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 • 3 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: 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: 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.