fans: will they go along for the ride?
April 21st, 2009 • posts i've written
Chances are, on a long enough timeline, every corporate marketing brainstorm hits the same grand idea: we should get our consumers to get their friends to buy our products. Without fail, we all go there eventually. Then we typically pad the idea with a lot of other things we want to ask people to do; like remix a song, vote on something, or make their own ad (woof). The do’ers in the room run off figuring out how to superimpose your head on a cartoon body while the thinkers in the room pat themselves on the back. We want fans to engage and participate; we just don’t put a lot of thought in why the hell they’d want to.
In their paper, The Moral Economy of Web 2.0, Josh Green and Henry Jenkins assert that users participate as much as they want to, depending on their skill, time, desire, interest, and knowledge. They participate as much as they want to, not as much as we want them to.
So, before you ask people to do something, think about just who you’re asking. Does this consumer/participator have the skills required? What do they need to know beforehand and have we made that clear? Are they available? Does it present a significant time sink to a hurried group?
Beyond expertise requirements, desire and interest raise important social concerns. Activity, or more traditionally consumption, is a much more social thing these days, especially on the web. As a user, you’d have to ask yourself if your friends were watching, and could be impacted by your choice, would you still commit to a public action on behalf of a particular brand?
The mantra of web 2.0 has always been, “ask not what your users can do for you, ask what you can do for your users.” Mike Arauz, a fellow Strategist at Undercurrent, likes to say, “if I choose to tell my friend about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friend.” So the mantra of our brave new world might be, “ask not what people can do for you, ask what you can do for their friends.”
Ultimately, fans are the ones that not only buy our products and consume our media, they proselytize; but not purely on our behalf. They share what they love with their social graph to engender respect, admiration and love. Only until we embed ourselves within the motivations and needs of our fans will we ever experience the kind of pass along we dream about.
Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.
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2 Responses (add your comment)
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Cool post! I might tell my friends. If I remember. And have time. Sod it, I just retweeted the link, it’s faster and non-committal.
(There’s actually a thought or more in there – it’s late and I’ve had a few drinks so I’ll put that on the list of thoughts to write about sometime later list)
I’m not a LOL type person, but I have to say that a LOUD guffaw of laughter erupted at this statement: “We want fans to engage and participate; we just don’t put a lot of thought in why the hell they’d want to.”
Why did it strike me as funny? Because I’ve been there in the room when someone suggested superimposing your head over a cartoon body. Heck, I’ll say it — I’ve even been the one suggesting it. Mirrors, ‘your name here’ written in fake handwriting, badly photoshopped magazine covers – anything short of getting down on both knees and saying “please please please be engaged with this.”
It rarely occurred to me to talk to people as people, to give them information they might actually use, to discover through trial and error what they were *really* interested in instead of what *I* was interested in.
Okay, I’m about to pass this along to my friends. Why? Because I like them. : )