Thoughts on Spreadable Media - Parts 3 and 4
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Continuing to sort out my thoughts 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 here.)
Part 3: The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture
One of the most significant aspects of the spreadable media paradigm is the acknowledgment, embrace even, of the agency of the individual; people play an active role in passing along ideas, messages, and content.
Brands and marketers often pay lip service to the idea of co-authorship with consumers, but rarely do they see this collaboration, both between brand and consumer and among groups of consumers, as an integral component of the spreading of their brand message. Once you do accept this reality, you are forced to answer this question for every idea and experience you create: Why would anyone share this with anyone else?
This may seem like an obvious question, yet it's amazing how often it goes unasked or unanswered.
Brands don't create communities, they court pre-existing communities. (I'll have more to say on this in the near future...)
Part 4: Thinking Through the Gift Economy
Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
lays out an alternative model for exchanging cultural products. There's a whole other economy at work, traditionally in art and craft, now on the web in which people give to each other for socially motivated reasons rather than commercial. If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it's not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends. I want to share something with them, in exchange for their attention and affection. And I want to say something to them about what we have in common or how I'm different.
What does the gift economy mean to you? Where are you seeing evidence of the gift economy online? Comments welcome.
Part 3: The Gift Economy and Commodity Culture
One of the most significant aspects of the spreadable media paradigm is the acknowledgment, embrace even, of the agency of the individual; people play an active role in passing along ideas, messages, and content.
Consumers, both individually and collectively, exert agency in the spreadability model: they are not impregnated with media messages; they select material that matters to them from the much broader array of media content on offer. They do not simply pass along static content; they transform the content so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs. Content does not remain in fixed borders but rather it circulates in unpredicted and often unpredictable directions, not the product of top-down design but rather of a multitude of local decisions made by autonomous agents negotiating their way through diverse cultural spaces.
Brands and marketers often pay lip service to the idea of co-authorship with consumers, but rarely do they see this collaboration, both between brand and consumer and among groups of consumers, as an integral component of the spreading of their brand message. Once you do accept this reality, you are forced to answer this question for every idea and experience you create: Why would anyone share this with anyone else?
This may seem like an obvious question, yet it's amazing how often it goes unasked or unanswered.
Brands don't create communities, they court pre-existing communities. (I'll have more to say on this in the near future...)
Part 4: Thinking Through the Gift Economy
Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
lays out an alternative model for exchanging cultural products. There's a whole other economy at work, traditionally in art and craft, now on the web in which people give to each other for socially motivated reasons rather than commercial. If I tell my Facebook friends about your brand, it's not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friends. I want to share something with them, in exchange for their attention and affection. And I want to say something to them about what we have in common or how I'm different.
What does the gift economy mean to you? Where are you seeing evidence of the gift economy online? Comments welcome.
3 Comments:
Your 4th point seems more dependent on personality than anything else.
Some people have a strong need to be liked, so they are motivated by that need to "give" to friends. B
Others will be motivated by "how cool will it make me look to my friends if I like this?"
And countless variations of the above. I don't think you can pick a reason because (a) its not that easy for the person themselves to discern why they're doing something and (b) there are often multiple drivers: nothing is black and white.
Thanks Mike!
I LOVE thinking about this, and appreciate your sharing and insights on the subject. Love your line about sharing something because "I like my friends". While I don't think we can discount the brand piece of it altogether, I have to say I had a real "aha" when you stated that.
Here’s what I think is interesting.
At the end of the day, the intention of a brand must be to create a purchase transaction.
In old models, a brand would give the consumer something of value only AT THE POINT OF that transaction. (Pay me the money. I will give you the product.)
With social media, brands are starting to think “what can I give of value *before* the purchase decision”.
In order to be shared, I think 3 things have to happen:
1.) What’s being shared needs to feel “new” in some way. I think people are less likely to share things if they feel like their friends/network has already seen it.
2.) Even though it’s new, it has to feel relevant. Creating something that has universal appeal is difficult (although obviously not impossible.) But the best way to create relevance is through targeting your audience and figuring out what *values* they share because of the way they’ve been targeted. It’s easy to create something that has value when you know what it is your network actually values. (this seems REALLY obvious, but I do think it gets forgotten in the effort to just "be viral")
3.) Even though it may seem like totally selfless “giving”, I feel like the person sharing is still looking for something in return. Attention, affection, admiration. Or maybe they just don’t want to be forgotten.
So brands could think of it that way – could I give people something so THEY won’t be forgotten?
What’s also interesting about this model is that you could have the intermediaries – those doing the spreading – be people who never make a purchase transaction themselves and still be of great value to the brand.
thanks again.
Lisa, your list of three things almost makes it seem like creating 'viral' content means starting with something that sounds very close to a creative brief.
On the top of the brief, instead of putting 'paid media' put 'earned media' and ask the question: why will this earn a click.
We agency peeps can then finally stop using the word viral, expect for when we call in sick.
BTW Mike, great post. Got here from Ilya Vedrashko.
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