fans: lead users

22 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments

Eric von Hippel coined the term ‘lead user’ in 1986 while identifying sources of innovation. According to von Hippel, a lead user was a user that exhibited novel behaviors by being both an early adopter of technology and an early adapter of technology. These are people who are quick to join a new platform and adapt that platform and other existing technology in unforeseen ways. von Hippel asserts that these users are important to focus on because they may demonstrate adaptations that could spread to the wider population.

In Fanning the Audience’s Flame, (Ford, Jenkins, and others) the team writes that fans are often lead users for media properties and that “lead users are valuable to understand because their tastes anticipate untapped potentials within the marketplace.” (p 23) The team explains how fans and their efforts have helped science fiction programs like Lost which work on long and complex narrative threads sustain themselves when sci-fi was once entirely episodic:

“Today, writers such as Steven Johnson and C3 faculty advisor Jason Mittell argue that American television has reached an unprecedented level of narrative complexity and that some of the most successful shows on television – Lost (ABC, 2003-present), for example – are structured more like cult series than like mainstream hits of the past decade. The success of these series suggest that narrative complexity is no longer a niche interest, one which rewards fan mastery, but is now something all consumers demand of popular entertainment.”

Ford, Jenkins, and the team go on to recommend that fan communities should be studied closely to monitor for emerging trends, behaviors, and ways to treat media content that will quickly spread from niche culture into the mainstream.

As a witness to fans crafting fan fiction for the AMC drama Mad Men using Twitter, I’ve seen fans as lead users firsthand. Now Twitter is full of fictional characters for everything from media properties, famous novels, and even :30 spots. Fans from the Mad Men escapade have even started their own agency to provide similar efforts for other properties.

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.

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: will they go along for the ride?

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

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.

fans: the new consumers

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public

- Jenkins, Henry (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: josh green

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Josh Green is a postdoctoral researcher at the Comparative Media Studies Program and formerly Research Manager of the Convergence Culture Consortium with Henry Jenkins. (and Josh, if I butchered your credentials yet again, I apologize) Most of the really interesting quotes/factoids I’m publishing this week were gleaned from a stack of papers Josh recommended I read. (and some were from the man himself) You should follow Josh. Nay, you should stalk Josh, or dangle him upside down until his thoughts on the future of the web and entertainment fall out. He’s a brilliant chap and worthy of your time and attention.

Also, Josh is Australian, and I usually don’t trust Australians. So that should say it all right there.

Find Josh across the web:

• Josh Green on Twitter
• His wordpress blog, a thing of weight and mass
• His Tumblr (a small thing of weight and mass)
  
• His soon to be published book on YouTube (and really, a success for all Australians out there)

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: media consumption

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Patterns of media consumption have been profoundly altered by new media technologies that enable us to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content. An increasingly more digitally enabled and media literate population has taken tools once the reserve of professional media producers and made reworking photographs, video, and music a routine practice. The “remixability” of media content, shared platforms for the distribution of grassroots media, and the social networks that have grown up around media properties are reshaping audience expectations about the entertainment experience.

- Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins, The Moral Economy of Web 2.0:
Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: wealth production

21 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, fans were emblematic of audience resistance (Jenkins,1992; Fiske, 1989), understood as actively appropriating and transforming mass media content as raw materials for their own cultural productions.  Mass media depicted fans as living in the shadows of mass culture (if not the basements of their parent’s suburban split-level houses), and media companies saw their tastes and concerns as “unrepresentative” of the general population. By the early 21st century, fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued, if still imperfectly understood, by media companies interested in adopting Web 2.0 strategies of user-generated content, social networks, and “harness[ing] collective intelligence.”

