fans: choose your own adventure

23 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Something’s missing here; the road most taken: calling your lawyer.

Treat your fan communities like the most valuable research project you’ve got – because they are. Give them space and give yourself time to take it all in. And when you’re ready to engage them, when you have something to offer them, court them wisely – as partners.

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.

fans: copyright

22 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Corporations will allow the public to participate in the construction and representation of its creations or they will, eventually, compromise the commercial value of their properties. The new consumer will help create value or they will refuse it. Corporations have a right to keep copyright but they have an interest in releasing it. The economics of scarcity may dictate the first. Th e economics of plenitude dictate the second.

- Grant McCracken, Plenitude: Culture by Commotion (1997)

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

fans: lost control

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

Mark Deuze has suggested at least two reasons why production companies get anxious around such [fan] activities: the creative department’s desire for creative control, the legal department’s concerns about controlling copyright. Here, we can add a third: the promotional department’s fears about losing control over their brand message. Of the three, the last is perhaps the most absurd, since in reality, these companies lost control a long time ago; the fans can do pretty much anything they want with these brands and with a high level of visibility and going after them is a bit like Brier Rabbit pummeling away at the tar baby. Yet, even pretty innovative companies are getting trapped in the internal politics around television production and promotion, incapable of forming meaningful partnerships with their most active and visible fans, and thus almost certain to start acting in ways that are going to leave them, to continue the metaphor, looking “stuck up”.

- Henry Jenkins (2009). Going “Mad”: Creating Fan Fiction 140 Characters at a Time

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

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.