Mike Arauz is a strategist at Thoughts on Spreadable Media - Parts 5 and 6
More on If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead, by Henry Jenkins and his team at MIT's Convergence Culture Consortium. (Read my thoughts on Parts 1 and 2 and on Parts 3 and 4.)
This post covers the social structures that enable content to spread and why people choose to spread content.
Part 5: Communities of Users
In order to start designing spreadable media, we need to start understanding the new social structures in which it spreads.
Spreadable media is made possible by the new landscape for social interaction and group collaboration. As Yochai Benkler describes in The Wealth of Networks, digital technology has improved what people can do for themselves, what people can do in collaboration with others, and what people can do within independent organizations outside of commercial industry. And, as I've written about before, this even affects how we perceive ourselves.
Here, again, the idea of individual agency, the active role that people play in spreadable media, echoes through the discussion.
Once we welcome this role that people play, we can begin to address the important questions of what people choose to share and why?
And this last point, can't be stressed enough:
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: People's lives don't revolve around your brand, they revolve around life. This point has come up several times in discussions around Desire Path Branding. Brands do not have the ability to dictate the cultural context in which they are experienced or the ability to define their meaning in the minds of consumers. Those roles have been turned over to the networks of individuals pursuing shared interests and passions on their own terms. The sooner you accept this new reality, the sooner you can start succeeding in this new landscape.
Part 6: Spreadable Content
This is what I meant, when I said, "If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it's not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends." In reality, it's much more complicated than this. We use culturally relevant and resonant stories to help us tell each other about who we are and how we fit in with certain communities. We share information in order to better understand complicated or difficult circumstances. And we share content in order to define who's "in" and who's "out." One of the most simple examples of this is sharing links on Twitter. Think about the kind of links you share and how you use different links to accomplish these different goals.
These motivations extend in similar ways to why people spread branded content:
If your brand experience can't accomplish any of these things, you're in trouble. Ask yourself, is this piece of content going to be useful to certain established interest communities (or Desire Paths) in helping them to talk about who they are and what they care about?
Now that we understand why people spread content, how can content be better designed in order to be used in these ways? One of the aspects that Jenkins lays out is to leave room for interpretation. Create content with "open, loose ends and gaps that allow the viewer to introduce their own background and experiences."
If this sounds a little scary, then I'll leave you with this point:
This post covers the social structures that enable content to spread and why people choose to spread content.
Part 5: Communities of Users
In order to start designing spreadable media, we need to start understanding the new social structures in which it spreads.
The question now becomes, not how to reach the influencers [as defined by Malcom Gladwell], but how do individuals choose to behave in a networked society and what kinds of social structures best support the spread of content.
Spreadable media is made possible by the new landscape for social interaction and group collaboration. As Yochai Benkler describes in The Wealth of Networks, digital technology has improved what people can do for themselves, what people can do in collaboration with others, and what people can do within independent organizations outside of commercial industry. And, as I've written about before, this even affects how we perceive ourselves.
Here, again, the idea of individual agency, the active role that people play in spreadable media, echoes through the discussion.
Once we welcome this role that people play, we can begin to address the important questions of what people choose to share and why?
And this last point, can't be stressed enough:
Although we've used the concept brand communities a couple of times, it's important to reiterate that communities aren't created, they are courted.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: People's lives don't revolve around your brand, they revolve around life. This point has come up several times in discussions around Desire Path Branding. Brands do not have the ability to dictate the cultural context in which they are experienced or the ability to define their meaning in the minds of consumers. Those roles have been turned over to the networks of individuals pursuing shared interests and passions on their own terms. The sooner you accept this new reality, the sooner you can start succeeding in this new landscape.
Part 6: Spreadable Content
Content is spread based not on an individual evaluation of worth, but on a perceived social value within community or group.
This is what I meant, when I said, "If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it's not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends." In reality, it's much more complicated than this. We use culturally relevant and resonant stories to help us tell each other about who we are and how we fit in with certain communities. We share information in order to better understand complicated or difficult circumstances. And we share content in order to define who's "in" and who's "out." One of the most simple examples of this is sharing links on Twitter. Think about the kind of links you share and how you use different links to accomplish these different goals.
These motivations extend in similar ways to why people spread branded content:
- They are doing so because the brand express something about themselves or their community.
- They are doing so because the brand message serves some valued social function.
- They are doing so because the entertainment content gives expressive form to some deeply held perception or feeling about the world.
- They are doing so because individual responses to such content helps them determine who does or does not belong in their community.
If your brand experience can't accomplish any of these things, you're in trouble. Ask yourself, is this piece of content going to be useful to certain established interest communities (or Desire Paths) in helping them to talk about who they are and what they care about?
When advertising spreads, it is because the community has embraced it as a resource for expressing its shared beliefs or pursuing its mutual interests.
Now that we understand why people spread content, how can content be better designed in order to be used in these ways? One of the aspects that Jenkins lays out is to leave room for interpretation. Create content with "open, loose ends and gaps that allow the viewer to introduce their own background and experiences."
If this sounds a little scary, then I'll leave you with this point:
Media producers worry about losing control. The reality is that they have already lost control; consumers can take their brands and do with them whatever they want. And the more producers do to reign in this grassroots creativity, the more they will take away the "worth" of their goods and devalue their content in the eyes of those consumers.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
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5 Comments:
Interesting take...so you would not focus on Gladwell's influencers? Would you target any specific group?
I'm trying to reconcile the fact that though media is spreadable because of the "new landscape," very few people use it (posting comments, digging articles, delicious bookmarking, etc.). There's got to be a way to leverage the tools without playing the education game with every customer.
On Gladwell, Duncan Watts - http://research.yahoo.com/bouncer_user/106 - has shown in his research, "Challenging the Influencials Hypothesis" that within a distributed network of individuals, and person regardless of their number of connections, is as likely as any other to make an idea catch on. Messages that spread exponentially do so because of the structure of the network and the quality of individual connections.
You target groups based in shared interest (Desire Paths). But, not the mythical "influencers".
On participation, Forrester's 2008 Social Technographics Report is a great resource for understanding the level of different kinds of online activity: http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2008/10/new-2008-social.html
There's a broad spectrum, and every type of participation is on the rise.
But, even the least web-savvy among us are still emailing links to people.
So, I do think that this approach is broadly relevant.
I'm really enjoying these posts. I'm writing some about spreadability on my own blog, and I'd love for you to check it out! You can read a recent post at http://jennamcwilliams.blogspot.com/2009/03/what-open-source-can-teach-us-about_23.html.
Thanks!
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