Communities Dominate Brands

Blogging community come to the aid of Mukhtaran Bibi

From the Guardian

Final act of rape case puts Pakistan on trial

Pakistan's supreme court will today begin to consider whether to reimpose the death sentence on six men accused of gang raping a woman whose battle for justice has become an embarrassment to President Pervez Musharraf

The story is that in 2002, Muhktaran Bibi was sentenced to be gang raped in punishment for a sexual crime allegedly committed by her brother.

Muhktaran stood up to to her accusers and won.

But in March of this year the success turned sour. An appeal court overturned the original conviction, citing flaws in the prosecution case. Then the government tried to gag her.

she was not allowed to leave the country when she had been invited to the US to talk at a human rights conference. A gagging order was placed on her and she was taken to Islamabad.

President Musharaaf became involved and the story was picked up New York Times Coloumnist, Nicholas Kristoff.

The Guardian says,

He was joined by over 100 internet blogs, some of which directed protesters to a demonstration at the Pakistani consulate in New York.

The sense of outrage reached the White House. Usually, Bush administration officials turn a blind eye to abuses by Islamabad, a key ally in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. This time the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, rang the Pakistani foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri, to complain. The travel ban was lifted.

We hope that Muhktaran Bibi survives her ordeal, and it goes to show, once again, the power of the blogosphere in applying pressure on those it believes have transgressed.

Perhaps Nicholas Kristoff would have created that pressure himself, The New York Times is no light weight, but I beleive that is not the case. he lit the fuse and people power did the rest.

Good for Schools - Good for business

Jupiter is a manufacturer of brass and woodwind instruments.

This is what Jupiters website says

Since 1930 the JUPITER company has been dedicated to helping schools and culture. This simple definition still represents the primary goal of the JUPITER brand today.

To that end Jupiter have been involved in a project called SoundStart

SoundStart began in September 2001, when 30 young pupils from Elmwood Primary School in Croydon became the first to try this unique musical experiment. Unlike most music tuition that takes place outside the classroom, Soundstart takes a whole class from beginner to concert in one term. Jupiter brass and woodwind and their UK distributor Korg UK, working with Croydon Music Services, gave each child an instrument of their choice – a wide range from flutes to saxophones, some of which the children had never seen or heard before.

And the benefits.... well, as one child explained “Do you realize if we weren't doing this music project we could be out nicking cars?".

Or how aboout this

All this is translating into better results for the school overall. Poor attendance and lateness have been virtually eradicated. Homework completion has gone up from 67 % to 97%. There has been a significant decline in children involved in "disruptive behaviour" in and, especially out of class, with three/four incidents a week down to less than one a week.

From the Jupiter website is a list of benefits:

Great enthusiasm from pupils, teachers and parents

Supports the school's music curriculum

Enhances music's status in the school

Provides development for teachers

Proved to be fully replicable in other authorities

Comprehensive resource material and support provided

Publicity opportunity for schools

Benefits for schools in the community and with parents

Leads to increased take up of Music Service tuition

Help to create "life-long enthusiasm“ for music.

Having just read the article - I am reminded that as we always argued at SMLXL finding innovative ways to support and engage individuals and their wider community is the future of brands that want to be successful.

As we say in our little book of engagement marketing

Engagement Marketing could help sell a product, an industry, a region, combat a social issue. Engagement Marketing is about connecting large or small communities with engaging content to a commercial or social agenda

It creates a better more rewarding context for people to want to be involved. The brand or institution becomes dynamic rather than static - it plays a more relevant role in peoples lives.

Korg UK and Jupiter who have put a great deal of effort into this project have equally benefitted. It is a self assured and mature approach to marketing. Aligning several key objectives through one inititiative.

As Glen Urban said:

Evidence is building that the paradigm of marketing is changing from the push strategies so well suuited to the past 50 years of mass media to trust based strategies that are essential in a time of information empowerment

Brendan Le Page who initated the scheme in Croydon says

There's no doubt in my mind that a good musical experience should be given as a right to every schoolchild. They shouldn't even have to want it. We don't offer reading to pupils who want it. It would cost something like £200 per child for a one-year project of sufficient depth to be worthwhile. Compared with the cost of other ways of dealing with poor behaviour, low self-esteem, barriers to learning, and anti-social behaviour, this is truly a drop in the ocean, but it would release a tidal wave of positive energy.

