Convergence culture

I've started reading Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture and even though I'm still just on the introduction the story that he's telling really resonates with me. The convergence, as I understand it, is that a story is its own self and is not beholden to a delivery medium. The story will reveal itself to you in the most appropriate manner to have the biggest impact. Thus, the delivery medium/s of a story converge to become a single ecosystem in which the story unravels. Today, more than ever, this convergence is available to the story-teller.

I'll get back to you with more stuff that I learn from Mr.Jenkins, but for now I'll leave you with some fun convergence you might be familiar with...

... Amazon reviews!

I love comedy, I love it even more when it is set in a context that you just wouldn't expect it. The lampooning of products on Amazon is some of the funniest stuff I've read on teh Interwebs. And what's more, Amazon, with its 'helpfulness' ratings for reviews, is complicit in helping these reviews be just as popular, if not more so, than the products themselves.

Crap Amazon products and comedy, there's convergence for you!

Here's some of the classics, please comment with more if there are!

• The Secret (Hardcover), by Rhonda Byrne (Ari Brouillette review still no.1 after two years!)
  
• Three Wolf Moon, by The Mountain
• Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, by Tuscan
  
• ... what the hell, here's all of Ari Brouillette's reviews
  

Can I say trans-informational?

In the old marketing text book that I used to read at University there was a great section on informational advertising and transformational advertising and I really took those two theories to heart.

It was pretty simple really, informational advertising was used in important decision making processes. It was to remove fear like medicinal advertising or explain complex expensive products (you know those car comparison ads that list how many cup-holders a car has?). Then there was transformational advertising used either to gratify the ego with a minor purchase decision like how a can of coke will get me a whole lotta chicks in bikinis, or to satisfy the ego with large purchases like how when I bough my new Macbook I just knew that I would become hip.

But what I'm experiencing nowadays is that there is definitely a middle ground. And I think this middle ground is growing with the growth of online communities and networks.

Let me explain. Transformation feeds the ego and gratifies the individual while information gives the individual the required understanding of the needs required to go from being without satisfaction to having satisfaction. What better way of getting in the clique than by joining a community of experts and conversing and learning from the experts on how to transform yourself.

It is these online communities and networks that I believe fill the middle ground between information and transformation. This is the trans-informational advertising. Get this space right, create a space for the expression of emotion and transfer of knowledge, feed it with the occasional talking point of content and the community will can self-sustaining.

Example: The 2010 Ford Mustang
The new 2010 Ford Mustang is in anybody's book a pretty big purchase. To sell one of these babies you need to latch onto a heap of emotion, give lots of sexy information about the power of the beast, and of course have a space where fans and potential buyers can salivate together about this animal.

Let's start with tansformation. This is a beast of a car and has no practical use on the speed regulated roads whatsoever. But it is sexy, fast and down right red-blooded Amrerican muscle. Tell me this doesn't transform you:



Now information. You want specs? I'll give you specs. Take those details and shove 'em up your imported piece of plastic. As much as information is there to remove the fear of purchasing an inferior product it can also be used to reinforce your decision for buying an over-specced rocket on four wheels.

And the middle ground. I love these videos, I think this car is awesome, I want to salivate with someone over the fact that I could get the top of the range model for under $50k Australian!!! (if you didn't take into account import taxes, and every other obvious barrier under the sun to getting one in Australia).

Ford services this middle ground with a very healthy Facebook fan page with over 350k fans and a very nice assortment of photos, videos and applications to play with and discuss intimate stories about abnormal love affairs with inanimate objects. Facebook, as you can see from this example is the perfect platform for servicing this new and exponentially growing marketing ground.

The trans-informational middle ground is one of the most promising developments happening in marketing today. The opportunity to combine emotional transformational wants and rational informational needs in a living community of enthusiasts, executed thoughtfully and in the community's interest, can only strengthen a brand in the eyes of its core market.



*For more awesome mustang photos I recommend the Mustang fan page.

New ways of consuming and learning (through transmedia and a broadening education model)

If necessity is the mother on invention, then demand must surely be the foreplay.

Through a convergence of a number of ways of thinking I'm slowly putting together the story about how the future of learning and consuming will take place. Let me begin with a quote:

As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful. These experiences will not simply be products. They will be complex combinations of products, services, spaces, and information.

