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.

5 themes from sxsw

25 Mar, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

SxSW Interactive ended a week ago and I’m still recovering. It was great being back in Austin and it was especially awesome meeting people IRL I only knew from the internet. My panel, on location based mobile advertising, went well. Sam from Loopt is incredibly knowledgeable about the space, and aside from my ‘brands have to relearn how to earn customers’ shtick, I think the attendees got a great dose of knowledge from him. A special thanks to Shari Doherty (of Loopt) for asking me to join the panel, and to Hugh Forrest (of SxSW) for running such a smooth and efficient conference.

In truth, there are two conferences at work at SxSW Interactive – the one with the panels, and the one with the parties. I attended the panels. I’d like to share a few common themes I heard while I was there…

1) Brands court communities, they do not create them. I caught the Henry Jenkins double feature and was toting his eight part series on Spreadable Media during the conference, and this was a powerful message. Even highly successful media properties draw their viewership from an amalgamation of clustered communities. If you really want to be successful, you’ll recognize this and mine those communities to better understand how they operate and the culture that ties them together. While at SxSW, Henry did a quick podcast that’s worth your time.

2) The journey is the thing that matters. Jim Coudal moderated a great panel on how to involve people in your process, not just the end product. (I’m a Coudal superfan – I was taking notes in a Field Notes prototype book I got at their SEED conference) Filmmaker Gary Hustwit of Helvetica fame talked a good deal about opening up the experience of making his films, and telling the story of its creation, to his audience. For example, Gary sells posters for his films before he even begins making them. He sells the idea first and in turn generates the capital to make it. People like to dream about stuff that doesn’t exist yet; and the idea of it is usually the sexiest part.

3) Help people use their brains. Brendan Dawes sat on Coudal’s panel too, and showed off DoodleBuzz, a news powered experience he built. The interface intentionally leaves you hanging until you gather the courage to try something different, in this case doodle. Gary Hustwit also talked about how his editor tries to ensure his films are 15 seconds ahead of the audience. Lost does this. Apple is really good at this, too. Ultimately, you have to juggle the risk for reward; the payoff for participation is critical.

4) Long is the untapped market. Every conversation about advertising and marketing (good or bad) revolved around flashes in the pan. Maybe being the douchebags we are, that’s all we pay close attention to, but it seems like there’s an awesome opportunity for a brand to make waves by being committed to long term, always-on, engagement.

5) Location awareness is in. A day or so before my panel, this post about 4 new or updated location aware mobile apps dropped. Pepsi (a client) built their Zeitgeist twitter visualization with a keen understanding that most people at SxSW use Twitter to broadcast location as much as their actions or feelings. Uwe Hook, the moderator of our panel maybe put it best, (I’m approximating) “it used to be ‘what are you doing?’ now it’s ‘where are doing what?’” All in all, it was a great build for our panel, I heard there was a line out the door, and the super spectacular folks that joined us were engaged and asked some phenomenal questions. (anyone that attended, you are the wind beneath my wings)

you are what you link

18 Mar, 2009 • posts i've written • 5 comments

I took the time on the flight back from SxSW to digest Henry Jenkins’ eight part series on Spreadable Media.  In the digital world it may be considered a hefty tome, but it’s an incredibly thought provoking piece of academic research (so read it). I also had the pleasure of meeting Henry at SxSW, albeit briefly.

In lieu of writing a cliff notes version of Henry’s work, I want to instead focus on the creation of one’s identity online (a key component of Henry’s studies). SxSW is a conference for marketers and advertisers; and this year I found the dialogue very much concerned with the consumer as means for distributing a brand’s marketing message.

From my own perspective, I’ve seen about three dozen too many powerpoint slides with the words, ‘Viral Video Concepts’ written across the top. I’ve heard far too many marketing managers speak about their next viral campaign as if their work was already complete. And I’ve watched far too many brands chase the next platform or piece of technology. I know you’re fed up too.

In truth, this fatigue is all our own doing. We’ve looked for easy answers, and we’ve fabricated for ourselves a false panacea. It’s time we ween ourselves from this idea of a ‘viral’ mechanism. Ideas (and marketing messages) do not self replicate. The mechanism of mobility does not lie within the message itself; your youtube video does not pluck itself from one pair of eyeballs to another. There’s a human hand at work here –  a human hand we have ignored for far too long.

Like a crime novel detective, understanding motive is critical. We must investigate our subject’s motive if we’re to better understand why messages spread. In the digital realm, rarely is our consumption or sharing of media invisible to our social graph. Particularly, our sharing of media is a conscious one; and the spread of these messages is intrinsic to establishing our own identity. As we’re prone to do, we’ve applied a myopic focus to the effect or end result, and have completely ignored the root cause.

Our identity among our peers is defined by our use of messages and the meanings we construct together. It’s critically important to understand that the meaning of these devices (or messages) is created by both the individual and the observer; and that controlling meaning (by the publisher) is impossible (and a waste of a scarce resource, time).

In Henry’s research, he extrapolates various motives for why people spread media:

• They are doing so because the brand expresses something about themselves or their community.
• They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.
• They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.
• They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.

Clearly, there is a complex decision making process happening when people spread media. It can no longer be said that content is ‘viral’ or memetic.

Talking about memes and viral media places an emphasis on the replication of the original idea, which fails to consider the everyday reality of communication — that ideas get transformed, repurposed, or distorted as they pass from hand to hand, a process which has been accelerated as we move into network culture.

Henry also goes on to speak about how media starts as a cultural commodity; and through the process of spreading, media can become a cultural resource – but only when we choose to give it to someone else. Thus, we are what we link. We are what we choose to spread; what we consciously decide to give to others. Through this process of spreading media we make meaning among those resources and ourselves. And we’re constantly in the process of defining our identity among the various networks in which we participate.

As a marketer, this completely negates our previous strategies of fixating purely on the content; sprinkle in this, make that joke, get this celebrity, etc.

We must begin to focus once again on the people we wish to affect, and the networks and cultures in which they participate.

We must create more using less.

Here I’ve specifically excluded content strategies from the discussion, although Henry’s work includes detailed discussion on the matter; have a read.

mad recognition

28 Jan, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

What a week! First off, Henry Jenkins himself, the father of Convergence Culture, posted an entry about my report into my time as one of the Mad Men characters on Twitter. And then New York Magazine online picked it up and wrote a little ditty.

I’m pretty elated by Henry’s recognition of my blood, sweat, and welling of tears. Henry’s work, along with the work of his research assistants and students, is absolutely essential to the future of entertainment and culture (and more importantly to me, Henry has given me immeasurable inspiration). Beyond my mere involvement, I’m excited at how much attention fan work is receiving these days. It’s a good sign of the times. But it means there’s so much more to do and say and explore. Are you game?

After Henry posted his thoughts, a representative of Deep Focus quickly commented on the piece. Although I disagree with some of what he said, he was absolutely right by pointing out the hard work of the other Mad Men characters. If they do ever choose to reveal themselves publicly, I hope they finally can receive the personal recognition they deserve. You guys and gals really did blow me away.

I guess I need to add a press page to my site. I’m kind of a big deal on the internet now.