So the schools win, the kids win, the parents win, government ministers win, and the company that supplies the instruments win, by now having the permission to talk to heads of music and government about their initiatives. And to sell more products.

This initiative has changed lives, and changed schools for the better. Jamie Oliver would be proud.

Jupiter and Korg have gone from just selling instruments to saying and delivering on the position "we care about music education." The results are there for all to see.

Or you could carry on spending large amounts of money interrupting people with messages that are out of context, that do not engage in media which is proven to be increasingly inefficient.

Lego confirms: nobody as clever as everybody

Last week's Business Week, which devoted half of the issue to its cover story, the "Power of Us" ie community power (June 20, 2005 issue) - had as its lead example Lego's Santa Fe train kit. This case is a microcosm of what we discuss in our book, starting from the attempts of the Lego R&D engineers creating a hit train, to recruiting enthusiasts to review the prospects, to discovering that communities rule as they dismissed all options. Lego then had the foresight to engage that community of Lego fanatics. Here is where it gets interesting..

The Lego fans were given a free hand to invent their ultimate train toy. They got together and constructed what they called the "Santa Fe" train. Business Week writes: "As a result, says Jake McKee, Lego's global community-development manager, 'we literally produced what they told us to produce.' The locomotive, the Santa Fe Super Chief set, was shown to 250 enthusiasts, and their word of mouth helped the first 10,000 units sell out in less than two weeks with no other marketing."

Brilliant !!!  First, the community knows best. Like Alan Moore keeps telling us, Nobody is as clever as everybody. Secondly, like we write in our book, engage the community. Then, again, like we say in the book, rather than waste your money in shotgun advertising, get hold of your evangelists, give them what they really like, and they will sell it for you.

250 hard-core Lego fans, sold out 10,000 kits in two weeks, only by word of mouth ! Do we need any more proof that this formula works. Not only on the internet, with telecoms, or IT, or electronic media. Even in a "bricks" industry like Lego, about as far away removed from the digital world as we can imagine.

Designing your own revolution

Is what Charlie Leadbeater talks about in a recent article in the Observer on Sunday, on how communities are forming and co-creating together

And it seems the notion of co-creation is moving into public policy as a new 'co-creation' approach to health care is set out in this paper from the Design Council's RED unit.

read it here.

Red Paper 01 Health - Co-creating Service

Authored by Charle and Hilary Cottam won the London Design Museum designer of the year award 10 days ago.

Cottam does not design for people but with them. Her aim is to give users the tools and support to develop their own solutions. She is particularly committed to applying this thinking to big public-service issues in education, crime and health.

Also worth a read There is a global conversation going on out there

10 years at ebay

Adriana from the Big blog company quotes the Economist in an article celebrating ebays 10 year anniversary

The commercial opportunities presented by an expanding global web seem almost limitless. But the pace of change is rapid, and so is the ferocity of competition. To succeed, firms need agility, an open mind and the ability to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Most of all, they need to listen carefully to their customers, paying close attention to what they do and don’t want. Such qualities, of course, would be valuable in any kind of business. Yet for online firms they are not a luxury, but necessary for mere survival.

Gary Hamel said

In a world where incumbency is worth next to nothing, a company must be capable of reinventing its deepest sense of self and its core business concept continuously, year after year.

So someone has been listening.

Adriana pushes her point home by then adding

Hence ther writing is on the wall for the marketing industry about the ’empowered consumer‘. They translate the many-to-many nature of the internet into the need to pay attention to every whim of the customers. Which is good advice, but I would go even further - businesses should understand that the barrier separating them and the ‘consumers’ is breaking down. Their employees are the same people who create the ‘consumer class’ and the big divide between the ‘broadcaster of the message’ and the ‘target audience’ is no longer what it used to be in the industrial era of mass production and pretty much mass everything…

Read the Economist article which reinforces the findings of our book here And our post on the Economist article here or Business week also worth a read.

The Guardian understands engagement on all platforms

Perhaps out of all the big newspapers, it is the Guardian, that has grasped the opportunity in building far deeper relationships with their readers, online and offline.

We have written about the The Guardian before, but what interested me was when the Guardian features team worked with an audience who were invited to join in producing an edition of the paper at the Hay-on-wye festival.

we have all it all here. Co-creation, community, two-way flows of dialogue, communities of interest.

