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Are you prepared for the power of the Blogoshere?

Power of the Blogoshere

Thirty years ago US anchorman, Walter Cronkite, would end his hourly news broadcast to the nation by saying, 'and that's the way it is'.

Cronkite was the daily voice of gospel truth, and America was duly grateful. How very different it is today.

Where and how we get and consume information is in stark contrast. We no longer live in a linear command-and-control society. For all businesses the implications are significant because financial scandal, political spin-doctoring and the erosion of our faith in institutions has led us to scrutinise the motive behind the message.

And as choice explodes and differences between products erode, how have we now learned to shop? We've learned to search online and speak to our peers first.

Research by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young in October 2003 found that 17% of car buyers say they were influenced by television ads, while 71% claim to be influenced by word of mouth. And a Nokia Monitor research project in 2004 found that 49% of mobile buyers said they were influenced by word of mouth and, crucially, the decision-making has reduced from six weeks to six days. The effects of television advertising are constantly debated; the strong influence of word of mouth is indisputable.

And if our friends don't know the answers, the increasing penetration of the internet, coupled with increasingly cheap bandwidth, has become our means to search for more credible, authoritative sources of information. Consumers have learned to be more discerning and less trusting, and not surprisingly we actively seek sources of information we trust. That is why 27% of Americans now read blogs and 77% of Americans seek their primary news online.

The Internet As A Social Phenomenon: The Rise Of The Blog

In many ways the internet is not so much a technology as a social phenomenon. For example, recent years have seen the rise of community rating sites such as Epinions, where you can read marks out of 10 for everything from well-being medicines to the latest movies; or the creation of 'folksonomies' such as flickr.com, with its social tags system; or travelpost.com, a community site for those travelling the world, with '174,238+ unbiased hotel reviews, travel journals, photos and itineraries'. These sites offer co-created, unfiltered, authentic – and therefore more credible – information.

And like World of Warcraft or Desert Combat (massive multiplayer online role-player games), all these sites have connectivity of one to one and many to many. They are constantly updated or modified with new content. They have built an interested and passionate community and are also successful commercial models.

The social phenomenon of the internet goes further. For example, last year blogging toppled leading media icons like CBS anchorman Dan Rather. Another casualty Jason Eason, Chief News Director of CNN, was forced to resign by blogger over remarks made at Davos.

On the plus side, blogging showcases how enlightened companies have embraced the social phenomenon of the internet. Bob lutz, vice chairman at gm, blogs on the gm fast lane blog. Jonathan schwartz, coo of sun microsystems and himself a blogger, believes that the 1000 bloggers at sun have done more for his company than a billion-dollar advertising campaign ever could.

Staying in the corporate world, the Boeing Design Team, with 120,000 members, is another example of how a corporation has harnessed the collective intellect of many people – in this case those who are seriously interested in aircraft and aviation. These people are spread across the globe and are constantly in touch with Boeing, sharing and discussing information about the future development of its aircraft. The maxim that 'nobody is as clever as everybody' is never truer than here.

A more home-grown example is Jamie Oliver's school dinner crusade, the tale of one man's passionate belief that we should stop feeding our children junk food in schools. The campaign translated into the social phenomenon termed a 'community of interest'. The television programme Jamie's School Dinners motivated people to respond in a number of ways: 230,000 signatures delivered in a petition to 10 Downing Street; the creation of worldwide online forums via Jamie's blogsite; an ongoing debate globally about what we feed our children.

Adriana Cronin-Lucas, co-founder of the Big Blog Company, says that the internet is not a channel itself, but is causing other channels to leak and bleed 'content'. This will become more profound as the internet increasingly converges with mobile devices.

The threat to companies from the revolution in media consumption

The internet, combined with broadband, essentially changes everything. It changes the way customers can access information and changes the way they use it. It changes the way businesses can communicate with their customers and how they get to market. It changes the channels that link businesses, customers, suppliers and employees. It offers opportunity and it offers your once helpless competitors the chance to radically rethink their business strategies and attack vital parts of your business model.

Professor Anthony Hopwood of the Säid Business School in Oxford believes that there has been a fundamental structural change in the way we consume information and content. Rupert Murdoch, speaking to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April 2005, reinforced the point:

'What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don't want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don't want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what's important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don't want news presented as gospel.'

Murdoch states that where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today only half do. For younger readers the figures are even worse.

So what has happened to 18-24 year olds' usage of traditional media like television and newspapers?
The answer is they are early adopters of new media. New media includes the internet, picture phones, instant messaging, blogging, cell phones, MP3 players, satellite radio, text messaging, TiVo/Replay and broadband TV, and web radio.

But it's not only the news industry that is feeling the pre-tremors of the volcanic eruption that technology is about to unleash. In a Royal Television Society Flemming Memorial Lecture in 2004, Ofcom chairman Lord Currie predicted that over the next 10 years audiences will move away from the linear, scheduled world where a relatively limited number of distributors push their content at the viewer: 'We will instead enter a world where content is increasingly delivered through internet-protocol-based networks that are non-linear, on-demand and entirely self-scheduled. In that world, the viewer – not the broadcaster – will decide what is consumed and how.'

BT's announcement in July 2005 that it is to launch an iPTV channel in conjunction with Microsoft demonstrates exactly what Lord Currie means as technology goes up through the gears. iPTV aggregates and amplifies this fundamental change in how we collect, edit and consume information, and share it with our friends.

More people talking to each other more often: connected communities

Howard Rheingold, author of Smartmobs, believes that the mobile phone amplifies people's talents for co-operation. The internet amplifies human interaction. That is why MTV has recently launched two broadband channels while AOL has created a partnered multimedia production company that will accelerate its live entertainment events online, as well as for TV, cell phones and other media platforms.

