Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

David Armano posted a terrific entry last week in which he proposed a new model for interaction within customer communities: The Marketing Spiral.

What if the spiral amplifies the more the consumer engages. From interaction, to engagement, to participation, to conversation to affinity to community?

As usual, Armano also has a great illustration for this idea.

This model, as well as the model that Brandon Murphy drew up, illustrates an increasingly popular notion that the universal quality of successful interactions in our web-enabled culture is Resonance. In physics, "resonance is the tendency of a system to oscillate at maximum amplitude at a certain frequency." In the context of new media communications, resonance is the tendency of an individual to be compelled through interaction to share their experience with their community. Though I hadn't yet given it a name, I touched on this communicative phenomenon in my post What is a Blog?

Is resonance the same as relevance? I'd say that relevance is a subset of resonance. In order to have resonance, your idea must have relevance. But, relevance is only a measure of how personally meaningful an idea is to any individual. Resonance is a measure of how the individual will amplify that idea.

Developing successful marketing is now about identifying the resonant frequency of the customer community. This is done by developing a deep understanding of the community's lifestyle and values, and then developing products and communications that will have relevance, utility, and a sense of delight for the individuals who choose to interact with it.

The result of tapping into the resonant frequency is that your idea will be amplified by each individual and subsequently by the community as a whole. This is the experience that every marketer is chasing. But the important thing to note is that so many marketers are approaching new media like a game of hot potato: create something that individuals will excitedly pass on to others without regard to why they are passing it on, or what is left behind. When resonance is your goal, you create something that is deeply compelling to the individuals who chose to embrace your idea, and in return you leave behind a newly transformed champion of your idea and a more receptive transmitter for future communications.

I've been reading Joshua Ferris' much blogged-about debut novel, Then We Came to the End. I'm only half way through it, and so far it's a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining story. The novel centers around the downfall of a Chicago marketing firm in the wake of the dot-com bubble-burst. One of the quirky aspects of this book that has garnered so much buzz is that the story is told entirely in the 1st person plural voice, e.g. "We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise." It's an effective device that makes the reader acutely conscious of the group; but it also means that the narrator only knows what the group knows. The boundaries of the narrative are defined by the moments when one member of the "we" passes on the story to another. If an individual chose to keep an experience a secret from the rest of the group, then it can't be part of the novel's narrative.



Photo by Chad Nicholson



On Saturday, I participated in Improv Everywhere's MP3 Experiment 4. For this brilliant interactive public performance piece, 826 men, women, and children downloaded a 36 minute long MP3 file, loaded it onto their iPod, and without listening to it beforehand, gathered by the water in Lower Manhattan. At a carefully designated time, we simultaneously started the MP3 track and effectively checked out of the world of tourists and other random strangers and checked into another layer of connected consciousness. We were all listening to the same omniscient voice and becoming aware of the same bits of knowledge at the same time. Yet, we were simultaneously free to move and behave independently of each other. Like most Improv Everywhere missions, the event was especially joyous, and the atmosphere was celebratory. (If you'd like to hear the track yourself, you can download the MP3 file here)

These two experiences are interesting metaphors for how knowledge is manifested and shared through New Media. Like the narrative of Then We Came to the End, ideas are effectively unknown in a New Media environment until the story gets told by one person to another. A Brand's message is meaningless when it is passed from the Brand to its customers; it only becomes relevant when it is passed on from one member of the community to another.

The experience of the MP3 Experiment illustrates how access to and the exchange of information has become mobile. All 826 participants accessed the same public source of information and experienced it in the private spheres of our own iPods and headphones. It wasn't necessary for us to gather in some kind of theater and all listen to the same soundtrack through the theater's sound system. And as a result, this large group was able to play a huge game of twister, parade half a mile from one park to another, and spontaneously form a gigantic human dart board. The notion of a destination or controlled environment where individuals gather to receive their information, e.g. TV channels, newspapers, even specific websites, is obsolete. Individuals are accessing information that they find personally relevant on their own terms in their own environments - at the office, at home, in the park, etc. Information is as mobile as the technology we use to access it. This is why spreadability is the new stickiness. As Henry Jenkins explains:

We are moving from an era when stickiness was the highest virtue because the goal of pull media was to attract consumers to your site and hold them there as long as possible, not unlike, say, a roach hotel. Instead, we argue that in the era of convergence culture, what media producers need to develop spreadable media. Spreadable content is designed to be circulated by grassroots intermediaries who pass it along to their friends or circulate it through larger communities (whether a fandom or a brand tribe). It is through this process of spreading that the content gains greater resonance in the culture, taking on new meanings, finding new audiences, attracting new markets, and generating new values.

Spreadability liberates ideas and enables the experiences of those ideas to be created by the community in personally relevant environments. This is why every marketer should be focusing on how to make their clients' messages spreadable.