Guardian reporter Sam Wollaston sets the scene

9.30am Eleven Guardian journalists stumble, slightly bleary-eyed, on to the stage. They start to sift rapidly through the morning papers, searching for the stories of the day. It's the same as a normal G2 day, except that they're doing it in a goldfish bowl. Behind the stage is a screen on to which images can be projected photographs and graphics, as well as G2 pages. On the screen at the moment is an empty flatplan, the framework of pages which, by the end of the day, will be filled with informative, thought-provoking and entertaining copy, and beautiful photographs. Well, that's the idea ..

He then goes onto say

OK, so here's the idea. Something we've been thinking about a lot recently is the changing relationship between newspapers and their readers. Papers used to just tell you what was going on and what to think, and occasionally they'd get a letter back from an angry reader. But with the emergence of the internet, the blogosphere, and the role of the reader's editor at the Guardian, papers now have a more intimate relationship with their readers. This exercise is just taking that one step further, involving a live audience in the decisions about what goes into the section that day.

It all seemed to go very well, a paper was produced, story was made, people participated. I would be interested to know what the audience thought of the experience. If anyone was involved - we would love to hear from you.

Still interested? Have a read of our Communities take control post

Mass media to social media Part V

Google To Overhaul Video Search, Allow Consumers To Index Their Own Content

SEARCH GIANT GOOGLE IS READYING a new version of online video search that would enable both content publishers and consumers to submit their own video for indexing, a move that could significantly blur the barriers between professional and consumer generated video content. As part of the plan, which Google executives confirmed on Tuesday, the search engine also intends to make the video content it receives via its uploading service searchable. It also is mulling plans to offer streams of all or parts of the video from its own site, said a spokesman. An instruction page for Google's current video service gives guidance on setting a fee for watching videos: "We suggest that you choose a fair price that you think users will pay to view your video content. Because you can change the price at any time, experiment and see what price brings you the most success."

Reports: P&G To Slash TV Ad Spend

Procter & Gamble is slashing its TV ad spending by as much as 25 percent for cable networks and by as much as 5 percent for broadcast networks, reports The Wall Street Journal. The newspaper, citing unnamed sources, said P&G, the world's largest advertiser, stems from doubts over the effectiveness of traditional TV advertising. Last year, as part of an ambitious shift toward communications planning, P&G indicated it planned to reduce its reliance on conventional TV advertising and to develop new methods and communications channels. The Journal said news of P&G's cutbacks was first reported by the Myers Report.

Rocker humbles Ebay - community always wins

Russell Buckley's Mobile Weblog gives the latest example of why communities dominate. In the UK the Live 8 concert tickets were distributed by SMS lottery. Soon after they started to be awarded, some showed up at Ebay. Seems rather a sad case of human nature but obviously the greed of some people got ahead of their compassion. Bob Geldof the former rocker and organiser of the event was having none of that. He initiated a revolt and boycott and disruption of the Ebay policies and sure enough, as readers of this blogsite would guess, again the community wins. Yes, Ebay pulled all sales of Live 8 tickets.

Ebay had no choice but to back down quickly from their previous "there's nothing illegal about selling them" to "we've listened to the eBay community". They should have seen this one coming, I think, when Sir Bob first made his displeasure known. But it proves that there's nothing so powerful as a community that has decided to act in unison. Even mighty corporations and governments must bow down to its wishes. Community power has arrived, but we ain't seen nothing yet.

If a digital community acts against you, even if you are an overpowering web presense, like Ebay, you lose. Communities always win. This is yet another case of examples like we have in our book and proves the point once again: the only way to succeed in a world of digital communities is to join them, not to fight them. Thank you Russell for noticing the story and posting about it !

20 year forecast resonated broadly

I posted on my 20 year forecast (given to the Canadian cellphone industry in Ottawa last week). That posting resonated remarkably strongly on various blogsites and websites. We have received hundreds of extra visitors because of it. Thank you for the coverage and welcome all who visit these pages.

I posted about the presentation and the forecast on three sites. I posted it at the Mobile Applications club of Ecademy  where we had lively debate and discussion about it in a thread of 16 replies from Mac Karlekar, Faraz Rizvi, Symon Blomfield, Ramnik, Alex Kerr, Julian Bond, Dave Jennings, Paul Goldingand Simon Cavill, covering such issues and mobile commerce, ownership of customer, miniaturization, Moore's Law, etc. My friend Alex Kerr added a great prediction, that over the next 20 years we'll also add X-ray capability, ie to see through walls. I wish I had thought of that, ha-ha..

