The radical decentralization of the means of cultural production and distribution it has brought about, that I mentioned in the slidecast in my last post, "Social Begins At Home," has changed the very nature of the audience--of what an audience is.
Until very recently, the means of production were in the hands of the few--governments and large corporations. The audience was functionally passive in its reception of ideas--like Victorian children, it was seen and not heard.
Thus we began to think of it as a target: a location that advertisers wished to bombard with persuasion (appropriating the language and strategies of war), an object to be acted upon, passive and attentive.
We are experiencing the beginning of a new era of culture, created bottom up by the many, not top down by the few. A brand is but one voice among a polyphony, hopefully providing the stimulus for conversations, but unable to dominate them: a brand's share of voice is now to be measured against all the conversations of the Web.
And many of these conversations are made up of other conversations, recombinant constructs built on cultural foundations of other things.
An example, by way of illustration:
This fan made "trailer" for the Thundercats movie is constructed entirely from scenes from other movies that have been rotoscoped.
One of the things that I hear a lot when showing people this kind of thing that is the internet is some variant of "Looks like someone has too much time on their hands."
Clay Shirky has also been confronted with this issue.
He answers a television producer's challenge about active online media, like World of Warcraft, or Wikipedia, thus:
Active consumers are different. If they aren't involved, they aren't interested.
It's the same challenge that people tend to make when thinking about immersive brand experiences, transmedia ideas or ARGs or anything complex that requires a lot from the people we hope to engage.
Of course there are levels of involvement, not every rabbit hole needs to go all the way to Wonderland.
But everything should have gaps for people to fit into--brands don't get, nor should they want, the final word.
The work of Henry Jenkins demonstrates that the "audience" is doing far more than listening. Stephen Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good For You demonstrates the increase in complexity of mainstream media. I stole liberally from both of them when writing my thesis about transmedia planning, which applies their thinking to brand communication.
42 Entertainment's transmedia ARG for The Dark Knight has just picked up numerous accolades at Cannes. For fans of the movie, it allows them to involve themselves in the narrative--it's more extension than promotion.
It seems highly complex, doesn't it? Where do they find the time?
Attention is earned and allocated in vast quantities. The more time you spend, the more you get.
But such layered complexity isn't how the advertising industry has been taught to create. The language of advertising has ever been reductive because we've had to squeeze into smaller spaces, around the outside of other media.
Thanks to the Internet, the great disintermediator, that no longer MUST be the case.
This week, Turkish Airline's issue a pitch brief via a simple social media scavenger hunt.
Instead of issuing a traditional RFP, they sent some agencies a social media treasure map: the tag "thybrief", surrounded by various social media logos.
So across platforms like flickr, tumblr and blogger, clues as to the whereabouts of the pitch brief were hidden.
The team at McCann Turkey followed the clues and cracked the fact that there was a password in the HTML source code of the blog, which got them into the gmail account and google docs, where the pitch brief was waiting.
Whether or not you believe the audience is, and wants to be, active, when clients start to insist their agencies are, we had better listen.
Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at McCann-Erickson New York. Before that he was the Digital Ninja at Naked Communications. He writes and speaks about brands, media, communication, and technology. You can find him all over the Internet, but his blog--Talent Imitates, Genius Steals --and twitter @faris are good places to start.
Social media is so hot right now. At least I think it still is. As I pointed out yesterday, in my blog post, "Cultural Latency," things that get suddenly popular have a tendency to become less interesting just as rapidly.
One variant, or effect, of this idea comes from the consultancy Gartner, who had long spoken about the Hype cycle.
In essence, diminished latency means that everyone hears about a technology way before anyone has worked out what to do with it, so everyone gets disappointed with it and stops paying attention, which gives said technology the breathing room to discover what it is for.
Social media hasn't hit the trough of disillusionment yet. Well, actually, it has, but it has avoided the associated lack of attention through nomenclature legerdemain.
User generated content was all the rage a few years back, but became boring. Then Web 2.0 was very NOW, but no one uses that term any more. Now it's social media--but it's the same thing.
I've dealt with how to approach social media before--you can watch the slidecast below--it's mostly about being nice.
Social grammar and commercial grammar don't mix well, so when brands try to use social spaces to push commercial messages things get ... uncomfortable. Relationships require building before they can be leveraged. You can't ask someone you just met to help you move, or to borrow money. You need to build the relationship first.
