Funny, how ideas return in this second „hype“. I can still remember letsbuyit.com, which was basically reverse-auctioning by gathering a large purchasing power in the form of a large crowd of potential buyers. eSwarms is very similar in a way, the differences seem to be in the details of the whole setup.
Max Kalehoff writes about „the death of the user„. The user as such is „dead“ because all people are users now. In the US it’s 80%, and even in Germany, where I am from, the majority of 62% of the population are „users“.
Let’s just call people what they are: people. The problem is that inaccurate buzzwords and overused vernacular, like users, distance us from our true intentions and interactions with customers and each other. Not just in technology, but in marketing, media, advertising and the Web — everywhere, really.
Interesting thought. If you start thinking not about users, but people who use your site, your web application, your whatever tool/marketing gadget, you’re instantly led to think about uses and different usage of things. That should help you thinking more in favour of different target groups and their needs.
One benefit that came from focusing on the person and not the user has been being able to easily see that people have different desired uses and reuses for the data, information, media, etc.
(Joe Jaffe, btw, has been saying that for a while in his podcasts.)
Now this might well unsettle Second Life: Entropia has licensed the Crytek 2 Engine. I have already written about Crytek 2 in March, it offers the most fascinating graphics I have seen in a computer game! You can click through to golem.de to see what I mean.
Funnily enough I wrote back then:
I wish second life was only nearly as realistic as anything the new cryengine can show!
Well, it looks like Entropia made the race…
Here is a good summary of the latest coup of Prince, the artist formerly known as a symbol. He just released his new album by attaching it to a newspaper in the UK. Meaning: everyone who bought the paper, also bought the CD. That should instantly catapult him into the top 10 charts. He did so before, by giving CDs to everyone who visited his concerts.
The music industry, of course doesn’t like this. But hey – do we like what the music industry does? Charging us for the inefficient logistics of carrying heavy plastic disks to a store near us, when all we want is to download a song via iTunes right in front of us?
Brandweek features a good, summarising, article of what brand marketers should take into account when dealing with all stuff „web 2.0“.
The user-generated content upheaval—manifested in blogs, podcasts, videocasts and wikis—is quite real, and so is the revolution of consumer empowerment. But despite the resultant chaos, brand managers simply must learn to maintain a balanced perspective. Yes, the digital media environment is being democratized, but that doesn’t mean that you have to turn the keys to your brand over to the digital inmates of the Web 2.0 asylum.
That is a bit harsh. „Digital inmates of the web 2.0 asylum“! But in a way he’s right. Brands do not have to respond to every web 2.0 challenge, just because someone thinks it could be fun if the brand did. Just like you, yes you, dear reader, wouldn’t just jump of any bridge, just because someone else thinks it’s fun. Brands need to engage with their target audience in a way that is true to their core brand personality. That implies that some brands might actually engage more carefully and less openly than others.
Brands might also take very different approaches in the way the open up the conversation with their target audience. But to some degree, they will all have to:
If you’re to have any hope of maintaining your brand equity in the Web 2.0 world, you must begin by assuming that while your happy customers will remain silent, your critics will be all too happy to denounce you online. So you might as well provide the place for discussion and retain some control of how the dialogue develops. An invitation to the public to air its views need not, however, be a free-for-all. You should take a hard-line on obscenity, vulgarity, hate speech and intolerance. You may even want to curb anonymity to raise the overall civility of the discourse.
Regard this as an opportunity: you never had the chance to learn so much about your customers. Providing an open platform for your customers gives you the ultimate opportunity to learn about the opinions of your target audience – you can even find out about the tonality they prefer, which in turn can help you (or rather your agency) write better advertising pieces.
Engage your customer, ignore the hype and don’t fear the revolution—whether it’s downloaded from iTunes, read from blogs or stolen from YouTube.
