Can Brands Enable Social Engagement?

MediaPost has a great article given by J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich Partners, entitled Productivity: Meet, Greet, Then Market.

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a context for people to engage with one another. People don’t want to see ads; they want to see their friends. And while they’re doing so, they’ll do business as well....Instead of isolating people into private experiences shared with no one else or clustering people into closed communities of narrow interests, the Internet is bringing people together in new and unprecedented ways.

...

(What makes for) the killer app isn’t Fox’s online content; it’s social engagement at MySpace.com. Social engagement is the platform on which business can be done.

I love reading how the advertising industry talks to inself. Overall I see the industry having a very hard time dealing with the web and finding ways to engage with people and charge for that engagement. Mostly existing tactics have been ported from existing media.

The article does hit a couple of good grounders identifying the new value drivers online but it misses the home runs:

• social engagement is not the ‘latest killer app,’ it’s not an app. Social engagement is what we do as humans. The web just allows people to do what they want in new ways and at different scales.
• people are most locked into experiences not by the interface or subscription fees or the data that they have invested in a site and will have to reinvest in another site, which is painful, if they make a switch, but by other people. And not just by volume but by quality. What’s quality? It’s different for each of us, that’s what makes it interesting.
• “...where people are engaged and interacting, they’ll do business, too.” Only if that same place meets their needs. I use Flickr to store and share my photos. But if I wanted to print them in an album and Flickr only offered a subpar option, I’d take my photos elsewhere to have them developed into an album. Portability is here and the people formerly known as audience know it.
• “There’s a new appreciation that people like talking to other people, not to brands. In fact, at Yankelovich we’ve documented how little people want to be marketed to these days.” People talk to brands? The reason advertising is in such deep decay is that people in the industry say and write these kinds of things. If no one hears a brand in a forest, does it exist?
• “Technological advances always increase control, but in the past this has mostly been an increase in collective rather than individual control.” Wrong. Almost all recent (the last 20 years) computer technology has been focused on serving the interests of organizations because they were the ones buying it and that’s what they wanted. The shift to enabling individuals to do things with computer technology (task enabling) from enabling organizations to control their employees (control enabling) is what I see as the biggest shift in what is collectively called Web 2.0. The best delineation I’ve encountered of task-enabling technology versus power-enabling technology is in Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology. Read it and you’ll see.

As a personal anecdote, I recently stopped using Yahoo as my RSS reader. I had been thinking about it for awhile but waffled on moving because I’d invested my time in subscribing to over 100 feeds. I had no way to export them so I kept using Yahoo and I kept hating Yahoo for giving me no way to export them. Then I reached a tipping point and it became worth it to move all those feeds to Bloglines. Why? So that I could create a blogroll like the one you see to the left under Leading Readings.

SFU Summer New Media Workshops

(Cross posted from my Up in Ontario blog.)

Thanks to the lovely and smart Monique I now know a little more about the SFU Summer New Media Workshops that are coming up this summer, July 31 to August 2. I’ll also ‘fess up and tell you that I’ll be speaking on Day 4: Getting the Money to Flow, though my bio has appeared yet.

Now that you know I’m biased, I’ll press on.

I know a number of the other presenters at the workshops, and if you’re looking for some great sessions to learn about new media, the web and what’s going on in this crazy networked world, the workshops will be a great chance to learn and participate. The folks leading the sessions live and breathe the web and will be great resources. Some of them presented at the recent Northern Voice conference and a number of others attended as partcipants. I know, I paid to be there to watch the whole thing go down.

So if you’re looking for an opportunity to hang out and learn with some of the leading webby geeks in Vancouver, I recommend the SFU Summer New Media Workshops. And if you or the company you represent have a budget for education / career development, I can’t think of a better opportunity to turn those allocated dollars into excellent learnings. The days are structured so you can concentrate on a particular area of expertise, or attend for the duration to get the grand sweep of the web.

• Day 1: The Future and the Now: The death of the desktop paradigm seems finally to be at hand. In its place is a networked computing environment with unprecedented reach. How are today’s enterprises using this environment? Learn from the experts about the different ways you can reach your audience, navigate standards and trends, create online community and get involved in social networking, understand the new world of digital identity, and explore the web as an emerging application platform.

• Day 2: What Counts as Content Anymore?: Questions around digital content run the gamut from traditional publication concerns of writing, editing and graphic design to live data, multipart conversations, anycasting, and personal identity management. How do creators deal with a world beyond the page? What are the skills and concepts you need to effectively create, manage, and deliver content online today?

• Day 3: Exploring New Formats: Blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, and aggregators present a host of new opportunities for bringing content and audiences together in different ways. This workshop gives you the opportunity to find out how these emerging formats and genres can work in your context, and what you need to be doing to make them work. Who has a successful online presence and what are they doing?

• Day 4: Getting the Money to Flow: Money has indeed returned to the online world, but it’s not the nineties anymore; there are new rules in play. The three mainstays of revenue generation are online retail, advertising, and subscription, but how are these shifting in the light of software-as-a-service, blog- and search-based branding, and ad networks? We look at the numbers, evaluate the strategies, and help you figure out how to make revenues flow your way.

If you have any questions about the workshops, let me know either in the comments of this post or by email and I’ll see what I can do to get them answered. Hope to see you there!

Work Industries Test Post

Please bear with us while we sort out the details of the very promising Expression Engine software and the Work Industries identity. On this website we intend to practice what we preach: iterate in the wild, deliver in quick cycles, take risks and think about the big picture while executing the fine details.

All feedback is welcome. I’m looking forward to the ride.

~James Sherrett, President, Work Industries