On Saturday, I read this post by Danah Boyd, in which she laments having now lost control over any meaningful context for her Facebook identity. She writes:

For months, I've been ignoring most friend requests. Tonight, I gave up and accepted most of them. I have been facing the precise dilemma that I write about in my articles: what constitutes a "friend"? Where's the line?
...
When Facebook became the IT girl for the tech industry, I knew that I'd one day lose it as a space where I talked to my friends from college.

On Sunday, Noah Brier chimed in with his simple observation, "Unlike what seems to be the rest of the natural world, I'm not totally sold." Noah goes on to reference Danah's post and speculate on what successful innovations in Social Networking might look like.

Then, on Monday afternoon, Rob Walker (author of the NYTimes Consumed column) posted this entry, in which he poses the question, "Has anybody started a Facebook backlash yet?" Walker writes:

A few months ago, I joined Facebook. This in itself is a bad sign, but then again I’m a journalist who covers consumer culture, and in the course of snooping around on something or other, I basically had to join.
...
I would say that there may be a familiar pattern here, following Second Life and MySpace. First there’s an audience. Then the marketers (and the journalists and the trend-watchers) flood in. And then there’s a backlash. Often led by the marketers, the journalists, and the trend-watchers.

So to answer Rob Walker's question - Yes. The Facebook backlash is now underway. (And like all respectable backlashes these days, I'm sure we will see the backlash-to-the-backlash before most Facebook users have even had a chance to update their status.)

I've been struggling to find something good to say about Facebook for weeks now, as more and more friends have been joining. In my past experience (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, etc.), the worth of the social networking site has been directly related to the number of personal friends who joined. So now that Facebook is reaching a critical mass of users, I would have expected to be all :) 's. Instead, I'm realizing that in spite of the pleasing interactive experience, clean design, efficient programming, entertaining apps, and even its popularity among my friends, I'm still asking myself, what's it for? I don't understand what the point of Facebook is.

I also read this wonderfully amusing and completely ridiculous article in The Observer about a bench - yes, just a plain old bench - on the Lower East Side that has become the coolest hang among the night-life residents of Rockstarville (don't worry, I'm going to bring this back around to Facebook):

"One night [earlier in the summer] we were sitting on that bench together and I said, ‘Yo, this is the best club in New York,’” Mr. Goias, 29, told The Observer. “You know, because you have to go to a stupid club party, like, ‘Oh, it’s Jessica’s birthday party tonight, I promised I would say hi,’ or ‘So-and-so is D.J.-ing, I told them I would swing by.’ But then it was like, sitting on this corner, we see all of the people that we would’ve seen if we went to those stupid places that we hate, and we could talk and smoke and fuck this, this is the shit right here. We were like, ‘Yo, wouldn’t it be funny if we made a flyer?"

The quotes alone are worth the price of admission. (Beat) Which, of course, is nothing. (Beat) Just go read the article. (Long Beat) Then come back.

The fact that these uber-hipsters found their anti-establishment club on a lowly little street corner (outside an American Apparel store, no less) reminded me of a point that Danah Boyd made in a paper I probably read more than a year ago. (Please leave a link in the comments, if you know which paper it is.) All of these social networks are the equivalent of The Mall. The Stoop. The Front Porch. The Corner Bar. And The Bench. What we're all looking for is a completely low-maintenance, casual, and low-key little spot where we can just chill out. Maybe meet up with some friends, whoever stops by. Tell them about what we did that day. Hear an outrageous story about so-and-so doing such-and-such. And occasionally get introduced to a friend of a friend who turns out to be pretty cool.

The reason why one of these real-world destinations works is that you and your friends are the only people who want to go there. The problem with these Social Networking Sites is that their business model relies on millions of visitors. But as soon as your have millions of visitors it becomes impossible for any individual visitor to feel a genuine ownership of their space. Each user's personal space is inevitably invaded by someone that they perceive as a stranger. In the real world the boundaries would be clear. If you don't know me, and you don't know any of my friends, then why would you expect me to say, "Hi" to you at The Mall? But, in this relatively new virtual environment, the rules are murky. As Danah Boyd has been asking, what constitutes a "friend"?

My prediction is that the virtual environments where our personal boundaries are best fortified, like email and IM, will eventually supplant these platform-specific identities. Imagine when Google finally dumps Orkut, and launches GoogleNetwork. Suddenly, every one of your Gmail contacts are now "friends." Each categorized by the labels you've already assigned to their messages. These relationships can overlap, and the content you choose to share with each of them can be easily filtered as you like. It's not The Mall, but at least it gives us a scalable, yet meaningful contextual foundation to build on.

A few weeks ago I watched a video of a panel discussion at the PSFK London conference. In the video, Russell Davies (OIA), George Parker (Madscam), Stan Stalnaker (Hub Culture), and Johnny Vulkan (Anomaly) attempt to address the daunting challenge of "Changing the World." Towards the end Russell and Johnny addressed a particular issue that I've been struggling with: Is it time to retire the term "Brand?" (Should it no longer be the preferred nomenclature?)

