I just wrote this article for Duke’s newsletter and it was a good training for my Age of Conversation article.

It was nearly a decade ago that David Weinberger proclaimed, “Markets are conversations” in the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’. Lots of things have happened since then, the internet has matured, people more advertising savvy and marketing folks more concerned about their impact on society!

However, ten years after the ‘Cluetrain Manifesto’, the “conversation” concept generates more debates and passions than ever before in the marketing field.
Last year, Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan launched a book called, ‘The Age of Conversation’ asking 100 marketing professionals what their view were on the topic? The book was a real success and started conversations across the internet, so many that they have actually decided to launch a new book expending the debate further.

Reading this first paragraph, it must seem that conversation is all about digital… but it isn’t. This is where most marketing people fail to make a difference, of course the medium is important, remember “the medium is the message” from Marshall Mcluhan, but your content, your point of view and the way you talk are actually the things that matter most. Actually no, there is one thing even more important than all the ones above; it is our capability to listen. Great brands work on cultural interactions, they don’t throw a message out for the sake of throwing a message out, they actively enter the circle of cultural context. This mindset could be nicely summed up by a quote from Lynetter: “…brands that win will be those whose consumers tell the best stories”
And there is a great new: size doesn’t matter! It’s all about the way you launch or take part in a conversation.

Things you will need to make the most out of it:

Find a bigger enthusiasm
If you want to be still relevant in a fast moving context you will need to realize that being a brand with great products isn’t enough anymore, it’s also about you ability to connect with like minded people.

Be human
Most brand theorists will tell you that your brand personality is important but when is the last time you saw a brand acting with human attributes without saying how great it is?

Be opinionated
It’s not how good your brand positioning is; it’s about how relevant what you bring to the table is.

Let it go
Accept not to be in control anymore, that people have now more tools than ever to tell their own stories.

Sometimes content isn’t the best thing for conversation but aggregating is
Understand that we live in an age of information where people barely have the time to catch up so creating content isn’t always the best solution.

Let the idea find a medium
One thing will never change in our industry it is the need for great ideas whether it is a cultural, design, experiential idea… and for each idea it’s medium.

Ten years ago a bunch a visionary amongst them David Weinberger believed that conversation was going to be the future of business. The present seems to make them wise with more and more marketing professionals interested in creating a two way relationship. However some people may think this conversation ‘thing’ is just another “marketing is dying” type of idea. Well this is actually going to be the new topic of the Age of conversation - Why don’t people get it? The timeless debate new
vs old has started! Is conversation just another fade or will it change the face of our industry forever?

Sources and further reading

Cluetrain Manifesto

Age of Conversation

Lynetter

Marketing Enthusiasm: John Grant

Being human: Faris Jacob

Do Brands Need to Create Content Anymore? Faris Jacob

Convergence Culture

Talking about Hollywood not allowing people to consume films on digital platforms, Rajjat A. Barjatya, Managing Director of Rajari Media said: “This model hasn’t worked for Hollywood because they are extremely protective of their content and their domestic market is huge. But for India, this is the future.”

Indeed, Bollywood, the most prolific film industry on earth has decided (via two of their major studios) to allow people to download/view films on their websites. There are a huge proportion (25 Millions) of Indian people living in foreign countries and therefore wanting to watch Indian films. Research is also showing that around 33% of revenue is lost each year to piracy…

“In November 2006, Rajshri released the romantic drama Vivah on its website, Rajshri.com, the same day it hit theaters. Within a week of its premiere, the film had been viewed online more than a million times. The Web release would eventually bring in $4.5 million — nearly a quarter of the picture’s total earnings. “Vivah proved that producers are best off releasing their films simultaneously — this way you are essentially creating a new market that would earlier either not have watched your film, or would’ve watched a pirated CD,” says Barjatya.”

“Fans can choose to watch videos for free with advertisements interspersed, or pay to download ad-free films; prices range from 99 cents for a music video to $9.99 for the latest Bollywood release.”

This is a very interesting and bold move for the cinema industry because it enables people to consume content the way they want to on one hand and generate new revenues and consolidate the business on the other hand.
This is actually reinforcing the “Free” theory recently developed by Chris Anderson. The model chosen by Bollywood is what Chris Anderson calls the Freemium business model: offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features.

