cluetrain
Mit Advertising Lab points out the struggle of RocketBoom:
“Rocketboom is searching for a new way to put fuel in its tank. Advertising is not doing it. “It’s frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now,” said the daily video blog’s founder, Andrew Baron.
More evidence that Scott Karp is on the right track that content creation is no longer a business.
As I’ve said before, much of the value of old media was in the distribution mechanism, not the content, and now that distribution is free, content is a commodity.
If RocketBoom can’t do it, who can?
Only the enablers.
Right now, value is in the sites and services that enable users to do something, like share photos, network with others, or blog for free.
Perhaps these services will be commoditized some day as well.
That’s when the Cluetrain will have arrived. When nothing stands in between the buyer and seller, the speaker and spoken too.
Ogilvy and Technorati announced a partnership at Always On Media centered around conversational marketing.
“Geeks are too linear,” says Peter Hirshberg, chairman of Technorati.
So they bring in Ogilvy.
They correctly recognize the power shift to the customer (Hirshberg calls them consumers. . .bad).
“Where’s the fire”, a feature launching on Technorati tomorrow, sounds like a Digg type.
I love Technorati, but these announcements raise an eyebrow. Sounds like they are desparate to come up with a business model. Anything!
They should turn it into a VRM/Attention clearinghouse. Now that would be a modern business model.
Ogilvy?
Ed Batista discusses successful relationships as put forth by John Gottman.
As I read what it takes to form a successful marriage, I couldn’t help but think that VRM and CRM need to embrace these same ideals.
This one really pops:
7. The creation of shared meaning.
In this age of empowerment, and in the same way that the Media must join the conversation, the vendors must join the bazaar.
A lot of talk lately about how page-views are dead.
Greg Yardley suggests a solution but it looks like he’s missing an important point.
It’s not just about widgets and “share” of the page, it’s the fact that a well-built Ajax application may now substitute a rich interface for what was tens or hundreds of page requests.
So now how do you calculate a CPM? By the number of clicks on a page? (I guess Ajax will report this data back to the server)
Are advertisers going to buy into the fact that a click that delivers new data to the page makes their ad on that page worth two impressions? Doubtful.
Do we need advertising engines that deliver ads in time based or action-based way so that one HTTP request can deliver more than one ad if the user is interacting with the page for an extended period? Maybe.
Or do we need to rethink advertising in general and admit that interruption based advertising is dead in general? I’d say so.
Which is why pay-per-click is so popular and why pay-per-action will continue to grow. No doubt.
By the way, it’s not just Ajax that’s causing this death of the page-view. It’s widgets, as Greg suggests, and RSS, and syndication of other sorts that make modern web marketing almost impossible to track effectively.
What can be tracked, as always, is the effectiveness of a campaign ROI, which methods like pay-per-action help immensely.
So what’s left to do in a pay-per-action world? Attention, Gestures and Intention are the gold that needs to be mined in order to create more effective marketing.
Using that gold will help us direct relevant offers to willing individuals. What could be better than that?
We can’t do it alone. CPM is one-way marketing, and one-way is dead in all things web.
That’s where VRM comes along. It stands for Vendor Relationship Management, and it refers to a new generation of tools on the way that allow the customers to assist in the marketing relationship.
Some will resist this loss of control at first, because what’s better for the customer doesn’t seem to equate to better for the vendor. But that’s wrong because the marketplace is not an equation, it’s a relationship.
A marriage doesn’t only get better for one of the spouses as the relationship grows stronger. It gets better for both.
Page views aren’t so dead as CPM is. Long live VRM.
With the help of a non-responsive Jason Calacanis, who later unwittingly responded through the very podospheric phenomenon which he outlined in a recent Gillmor Gang, and the hyperbolic responsiveness of Steve Gillmor, by means of linguistic attrition, the epitome of negative metadatic gesture, I’ve concluded what has been a troubling week of uncertainty with a newfound clarity.
I am talking, specifically, about implicit meme propagation and affinity proliferation.