The only people I know who are comfortable using the term Brand are those of us who rely on the various manifestations of the term for our paychecks. Even those rare customers who blissfully plaster themselves with logos and actually define themselves to some degree by the stuff they own don't use the term Brand to identify their preferred choices. Sure, people will tell you about "this great new ___, I got at ___." But they'll never follow that up with "Yeah, ___ is totally my favorite Brand." As Johnny pointed out, the word "suggests some kind of thin veneer that is coated over mediocre products." Brands are empty and meaningless entities as far as the general population is concerned. The term Brand might be good for us, but it isn't good for them. And if we've learned anything in the past few years, it's that we should be speaking their language, not vice versa.

Around the 47 min mark of that PSFK video, Russell Davies makes a great point:

Things would get really simple if people only used the words Product, Company, and Reputation.

This nugget has been echoing in my head ever since. Everyone knows what those three words mean. And when you challenge your clients and yourself, as their planner or strategist, to take on the notion of earning a Reputation, you are suddenly forced to cut the bullshit. A Reputation is something that is earned through your actions, not awarded based on your appearance. We all share an intuitive understanding of the difference, because Reputations are how we become known to each other. Our best relationships are sparked by a genuine interest in each other's Reputations. What has she/he done? Have they been a good friend? Have they proven themselves insightful? Do they have a hilarious sense of humor? The relationships that we've started based on the most superficial aspects, on the other hand...What does she/he look like? How many MySpace friends do they have? Do they spell their name with and "i" or a "y?"

So, as Johnny pointed out, marketing - and maybe that term needs some help, too - should focus more on developing products and the companies behind the products. Because, in this age of transparency, that's where your reputation is made. Now a marketer's job is to help their client walk the walk, instead of trying to convince customers that the client's walk is awesome.

We know how Mass Media communications work: messages are created by a limited group of authors, i.e. the major media conglomerates, and disseminated through a finite number of channels, i.e. TV, Radio, Print, etc. Mass Media marketing strategy consisted of making enough impressions with your message in order to influence your audience's choices. Here's a simplified illustration:


Things have changed. The traditional communication channels have been shattered into millions of distinct outlets. Message creators now have little, if any, control over the dissemination of their message. Audiences are influenced primarily by their self-curated networks of information sources which they find most relevant to their unique interests and desires.

We call the communicative tools used in this environment New Media; but New Media is more than just the internet and a stack of gadgets. New Media is the collective network of every connected entity - every cable channel, every website and blog, every retail store and office, every home computer, and every individual human being capable of communicating with another human being. The structure of communications in New Media is an effectively infinite network of interconnected nodes, any one of which can be connected to any other node. It looks something like this:


(I've only illustrated a single arbitrary perspective; imagine every one of those little nodes simultaneously at the center of its own network.)

These nodes act like neurons in the human brain, becoming stimulated and transmitting information on to other nodes. And like our brain, there is no conscious authority controlling how the messages get passed from node to node. The navigation is intuitive and organic. In this new structure, when messages get passed effortlessly from node to node, a successful communications strategy is like a pulse of light, which, as it's transmitted, lights up each node and the connections between them. A very popular message quickly lights up a large part of the network like an fMRI brain scan where active parts of the brain are highlighted in bright yellows and oranges.

This is the desired effect, but this new structure seems dauntingly chaotic. If the path of a message cannot be dictated by any authoritative source and broadcast to a passive audience, then how is it possible to create a strategy to effectively reach an audience that is likely to find the message relevant and compelling? How do you know where your message will go once it is released? And if you can't know that, then how can you possibly devise a strategy for reaching your desired audience?

As I was trying to find an answer to this question, I remembered Habit, an essay by William James, a 19th Century philosopher and psychologist. The essay focuses on the nature of conscious thought as a series of communications between neurons. As currents get passed from neuron to neuron...

...they leave their traces in the paths which they take. The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones...the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear.

The establishment of these known pathways is how we form habits and make certain actions instinctive; it enables us to walk and hold an intelligent conversation simultaneously - the walking part is on autopilot.

Like the neuron pathways carved out in our brain, there are pathways - some well established and some barely formed - that exist within this New Media communications network. These pathways are dictated not by any corporate entity or even by brilliant marketers, but rather by the exigencies of contemporary culture and each individual's desire to live better within that culture. I have particular interests in new media research, liberal politics, and cool new tech gadgets. I have established sources where I go for information on these topics. And all of my sources have their sources, and on and on. And these chains of queries and responses establish reliable pathways for communication.

We must also acknowledge that we are all continually discovering new interests and evolving our collection of sources. The evolution of these pathways, though, is sticky enough to be useful. William James describes the nature of our thinking as "plastic enough to maintain its integrity, and be not disrupted when its structure yields." Clay Parker Jones wrote a great post that described stickiness as something that is fluid enough to adapt and make new connections, yet elastic enough to hold on to established connections.

This stickiness makes it possible to discern the pathways through the New Media communications network. These continually evolving organic pathways are the new playing field. And the challenge for communications strategists is to recognize and understand the human character of each pathway.