So, looking at a short term ROI when assessing the value of social media is antithetical to the emerging reputation and gift economy that operates there. You need to take a longer- term view. Brands need to pay it forward in social spaces.
One of the good things about reputation economics is that it drives people to help other people, especially if they know something you don't. Information is the oldest form of gift--it's the only thing that multiplies the more you give it away, you never lose it yourself.
And this dynamic is really useful, if you can harness it.
One of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently is how to better harness the value of working inside a big agency. When I sat in one room with everyone I worked with, it was easy to know who was good at what and to bounce around ideas. Cross pollination works when there are random micro-interactions all day long.
But when you work with over 1000 people it becomes a little harder to co-mingle, which makes it harder for people to share what they are doing, to hang out, to find out who is great at what, to inspire each other.
But social media is really good at that sort of thing.
I experience ambient intimacy with people from all over the world. Their continual partial presence means I can share what they are doing, hang out with them, get to know what they are into, and ask them for help.
So we are bringing social media into the agency.
We have rolled out an internal suite of social tools to supplement existing work focused collaboration spaces, like Basecamp or Sharepoint, that are more focused on hanging out.
Internal blogs, forums, video sharing, and link sharing so people share what they are in to.
We're using Yammer, an enterprise focused microblogging platform so people can share what they are working on and ask for help, in a way that protects client confidentiality.
We are rolling out one of the first installations an enterprise version of Kluster--a group decision making and ideation platform-- to enable us to better access the creativity and wisdom of the whole agency.
These are experiments in being social at home, to see if the intimacy and gift economics of social media can work inside a corporation.
I believe, fundamentally, that hanging out more makes you nicer and smarter--so I'm confident that it can.
Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at McCann-Erickson New York. Before that he was the Digital Ninja at Naked Communications. He writes and speaks about brands, media, communication, and technology. You can find him all over the Internet, but his blog--Talent Imitates, Genius Steals --and twitter @faris are good places to start.
There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes to distribute something, and the amount of time it takes for that thing to have an effect, and consequently the amount of time that thing stays relevant and interesting.
When music was distributed as sheet music--a literally laborious distribution mechanism--popular hits stayed at the top of the charts for years.
When gramophone reproductions were introduced and became a more popular mechanism for distributing music, the half-life of a hit decreased dramatically.
It decreased again each time formats became easier to distribute, for either technological or structural reasons.
Digital distribution removes many of the friction points within the distribution system--making it more efficient, economically speaking.
But this also leads to far more rapid cultural decay rates--sales charts now are driven almost exclusively by novelty--top selling DVDs are just what came out that week.
In gaming, and network based computing in general, the term that describes the lag between a cause and effect, between the moment when something is initiated and the moment one of the effects, can be perceived is called latency.
The lower the latency, the faster the distant computer responds, the faster you see an effect and can respond and so on. This is a good thing--it means you don't get killed in the game because your character didn't move when you told him to.
As communication technologies become faster and more pervasive, the latency of culture is actually decreasing.
The speed at which people could move used to be the speed at which information traveled--hence the guy who ran the marathon.
Then people on horseback became the speed at which information traveled: the speed at which messages could traverse distances put a limit on the latency of culture, which in turn tended to mean things changed more slowly.
Email enabled messages to travel at the speed of light. This led to things moving faster, things changing faster.
But email is one to one--even if you send it to many people, no one oversees it, which puts a limit on the reduction in cultural latency--and it used to be limited to the desktop.
Now we have millions of eyes all connected to a real-time micro broadcast messaging platform via a mobile device they have with them at all times, and a social eagerness to demonstrate primacy.
Cultural latency is nearing zero, at least in the more connected parts of the world.
Which is going to have some interesting effects, because it creates much faster feedback loops--information, once delivered, is both a reported effect and a subsequent cause, which triggers more effects.
A number of recent events highlight the effects of diminished latency. Swine flu went from unknown, to hysteria, to uninteresting in days. The protests in Iran found a way to reach the world and garner support thanks to twitter--the reactions and support galvanized the populace to continue because they could get real-time responses from the world. The death of Michael Jackson triggered moonwalking flashmobs in London the very same day.
But the Thriller flashmob in Times Square failed to materialize. Jeff Goldblum was forced to confirm his ongoing vitality. Rumor becomes truth after a certain number of reproductions, which can now happen in a heartbeat.
