Listening to Chatter
April 03, 2009
I wrote this thing for Forbes.com about listening to the web - stage one of my very simple approach to social media.
I'm going to write a column for them regularly about such things for their newly launched CMO network.
The version you can read there is a bit different from what I originally wrote. I originally wrote this relatively grandiose thing called Such People In't - a reference to the newly active role of 'the audience' in our endeavours, which was pretty theoretical, as is my bent.
I changed it to suite the needs of the environment and audience and am pretty happy with how it turned out.
But there was stuff in my original that I really liked, so I'm going to post some fragments here:
Up until very recently indeed, cultural production was an industrial process. The means of production and distribution – the printing presses, the production studios, the satellite and cable stations – were only available to large corporations. The audience remained silent.
Advertising grew up in the golden age of mass media, creating discrete units of commercial culture – advertisements – that were delineated by the nature and relative scarcity of the transmission vector, or distribution platform. Television is a filmic medium and airtime is expensive, so 30-second slices of film became television commercials. The audience was functionally passive in its reception of advertising--like Victorian children, it was seen and not heard.
Thus we began to think of it as a target audience: a location that advertisers wished to bombard with persuasion (appropriating the language and strategies of war), an object to be acted upon, passive and attentive.
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Advertising grew up in the golden age of mass media, creating discrete units of commercial culture – advertisements – that were delineated by the nature and relative scarcity of the transmission vector, or distribution platform. Television is a filmic medium and airtime is expensive, so 30-second slices of film became television commercials. The audience was functionally passive in its reception of advertising--like Victorian children, it was seen and not heard.
Thus we began to think of it as a target audience: a location that advertisers wished to bombard with persuasion (appropriating the language and strategies of war), an object to be acted upon, passive and attentive.
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Your brand is but one voice among a polyphony, hopefully providing the stimulus for conversations, but unable to dominate them: a brand’s share of voice is now to be measured against all the conversations of the web.
[This reminds me of Bud's chart]
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Brands are the cultural, psychological and corporate face of the products or services you sell. People want relationships with some, responses from others: they want to be involved, to be listened to. If you ignore them, they may start to ignore you.
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The lines have blurred like the modalities of media – those that consume can also produce, those that receive can also broadcast and it is within this new context that marketing exists, connecting consumers to businesses in a way never before possible.
Welcome to this brave new world, that has such people in’t.
[This reminds me of Bud's chart]
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Brands are the cultural, psychological and corporate face of the products or services you sell. People want relationships with some, responses from others: they want to be involved, to be listened to. If you ignore them, they may start to ignore you.
--------------------------
The lines have blurred like the modalities of media – those that consume can also produce, those that receive can also broadcast and it is within this new context that marketing exists, connecting consumers to businesses in a way never before possible.
Welcome to this brave new world, that has such people in’t.