Posts Tagged ‘fan communities’
the green lantern fan made trailer
26 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment
Created by Jaron Pitts, this fan made trailer includes cuts from almost 30 films and some nicely done after effects. Uploaded only four days ago, the video currently has over 100k views, 1400 ratings (currently 5/5 stars), and 800 comments.
When is a fan made trailer so successful that it demonstrates an unfulfilled demand? When should it spark DC Comics to release a Green Lantern movie or animated feature, and when should they bring in fans like Jaron to advise in production and distribution? These are the questions that major studios should be grappling with, and by monitoring these fan creations, they could make educated and profitable decisions.
fans are the future of digital marketing
29 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 7 comments
Thanks to everyone that commented and shared my posts last week. I hope I sparked a few thoughts.
Now here it is, my fan week round-up…
Today, brands must learn how to earn fans. This begins with courting existing communities to earn (not fabricate) credibility. After that, brands must provide the means to connect fans and give them something to do. After all, a dollar spent on fans is a dollar spent on R&D, retention, recruitment, loyalty and longevity.
- a week dedicated to fans and the future of marketing
here’s my rule of thumb for the question, “is it worthy of earning fans?” How many existing communities can you identify as being ‘courtable’ and demonstrate fandom? As Henry puts it, communities aren’t created, they’re courted. And if everything new is constructed from bits and pieces of pre-existing stuff (as Faris says), then you should be able to measure anything new by investigating which communities could be courted based on the stuff inside your new product or show.
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.”
- fans: will they go along for the ride?
When I urge clients to look more closely at niche fan communities, I’m urging them to study the actions and social norms within these groups in order to identify any lead user behaviors that could go mainstream. Fans are creating unanticipated connections between technology, social groups, and media that will reward our attention. And the pace of the web demands we stay focused on centers of innovation, and more often, fan communities represent the undersea chimneys which give life to the next evolution of species.
Fan communities are indeed “self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture.” Moreover, fan communities mobilize around unanswered questions.
Advertising is made for people who care… to pay attention. Fans care. Fans pay attention. But most messaging doesn’t create the tension that activates full fan communities. We’re still stuck on saturating a crowd of unwilling participants instead of mobilizing a community to create and spread a conversation.
- fans: mobilize a conversation
Images from my posts: (click the image to read the full post)
Quotes from more brilliant women and men: (click the image to read the full post)
And finally, if you’re interested in more fandom, get to know Joshua Green:
fans: mobilize a conversation
23 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments
To be marketable the new cultural works will have to provoke and reward collective meaning production through elaborate back stories, unresolved enigmas, excess information, and extratextual expansions of the program universe.
- Jonathan Gray (Editor), Cornel Sandvoss (Editor), C. Lee Harrington (Editor), Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World
The best conversations are ones where I know something you don’t and you know something I don’t. We share what’s new. Too bad this isn’t how most marketing and advertising works; marketers love conversations (about their products).
Advertisers look for the big message. They spend weeks in front of a white board crafting the perfect tag-line, one that says it all. Then they buy up all the mass media airtime they can afford to make sure that big message saturates the most people. End of conversation.
As if attention is a commodity you can buy…
In Pierre Levy’s Collective Intelligence, he describes a future societal power structure that transitions from ownership over commodities to mastery of knowledge. In particular, this ‘thinking community’ taps a ‘cosmopedia’ or ‘knowledge space’ of vast information provided by the type of many-to-many connections the web facilitates. Members of this group search, inscribe, connect, consult and explore together. Pierre describes what we might call a ‘hive mind,’ where if one has knowledge, soon all will. And in this hive mind, “unanswered questions will create tension within cosmopedic space, indicating regions where invention and innovation are required.”
The authors of Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World argue that digital fan communities might be the most fully realized versions of Levy’s cosmopedia. Fan communities are indeed “self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture.” Moreover, fan communities mobilize around unanswered questions. This is what spawned fan fiction, ARGs and other multi-player transmedia storytelling games. Fans rush to create meaning where meaning appears to be missing.
Advertising is made for people who care… to pay attention. Fans care. Fans pay attention. But most messaging doesn’t create the tension that activates full fan communities. We’re still stuck on saturating a crowd of unwilling participants instead of mobilizing a community to create and spread a conversation.
where the wild things are
02 Feb, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments
I want to write for your blog. Gratis. But you have to give me a great question or profound thought to ponder. That’s what Shari Doherty did. Shari works at Loopt, and she’s asked me to wrap my head around location based technologies and the mobile phone. Shari also asked me to speak with Loopt’s CEO and Founder, Sam Altman, at SXSWi this year. Shari is my new best friend.
So with each new jump in technology, I’m less interested in mass application and more interested in how our LARPERS in the woods will use it (or fan communities in general). Mapping their behaviors to emerging technologies can be a great exercise in considering what’s next. And now we find ourselves with a sophisticated device that fits in the palm of our hand and enables us to connect the web with our physical location in the world. If you consider the power of tightly connected groups and their obsessions, there’s no limit on what you can offer.
Go to the Loopt Blog to read the full post. I’m becoming rather obsessed with fan communities and their tightly wound connections. I think there is so much we can learn from their socialization and use of technology; and I challenge brands to not spend a dime outside of their fan communities this year. More on that later.
Please help me show Shari some gratitude and leave a comment on the post.