This is Tim Brown of IDEO in his June 2008 Harvard Business Review article on design thinking. The quote encompasses a lot of what I also view the future to be and the demand for this way of thinking is permeating our entire society.

Two examples to kick-off, what I believe will be a fair amount of future blogposts, are transmedia and the broadening of the education model.

Transmedia (here's the wikipedia entry) roughly is the creation and delivery of a story across multiple forms of media. Here's a nice and thorough history to get you started on cross/trans-media from transmedia creator and chronicler Christy Dena.

While from Christy's preso you'll see that transmedia story telling is nothing new, especially in the world of fiction and film production, I think that it is getting more and more common. We are not surprised to see a computer game released at the same time as the latest Marvel cinema release, we expect it. Or when District 9 was promoted at Comic-con in the US, it wasn't mind-blowing that a team of MNU trucks locked down San Diego and a series of pre-graffitid posters sprung up over night. This is just how we demand movies to be sold to us now.

Some might say its all about eye-balls, that if consumers are switching off the TV in favour of the Web then naturally the dollars will follow where the eye-balls go. And this is right, but at the same time there is another aspect to transmedia that we are demanding and its that of reciprocity and co-creation.

Reciprocity in that if I am going to follow a story across media (chase the rabbit down the hole as it were) then I'm going to want reward in return. Mindless consumption via the idiot-box is over, mindful consumption through multiple media now commands respect. In as much, free downloads now act as rewards for following story-lines, prizes via ARGs go to those who dig the deepest into a story and online games attached to stories act as town-squares where consumers consume together.

And consuming together brings me onto my next point about co-creation. That a story is filmed/written, edited and distributed was once a nice process that meant everyone could play their part, received a cheque and go home to bed. Unfortunately for producers it isn't that simple any more. Consumers are now talking back, they're asking for more, wanting to get involved even. Which is where co-creation is creeping in. We see this now with characters jumping from pre-recorded episodes to live and interactive Twitter accounts (see the current Girl Number 9 web-series).

And of course, this brings me to an article I spotted in today's The Age about beating boredom in the school classroom. The article recounts the experiences and parents and teachers where students are skipping school due to boredom and some of the tactics schools are implementing to confront this problem. Not surprisingly transmedia story telling and co-creation play a large part in turning the problem around:

At Balwyn, students in years 7 to 9 start a program by watching a DVD that acts as a springboard for activities that are integrated across their subjects ...

... Resolving conflict — a theme of the movie — would be discussed in tutorial groups, with each group creating a movie to be presented at the final school assembly.

In turn, year 8 students will film news broadcasts as part of their sustainability program and year 9 students will enter into a music video competition as part of their program.

At my own work, we've been trying to extend the experience of our annual CPA Congress and broaden learning opportunities through changing what's expected (like conferences and training seminars) to providing the new and un-expected (like Second Life conference sessions and made-for-YouTube histories of members experiences).

Transmedia storytelling and the broadening of the education model are to me just two observations of how demand for a more sophisticated and communal way of consumption are mutating the old model of thinking.

So to those who still see this as an experiment or something that 'those' people do not us, all I can say is that it's too late already. The lines of communication will continue to blur. Teachers, soon your students will talk directly to you textbook author and bypass your meagre thoughts. Movie producers, make sure you keep your writers on the payroll because the writing doesn't end when the movie studio commissions your movie. I want to talk to your characters, and I expect them to listen. Between how it was and how it is now is a pretty big pill to take and takes a hell of a lot of effort, but as Tim Brown said, "we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful."

Social media from outside the marketing department

It's been a little over 12 months since I left the marketing department at work. I'm now sitting in a small team that is curiously called Knowledge Exchange and essentially our role is to "help members connect with each other online and share experiences" (that's how I put it).

I've had a fantastic time in the role because it has given me the freedom to voraciously learn about everything that online collaboration/networking/sharing can offer. I've got my million-and-one accounts on every service possible; I'm talking to people I would never have met were it not for the Interwebz and all up I think I've had a bloody educational year.

But one of the biggest things that it has taught me is that doing this stuff just ain't natural to everyone. For the past four or five months I've been having regular catch-ups with my old marketing team to get them on-board as advocates for online collaboration.