Let’s break that down:
A link to another blogger can be explicit or implicit. A vote on Netscape.com is explicit. In the case of audio, you can explicitly talk about a subject in a positive or negative way, but even if you say, “I don’t like Splenda.” you are implicitly propagating a meme. A comment on a blog post or a link to one implicitly infers value at the other end, even if the value is to point or comment on something you don’t like.
Implicit gestures are what propagate memes, moreso than explicit actions.
By comparison of the sum total of our implicit gestures ( a gesture is usually implicit by nature, so I don’t need to specify that), we can see affinity groups form on the long tail portion of the gesture graph.
By using social networking applications to bring these affinity groups together, or direct like information to these groups through behavioral targeting, we can create fluid and virtuous circles of trust and value transfer.
That is the new economy.
And I tend to conclude that sites like digg are fun, but only a stepping stone toward the attention filters and value exchange systems of the very near future, because the implicit is what has and will rule, because it can be trusted and can’t really be faked.
The explicit will always be subject to gaming.
I used to go nuts when clueless folks called site visitors “viewers” instead of “users”.
My point was that if all they are doing is viewing and not interacting, then our product needs to get a little better.
Well, the times have changed and now I agree with Stowe Boyd on the term “User Generated Content” .
He’s got it right. We are all here and the world is flat. So any term that implies a publisher->reader or site->user type of relationship is headed for trouble.
As Stowe says, we are now all participants.
He says we are participants in Participatory Media, but I’m even against the word media.
Media can be disintermediated while participants in a conversation really can’t.
Now I’m fully aware that the term media can be used to mean film, tape and digital rather than Media Companies. But the reason why we call them media companies is because media is the plural of medium.
The web is the first mass distribution medium that isn’t scarce in it’s allocation, either through economics or scarcity of availability, like limited TV frequencies (channels)
By it’s very nature, then, it is qualitatively different from anything else we have ever called media.
But I’m not here to argue semantics.
I only know too well from first-hand experience that many “media” companies still see User Generated Content as some lower form of media species.
Their attempts to exploit it will be as successful as chasing a lizard’s long tail.
UGC = Unsuccessful Grasp for Control.
The other day I said Media was dead. Perhaps Advertising is dead.
From the BuzzMachine comments, in response to Hugh Macleod, I say:
Once you realize you can be disintermediated, it becomes clear that the old advertising model doesn’t work as well as it used to, so you find you must provide and extract value in another way.
Something has been bothering me since Adam Curry talked about media vs. technology on the Gillmor Gang.
And I’m also left wondering why Jason Calacanis pumps up AdSense and yet gets labeled a “media guy”, or even calls himself such.
I think it’s a dis-credit to himself. He’s much more than that.
He’s an “Attention” guy.
You see, media by it’s very nature can be disintermediated, and I don’t think any strategy that could fall prey to that is a good one.
Is Google a media company?
No.
Media companies aggregate content makers and act as mediaries between the advertisers and the media consumers. (sorry to Doc, i don’t like the word consumer either)
Google is doing more than that.
They are an Attention clearing house.
It’s what Jason might call an enabler, and it’s why the successful new companies we adore all seem to be doing just that. (del.icio.us, grazr, edgio, top ten sources etc.)
They are enabling an attention transaction to occur. Think eBay or Craigslist. OPML, not HTML. Tom Morris, not Morris, the Cat.
There is no enabling happening here, just intermediation.
Jason’s latest venture is about enablement, so I think he’s on the right track. Paying people doesn’t change that, as long as a service is open.
Attention enablers can’t be disintermediated. They can be replaced, but not disintermediated.
I don’t come from the software industry. I much more relate to what Dave Winer calls a himself, a “media hacker”. And that’s what he calls Scoble too.
It’s not really about technology. That is a means, not an end.
Technology itself can be disintermediated or commodified. Soon, we will plug into technology like we do into electrical outlets. It’s happening now.
So I say that the winning companies are not media companies or technology companies, but Attention companies.
And if PodShow is a media company, it may succeed in the short run. But to last and grow, it will have to transform to an Attention company. So will Tribune, New York Times, Microsoft, Podosphere.com and the whole lot.
The Old Media Doomsday Clock has been moved forward from eight minutes to midnight to six minutes to midnight.
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
— Next Page »