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I’ve always loved visual representations. They help me to focus on the important things when I am starting to be confused by something! As I did some for Richard Huntington’s advices for young planners a while ago, I have decided to do another one for Iain Tait’s brilliant post: How to do digital planning.

Thinking - courtesy of Iain Tait

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This South Park episode about Wal-Mart was originally aired about 4 years ago however it is still a very interesting and provocative view on capitalism! I love the dialogue between Stan & Kyle and Wal-Mart personification as well as the mirror analogy being the heart of Wal-Mart.

“Yes, don’t you see? That is the heart of Wall-Mart. You. The consumer. I take many forms, Wall-Mart, Kmart, Target, but I am one single entity: desire.”

If you haven’t seen this episode or want to see it again, enjoy the videos below!

Here is another T-shirt post. On their own words Rumplo’s mission is to “make it easy for everyone to find their new Favorite T-shirts, and to give designers and tee shops great tools to promote and share their killer work.”

It is a great site enabling T-shirt lovers like myself to find even more nicely designed stuff. It’s also great for designers and shops to make more business.

What’s better than a “T-shirt of the week” post on a Friday?! (Or maybe I should say a ‘Quarterly T-Shirt’ regarding the number of posts under this category!)

Anyway, I’ve recently discovered this stop motion video done to promote Erbert & Gerbert’s restaurant chain in the US. It is really lovely and make sure you’ve watch the quite impressive behind the scene video. The whole idea reminds me of Osvaldo Cavandoli’s iconic cartoon: La linea.

Nice stuff, hope you enjoy it!

Always very interesting to read/listen to Danah Boyd. This interview will give you a very good overview of her research : How people - especially kids - use communication technology - particularly social network websites.

A very good way to finish the week!

Both Chris Anderson (Wired) and the guys at Trendwatching have written inspiring articles about the notion of free:

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Free Love

They are both very interesting and praising how brands and businesses could actually be more relevant and even more profitable thanks to free.

You can watch the video of Chris Anderson discussing this point below.

(Well apparently taking about free doesn’t mean that you are enabling people to embed your video, so you can have a look at the video on YouTube!)

I am maybe just thinking out loud here, but although I am a big fan of the idea of a brand and/or a business giving free and useful stuff away, how could it work at a bigger scale?
For instance the free newspaper concept work because the advertising is paying for it. We live in a consumerist society and unless we change the whole model, someone will have to buy something at some point. Indeed if you push Chris Anderson’s argument to its paroxysm, how could we have every consumer goods at our disposal for free? And what would happen to the advertising supposed to pay for the freedom? There is an utopia in the everything for free idea.

I guess free isn’t the answer for all the problems the consumer’s society has had in the past but usefulness definitely is. I’d rather like paying for my Flickr pro account rather than having a free one with advertising and less functionalities… (This example works for me but not necessarily for others, however people will be ready to pay for other useful products / services)

Thoughts anyone?

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How many times have you been seated in a boring meeting room when suddenly someone is mentioning The Tipping Point, The Long Tail, Convergence Culture, The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Paradox of Choice or The Wisdom of Crowds and then making an obscure point? At this precise moment, you ask yourself: Has this person even been reading the back cover of the book he is talking about? And sometimes you contribute to the debate without having been reading the book in question!

Well there is nothing to be ashamed of if you’ve read Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. In a very well written style (I’ve read the book in French!) Pierre Bayard, a French professor of literature and a practicing psychoanalyst, is giving a lot of very interesting insights on one of the most taboo subject amongst scholar (and planners!) “non-reading”.

“The first of these constraints could be called the obligation to read. We live in a society . . . in which reading still remains the object of a form of sacralization”

The two first chapters of the book are dealing with the ways of non-reading and the situations where you can find yourself discussing a book you haven’t read. These chapters are highly interesting if you want to find out how writers are commenting on other writers work without having read the books for instance! You can have a read through two Times online articles for good reviews.

The final chapter of the book is the most interesting, the author develops his main thesis: How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read! His main advices about non-reading are: don’t be ashamed, impose your ideas, make up your own stories and talk about yourself!