While it is true a person's need is the first step in deciding what and indeed if collaboration should be online, in these meetings we've decided to have a bit of a taste-test to learn about the fun things that live online. The team has tasted forums, blogs, micro-blogs, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube... the works. And in the end I think that the biggest learning I've had is that for most of these tools and platforms you simply can't explain the benefit - you have to experience the benefit.

And that's a bloody hard sell. The whole "trust me" line just doesn't cut the mustard when a member receives their 4th email for the month.

Deborah Schultz, partner at the emerging tech strategy consultancy Altimeter, also shows in her P&G digital hack night, the 'jump-in' mind-set of a digital native/convert is different from the 'planned' marketing mind-set. Marketing, as creative as it might sound to the outsider, is actually about tangible benefits and direct outputs - $1,000 input gives me 6% return gives me $20,000 sales. It's logical, it's tested, it works. Marketing reads the instructions, figures out how it works and then applies the correct procedures.

Sitting outside the marketing department has given me a new appreciation for the act of marketing, especially in this new world of 'experiences'. The digital native/convert has accepted that the world simply has too many experiences and opportunities to sit down and read the instructions. You simply gotta jump in and go for a ride. If you don't like it get out, get in the next one, try something else. You'll find the one that you get a benefit from soon enough. Try marketing that! And everybody's 'it' is different to the next.

The best I could say is get your story right and tell your story through the experiences that you market. And it doesn't all have to be digital. Red Bull is a great example of a company/brand that has a story to tell through the experiences it markets and I bet their marketing spend is 90% off-line.

So in a little over twelve months a curious thing has happened to me, my walls of data and measures that direct-marketing taught me have started to crumble. Instead I'm now talking about stories and experiences, about failing, collaborating, talking with people not at them.

... I think I have a long way to go to win over the marketing department but I'll keep working at it. Good luck to all you other digitals out there converting the analogue marketing departments of yesterday.

How I tried to appeal to the left brain in a marketing blog

I have recently changed my blog template. It's part template and part me playing around with HTML/CSS or whatever the code is. Granted it's not pretty and I won't be getting a web design job anytime soon, but quite a bit of thought has gone into the layout.

The thinking has mostly been about, 'what is the most effective layout for a blog?' A quick perusal of a blog template page like btemplates will show you there is no set pattern for templates, but you can have a rough estimate that there are twice as may right-hand side bars as left-hand side bars and also three column (left- and right-hand sidebars) are becoming more fashionable.

But from a usability perspective what is the best? Are there rules for blogs? If there are, I haven't been able to find them.

The general wisdom of print publishers, has traditionally been that the left side of the page is more inspirational/pictorial and the right hand side is more informational/factual and the most 'viewed' part of a publication is the right-hand side. An example of this is a QMedia rate card (PDF) for the Qantas inflight magazine where a right-hand side placement commands a 10% loading.

While some might say that more purchase decisions are made by the left side of the brain and that's why there's a load, it also stems from the traditional way (most) people read magazines, the right-hand side is the first thing you see when turning a page. So does this translate to the web?

Like their printed siblings, online newspapers do reserve the right-hand column for advertising. Have a look at these examples taken from today's editions:

Sydney Morning Herald

news.com.au

Wall Street Journal

Guardian

It would seem that the right-hand side is the preferred place for advertising in online newspapers.

But if an online advertiser were to take a look at the F-Shaped pattern for reading online content, they might be a bit miffed to see the right-hand side of a web page is almost vacant of any eyeball viewing.

One more theory to throw into the mix is the left/right brain preference. One such test for this is the HBDI brain quadrant preference test. As seen in the above image, the left brain (therefore right side of the screen) is more anyltical, technical and organised while the right brain (therefore left side of the screen) is more imaginative, emotional and conceptual.

It would seem that the F-shaped viewing pattern and left-brain preference would be contradictory, but this might also provide a possible opportunity. Imagine a news web page that had the travel and lifestyle section on the left side of a page and the business and world news on the right side of the page. In this scenario you would read the section you want to and it would be placed on the most preferable side of the screen to elicit the best response.

In the end with my new blog layout I went middle of the road. I have centralised the main content but by placing my side-bar on the left I have skewed the text to the right so the informational/factual aspects of the content are brought to the fore.

Yes my blog is about marketing and advertising and more right-brain ideas, but I want to explore the technical aspects behind the execution, and that is why I prefer to have my text slightly to the right!