Funny! This reminds me of:
But the quote I find the most useful – and it is also something I keep telling everyone:
there’s also no single ‚right way‘ to manage in the reality of the Web 2.0 world. Be prepared to experiment.
Sean pointed me to an old article that takes us down memory lane. It’s about the gold rush feeling some 12 years ago. The hopes and expectations were as high as today, but the numbers behind „the web“ were much smaller. Here is a couple of quotes, plus my own thoughts of what has changed in the last 12 years.
It’s that huge body of potential consumers that has businesses scrambling to get onto the Web, to which 6.64 million computers are already hooked up. There are more than 100,000 Web sites already […] The popular Yahoo guide to the Web lists more than 23,540 companies. […] Nielsen Media Research (famed for its TV-market analysis) found that 24 million people in the United States and Canada have used the Internet in the past three months–more than 18 million of whom used the Web.
Interesting by the way, the differentiation between the web and the internet. I guess most digital immigrants of today wouldn’t know that there ever was a difference. And I also think that in another 10 years time, people won’t know what we mean by „surfing the internet“ or „being online“. Simply because the net will be omnipresent. Every electronical device and every house, car, fridge, will be connected to the net. People will be online all the time, without thinking or doing anything about it.
To many, this is the dawn of a radical new commercial era in which a single medium combines elements that used to be conveyed separately: text, voice, video, graphics. Countless firms will be transformed in the process, including publishing, banking, retailing and deliverers of health care, insurance and legal services. […] Is there a market for this commercial zeal? Answer: There is a fairly small one now and probably a large one to come in the next decade. But many things must happen technologically and creatively to draw more paying customers.
While the boom up until 2001 was filled with hope in an era of still too few users and static websites, the last couple of years have changed that. This is, of course, what people refer to as web 2.0. It caused a shift, both technologically, and in the way users can interact with websites (i.e. companies). And there is around 1 billion people online by now – in many developed countries, the rate is between 40-70% of the population.
most information on the Internet is already free, as is much software. Experienced Internauts, not used to paying for things they download, may be reluctant to pay as they go. Second, as spectacular as the Web technology is, it still has a considerable way to go to become attractive to the great numbers of consumers who are used to the amenities of mall and catalog culture.
Things like Flash, AJAX, etc. have greatly improved the usability of many sites. Some sites have implemented payed content business models which actually work, based on exclusive content or functionalities. But quite a few sites that tried to offer more or less regular content for paying subcribers did not succeed an opened up their archives again. This will not change. Unfiltered, regular content will become somewhat of a commodity. Only sites offering added value through filtering, remixing, sorting or commenting existing content will make a difference. If, and only if, users can tailor these services to their needs. Relevance of content will be increasingly important during the ongoing flood and fragmentation of information.
The new requirements for advertising and marketing in this new era were already cristal clear in 1995:
Understand the medium. Conducting business on the Web, a phenomenon with no parallel in communications history, will demand new strategies in advertising and marketing. Unlike broadcasting and print, which are one-to-many entities with a passive audience, the Internet is a many-to-many medium in which everyone with a computer and modem is a potential publisher. Web surfers, for example, tend to be self-directed. They typically have little patience for „brochureware,“ advertisements that are thrown up like so many billboards.
The Web gives commerce a unique opportunity to communicate directly with employees and customers around the world. „The Web can be a powerful tool for fostering connections, building associations, delivering information and creating online communities,“ says John December, co-author of The World Wide Web Unleashed. […] The Web, says Hamilton [Federal Express], is „one of the best customer relationship tools ever.“
I wonder, why it has taken the industry so long to start offering the right kind of marketing tools? In a way, there still is a lot of companies out there that don’t respect what has been written 12 years ago!
I am very curious to see what the world will look like in another 12 years. I will be close to 50 years old, probably with kids – digital natives – and hopefully still maintain this blog. Just to make sure that I will pull this old post out again, I will send myself a reminder via email for in 12 years time, using futureme.org.
Wo ich sonst so bin...