And as Adrian Tahourdin says:

“It would, of course, be wrong to take everything Bayard writes here seriously – and maybe he would not want us to – but we could do worse than heed his therapeutic advice when he suggests that

“in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves.”

Bayard cheerfully insists that he will continue to talk about books he hasn’t read – he seems to have got away with it until now – and offers the optimistic notion that only when people overcome their “fear of culture” can they themselves begin to write.”

This book should be a must read for every planner because it isn’t praising cultural devaluation but urges us to be more creative.

By the way I haven’t read three of the books I mentioned on the first paragraph although I am mentioning them on a regular basis! Welcome to the non-reading age!

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There aren’t many web2.0 critics out there. Most of the technology analysts seem to be agreeing that digital innovations are a move in the right direction with more interactivity, usefulness, relevance… and so forth.
The hype and the social components of blogs make it very difficult for Internet cynics to criticise it.

One of the most well known critic, Andrew Keen is making a couple of interesting points when he is highlighting the need of scholars, specialists and professionals in today’s digital culture. However, he is missing the point about cultural changes through the Internet and is going too far. He becomes too caricatured and patronising to be taken seriously.

Geert Lovink, Media theorist and Internet activist, has a different approach. He has always been raising a challenging point of view on all things digital.
To find out more about his work you can have a read through The Art of Free Cooperation, Zero Comments, Blogging and critical Internet culture as well as the article, Blogging, the nihilist impulse.

Geert Lovink did a couple of interviews for French newspapers/magazines recently. (You can have a read through the different interviews here.)
They are all well worth reading and will challenge your perception of digital for sure! Below a couple of ‘food for thoughts’ quotes.

“[...]What is a pity, is the way in which social movements are lagging behind. They’re hiding behind their email boxes, so it seems. So-called global civil society has been asleep and again left the whole Web 2.0 craze to Sillicon Valley.[...]

[...]Right now the hype is centred around gathering user profiles that are resold to advertisers. This should concern us because of the rampant privacy violations, mainly amongst the youth who seem to be unaware how Google and all the rest make money. They think: we get all these fabulous services for free, so why worry? The problem is that no one really explains them what the Web 2.0 business is all about.[...]

[...]The amount of private data that a company like Google is gathering about us is unheard. This situation will only turn worse and become so bad that the only option left will be to ‘nationalize’ or rather ’socialize’ Google. The reason for this is that their profitability will depend on the gathering of ever more precise user profiles. What is needed is a renewed sense of the global public nature of the Net. The Internet is a digital public realm in which our data are stored that should not be owned by national states and corporations. This is not so utopian as it may sound.[...]

[...]What is wrong is not the Web 2.0 with its tagging, blogging and collaborative writing tools but the way business is done. Technology firms are a pray for those with ‘funny money’. Venture capital does not allow businesses to grow organically, stay independent and develop sustainable business models. The willing victims here are the clueless users that indeed behave like willing sheep.[...]

[...]We should have a bit more fun about our blog affairs! Blogging is all about ordinary people who sit down and start to ‘talk back to the media’. That’s in itself a revolutionary step. But seen from a content perspective it a tragic joke. At best users express their doubt, at worse blogs are merely reproducing the hegemony. Let’s not set blogging apart from wider trends in society. If you’re not ready for the futilities of life, then please skip blogs.[...]

[...]ML: Should we stop blogging?

GL: Never! Technorati, a company that ranks blogs, is tracking over 100 million blogs, that’s a little under 10% of the world’s Internet population. Why stop when it has only just begun? Blogging is a mass leisure sport that emerged only in 2003-2004. The blog chapter of humankind started only a blimp ago. We all know that blogs won’t last. They are not even properly archived. Blogs will be succeeded by superior software platforms that come closer to the people’s lifestyles. If there would be less alienation in sight, we could expect to see the need for electronic communication to drop. But the human condition does not look that bright. With the overall rise in economic standards, mobility and work hours, the need for ‘computer-mediated communication’ (as it is sometimes called in academia), will only further grow. Only the rich can cease to communicate. They got their servants to do it for them. The rest, who simply cannot afford to not answer their mobile phones, will have to stay connected and blog in anger, fear and outrage. Being online is their state of ‘moderne Nervosität’ (as Freud called it). Chapeau to those who can afford to ignore cyberspace!”[...]

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