- O’Reilly, 2005

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: our song

20 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

How do we separate out the positive evaluation of the “poacher” among academics and the negative assessment of “infringers” within the media industry? Both terms read the relationship in antagonistic or destructive rather than constructive terms. Instead, the Convergence Culture Consortium encourages a new model which emphasizes fans’ emotional capital, a term borrowed from a talk by Coca-Cola CEO Steven Heyer. We might think of emotional capital as the affective investments consumers make in favored cultural materials. For example, when a young couple says, “They are playing our song,” the “our” in that sentence is important: it describes an emotional relationship to the music which grew out of their unique memories and interpretations. For most people, the song remains in the background; for them, the song takes on special significance in their lives. The song becomes their emotional capital.

- Sam Ford with Jenkins, H., McCracken, G., Shahani, P., Askwith, I., Long, G., & Vedrashko, I. (2006) Fanning the Audience’s Flames: Ten Ways to Embrace and Cultivate Fan Communities.

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: will we earn any?

20 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

I met with some damn savvy TV folks last week and the conversation fell upon predicting if upcoming shows will earn fans (and to what extent). While we all knew that ultimately, quality content draws a crowd, there are some ways of thinking about types of television fandom and what fans have been drawn to in the past.

According to Kaarina Nikunen, a Finnish researcher, there are three types of television fandom:

Trend Fandom – this is when an active fan community pops up around a popular property (that is sometimes benefiting from a rising trend, eg. ‘reality television’), novelty plays a big part here, hence it is often short lived… look at American Idol, Survivor, Ally McBeal, etc.

Star Fandom – this is when the focus of fandom is centered on the celebrity or star of the show, and this is most often a community that follows said celebrity from entertainment property to entertainment property

Cult Fandom – this often involves a fan community participating at much more elaborate levels for a property that is typically marginal to the rest of culture. Think Xena, Warrior Princess. Cult fandom communities often socialize in these groups because they gain validation that is especially awarded among other like-minded fans

In addition to Nikunen’s work, at SxSW Henry Jenkins talked a bit about popular fan formulas among TV properties. He gave the following two examples for character ensembles:

Star Trek – the group of characters struggling to uphold certain societal values or protect a way of life (Lord of the Rings also fits here)

X-Files – two characters, that play off of each other, combat and or protect one another, against outside forces (Beauty and the Beast, too)

Now, even though both were specifically referenced for television fandom, it’s clear that some concepts can be translated into the world of brands and products. Let’s take Apple as an example. Steve Jobs surely benefits from a bit of Star Fandom. His celebrity is followed and closely monitored. And before its most recent resurgence, Apple was marginal to culture at large, and enjoyed some Cult Fandom. Other brands that jump to mind… Tom’s Shoes could be experiencing Trend Fandom as doing ‘good’ is becoming more popular… The crew at 37Signals, makers of Basecamp, resemble the Star Trek ensemble of characters fighting to uphold certain ideals about work and productivity…

Beyond these elements, 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. For example, the new Stargate show will need to court fans of the existing platform, along with fan communities inside sci-fi programming; specifically fans of shows that work on the same attributes (themes, character ensembles, celebrities, etc).

If you’ve got a new show or product and can’t name any pre-existing fan communities that you could court, most likely you’ll have trouble finding and earning fans.

This post is part of my week dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: wack-a-mole

20 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Engaging and promoting fan engagement offers media companies a more positive outcome than attempting the wack-a-mole game of trying to quash grassroots appropriation wherever it arises. Doing so also brings corporations into direct contact with lead users, revealing new markets and unanticipated uses.

- Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins, The Moral Economy of Web 2.0:
Audience Research and Convergence Culture

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

a week dedicated to fans and the future

19 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments

I don’t write TV spots. I don’t design packaging. I don’t re-organize supply chains or help your sales team close more deals. I help giant global companies speak digital. In the past, I’ve written about what I do, but this week I’m focusing on the how and why.

Speaking digital means realizing digital media isn’t mass media. It’s about courting numerous existing communities in relevant, useful, and respectful ways.

This is digital marketing vs the marketing of yore…

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.

I’ll be spending all week posting my thoughts on the future of fans and digital marketing here. I hope you stop by and join in on the conversation. Let me know if there’s something specific I can dive into.