Internet and broadband has put the 'me' into media, and Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine resurrects the McLuhan distinction between hot and cold media. Traditional mass-media one-way channels are cold media, whereas community sites like Wikipedia, blogs and commercial online enterprises like eBay, Amazon, and so on, are hot media – vital, emergent and social, with two-way flows of communication.

To put this in context, July's tragic bombings in London demonstrated how far we have come in how we collect, share, create and disseminate information. Newsweek (9 July 2005) describes the most dramatic example of this:

'The biggest story on Thursday was Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia that internet users around the world freely add to and edit. Yesterday's entry on the London bombings was amended, edited and updated by hundreds of readers no fewer than 2,800 times throughout the day. The entry has photographs, detailed time-lines, contact numbers, a complete translated statement by the jihadist group claiming responsibility for the attacks and links to other Wikipedia entries.'

The first video pictures broadcast from CNN came from a citizen journalist, as did many images broadcast by the BBC.

The BBC, no slouch these days, has understood the implications for its organisation. It has, for example, taken a 'pioneering new approach to public access rights in the digital age' with the Creative Archive Project. The project will allow British residents to download clips of BBC factual programmes from the BBC website for non-commercial use, keep them on their computers, manipulate and share them, thereby making the BBC archives more accessible to licence-fee payers. In the next phase of the project the Creative Archive will make 100 hours of BBC content available.

To see how connected communities are generating a paradigm shift in how businesses can connect and co-create value with their audiences, we look to Korea and the online newspaper, OhMyNews. OhMyNewsis the third largest newspaper in Korea, but the salient feature is that it has 26,000 citizen reporters who contribute to the newspaper. Get your story published and you receive US$20 and your name in print. Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine:

'With OhMyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves.'

The Guardian (which has its own blog) has described it as the world's most domestically powerful news site and a South Korean diplomat was quoted as saying that no policy-maker can now ignore OhMyNews.

Information flows are transforming business models

Alan Mitchell believes that eBay, Yahoo! Social Search, SMS messaging and Skype in telecoms, music file sharing, Wikipedia and OhMyNews all show how enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows can transform business models. Companies need to understand that today value lies with the consumer, not the other way round.

Mitchell is supported by Simon London, writing for the Financial Times (Monday 27 June 2005), who said:

'In business as in art, we live in a post-modern era. Old certainties are being demolished and relationships redefined. Everything you thought about business has been upended. The relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The old notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded as passé by management theorists.'

In its cover story entitled 'The Power of Us' (20 June 2005), Business Week said that community power is the biggest change business companies have faced since the Industrial Age. In context, that means bigger than the telephone, TV, credit cards, the PC and the internet. The Economist, in its cover story 'Crowned at Last' (2 April 2005), said:

'Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Only those firms ready and able to serve these new customers will survive.'

Peer-to-peer communication is the life force of communities – the rapid emergence and convergence of the mobile phone and the internet means that we suddenly have access to our peers, our friends, our colleagues and family members. We are becoming used to living in a connected age where we naturally draw on our participation in various networks for assistance, information and support.

An object lesson: goodnight kryptonite

Kryptonite is a global brand that produces D-locks for bikes, scooters and motorcycles, with a global reputation of being theft-proof. But in early 2004 a film was released via the internet that demonstrated how these locks could be undone using a simple Bic ballpoint pen cap. The news travelled through the blogosphere and into mainstream media. Within weeks the business was on its knees, deluged with complaints from very unhappy customers. A global recall was instigated and the company lost tens of millions of dollars.

The Kryptonite case offers a masterclass in what can and will increasingly happen to brands and businesses that do not deliver on the product or service promise, or consequently fail to engage in dialogue with their customers.

Traditional marketing has become adversarial

The problem for businesses and marketers is that, in the eyes of everyday people, traditional marketing has become adversarial. Customers have changed and adapted to this modern, continuously connected, media-fragmented world. They seek value by searching for themselves, and are not waiting for you to interrupt them with unwanted messaging. They look to their peers for voices of authority. They are in effect doing it for themselves.

Some companies are responding to consumer power simply by focusing more energy through traditional marketing channels. But one can no longer take a one-way broadcast or a monopoly approach in a consumer-empowered world, because the internet, and increasingly the mobile phone, has fundamentally changed this.

The harsh reality for all businesses today is that they need to change the way they think about marketing and marketing communication strategies. And the notion of mass media is fast becoming an oxymoron.

There is a new language to describe the behaviour of modern consumer culture. Its vocabulary includes terms such as flexibility, fluidity, portability, permeability, transparency, interactivity, immediacy and peer-to-peer networks.

So what are the implications for companies as a consequence of these developments? They need to ask themselves the following questions.

  • Are our products and services the very best they can be?
  • How can we support our 21st-century consumers in a real and credible way?
  • How can we facilitate positive co-creation?
  • Does our current operational structure allow us to support this?
  • Are we engaging our audience or are we overly transmitting to them?
  • Can we deliver a genuinely valuable experience across multiple platforms?
  • Do we have the metrics to support such initiatives?
  • How can we align everything we do to deliver enhanced customer advocacy?
  • How can we become a dynamic engaging brand that is true to ourselves and true to our customers?
  • Can we continue to accept mediocrity?

Although Apple has only a tiny percentage of the market, it has consistently punched above its weight and, importantly, made the Apple brand matter. Here is not the place to debate the long-term future of the company. However, its ethos is simple, and we can all draw lessons.

  • Create an experience not an artefact.
  • Honour context.
  • Prioritise your messages.
  • Institute consistency.
  • Design for change.
  • Do not forget the human element.

All marketing interaction should deliver an experience that actively and positively links customers, media and brand in relevant and meaningful ways. Brand experience replaces broadcasting in its broadest sense.


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