – off subject, consumers can be confident that the traditional version of the paper will not.  and are happy to pay for such.  for this amongst other reasons, predictions of the demise of the newspaper are extraordinarily premature and wildly off the mark.

and the same applies for TV.  there remains – and will remain for a good while – the need for quality studio-produced broadcast entertainment.  as I’ve often said to TV clients when discussing how they negotiate the flood of user-generated content we are increasingly consuming (occasionally but as not as often as is implied to the detriment of broadcast impacts); you’ll never make the OC in your living room.  which is a shame really, cos after today’s news that’ll soon be the only place it can be made.

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