Diminished cultural latency means that the propagation of information is so fast that the spread itself becomes the defining aspect of the system: the rate-of-spread becomes as important as the information itself.
It is in this quick fire culture that the commercial meaning makers--brands and their agents--must operate. In line with the increasing cultural decay rates, the speed of advertising must increase in step--more things must be created more often, to maintain the salience of even a few years ago.
Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at McCann-Erickson New York. Before that he was the Digital Ninja at Naked Communications. He writes and speaks about brands, media, communication, and technology. You can find him all over the Internet, but his blog--Talent Imitates, Genius Steals --and twitter @faris are good places to start.
Language is in a state of constant flux, evolving at the edges, occasionally ruptured by dramatic and rapid changes in culture. It contains fossils and fractures that hint at what has been or will be important.
The word "computer" provides a convenient example. The first computers were all female, not in the anthropomorphic sense that boats are, but because they were all women, using slide rules to do calculations before we had "difference engines" [which are what evolved into the computers of today].
Within the communication industry [formerly known as advertising], language is rapidly evolving in response to dramatic changes in the context we operate in.
Job titles are an obvious example.
Over last couple of years new roles for geeks have come into existence within agencies: content strategist, social media something, creative technologist, user experience designers, developers, digital ninjas and chief technology strategists, [ahem] to help us service the growing need to understand and connect to consumers enabled by technology.
The word technology itself is subject to semantic drift. It comes from the Greek technologia: "saying" through "craft." Douglas Adams, author and famous technophile, summed up the recent tension in it well:
"Technology is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet."
In some sense, that's how the word is used in my job title. It doesn't refer to normalized communication technologies, such as writing, or television, but emerging technologies that we don't fully understand yet.
Adams pointed out why this was:
"There's a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you'll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
The "natural order of things" for the communication industry is perhaps best reflected in awards that were handed out last week at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, where the great give Lions to the best of the last year, hinting at their hopes for the future.
The big winners all had technology at their core. Obama won the Grand Prix in the Titanium category--created to celebrate breakthrough ideas that point to a new direction--for a campaign enabled by social media and crowd-sourced participation.
From a more traditional brand, the Whopper Sacrifice, a Facebook application that allowed users to receive a free Whopper for every ten friends they got rid of, also got gold.
The Cyber category is both fossil and prophet [William Gibson's neologism "cyberspace" has long since fallen out of usage].
The winners here included the Fiat Eco-Drive, an interactive tool that pulls data from your car and visualizes it to help you drive more efficiently, and Queensland Tourism's "Best Job in the World," which promoted the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef to the world by advertising a job looking after one. Small recruitment ads drove people to a website where they had to submit a video application--1.4 million people did so.
Perhaps most telling is the Film category, which, unlike Radio and Press, no longer conflates content with delivery platform. Last year, the category was expanded to include "other screens."
This year, for the first time, the Grand Prix was awarded to a film that has never been shown on television. Philips "Carousel" is an interactive Web film that promotes their new cinema-ratio televisions with a single tracking shot through a frozen explosion.
This is film designed for the Web, where attention must be earned, where narrative is no longer entirely linear, where technology, whatever that might mean, is helping us say things in new ways, with new craft.
Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at McCann-Erickson New York. Before that he was the Digital Ninja at Naked Communications. He writes and speaks about brands, media, communication, and technology. You can find him all over the Internet, but his blog--Talent Imitates, Genius Steals --and twitter @faris are good places to start.
The radical decentralization of the means of cultural production and distribution it has brought about, that I mentioned in the slidecast in my last post, "Social Begins At Home," has changed the very nature of the audience--of what an audience is.
Faris is Chief Technology Strategist at McCann-Erickson New York. Before that he was the Digital Ninja at Naked Communications. He writes and speaks about brands, media, communication, and technology. You can find him all over the Internet, but his blog--Talent Imitates, Genius Steals --and twitter @faris are good places to start.
One variant, or effect, of this idea comes from the consultancy Gartner, who had long spoken about the 
There is a correlation between the amount of time it takes to distribute something, and the amount of time it takes for that thing to have an effect, and consequently the amount of time that thing stays relevant and interesting.
As communication technologies become faster and more pervasive, the latency of culture is actually decreasing.