I also posted a summary at the Wireless Future club of Tribe (but there was no discussion) and at the English language part of Oh My News in Korea.

Alan kindly posted a mention at his company blogsite at SMLXL's From Interruption to Engagement blogsite/website (and an excellent source for more deep thought pieces on the topics we cover here at this blogsite)

Brian Hayashi of Denver Colorado saw the presentation in Ottawa and wrote about it Envisioning The Future of Cell Phones at ConnectMe Networks

It was with great interest I read a speech by Tomi Ahonen, author of Communities Dominate Brands. The Canadian industry association, CWTA, invited him to deliver the keynote to its celebratory event celebrating 20 years cellular telecoms in Canada, and asked him to look 20 years into their future. I pretty much agree with much of what he says: credit card functionality on phones by 2010, retail acceptance of mobile payments by 2015 to the point where more payments take place over phones than traditional credit cards, and built-in video projectors in phones by 2020. Remember the scene in Star Wars where Luke sees the image of Leia for the first time, floating as if by magic? We're going to go away from watching video on postage stamp-sized screens, to heads up displays

The 3G Portal run by Steve Jones - who lectures with me at the Oxford University 3G courses - was one of the first to run the story

One of my favourites was how Russell Buckley at his Mobile Weblog blogsite mentioned it - he posted a nice picture of the original cast of Star Trek (as I did refer to the Star Trek intergalactic translator in my presentation). Cool, thanks Russell. He wrote about my posting like this

He was asked to forecast the next 20 years for the industry. This is really the realms of sci fi as who could have guessed 20 years ago, for instance, that we'd have the worldwide web as a mass market concept - Arpanet, the web's predecessor had only 2000 or so connected computers in 1985. This was also an era when mobile phones only came as carphones and batteries were massive. Thus, they were the domain of a few, very wealthy people, who really needed to keep in touch

Another site where we triggered a long discussion is at the Telepocalypse blogsite run by Martin Geddes. This was not focused so much on the future of mobile telecoms, but rather the one prediction I threw in that by 2020 the "fixed and free internet" is all but vanished. This triggered heated discussion about the future of the internet, from definitions to money to number of users, to even comparing internet future visions with communism. A long discussion thread with participation from Martin, Patrizia, Yadu Tekele, and Paul Jardine with even our Alan Moore joining in.

Ajit Jaokar's Open Gardens blogsite covered it here under "Tomi Ahonen's Crystal Ball"

Adriana Cronin-Lucas of The Big Blog Company wrote about it like this:

A truly dizzing predictions of the future of mobile from Tomi Ahonen on Communities Dominate Brands... I was getting quite excited by 2010 what with a 3.5G phone with a 5 Megapixel optical zoom cameraphone with WiFi type speeds and built-in TV tuners, and a gigabyte size hard drive (like today’s i-Pods). The smallest phones are the size of a thick credit card.

and our dear friend Jackie Danicki, blogger and moblogger wrote about it at her blogsite The Hole like this:

One of the coolest people I know, mobile expert Tomi Ahonen, writes at the blog for Communities Dominate Brands, the book he wrote with one of the other coolest people I know, Alan Moore of SMLXL, of his predictions for mobile progress in the next 20 years. This is based on a keynote speech he gave for the CWTA's celebration of 20 years of mobile telephony in Canada, but no matter what country you're in, Tomi's glimpse into the future is exciting.

Thank you Jackie, kiss-kiss-kiss..

I am sure there have been many more that we have missed, and apologise for all of those. We also strongly welcome all new visitors to our Communities Dominate Brands blogsite. Please do visit us again, and take a look at our book. It is the only book on the business of digitally connected communities, from blogging, gaming, dating, rating to cellphone based smart mobs. And yes, if you are interested in the future of mobile telecoms (my 20 year forecast) then you must read the chapter of the book on Generation-C.

For those who have not seen it, obviously read the full 20 year prediction here - Original Ahonen 20 year prediction for mobile telecoms.

Communities take control

A great post by Mike Butcher over at Net Imperative which resonates with the themes and ideas of our book.

Mike says

Simon Waldman, head of Guardian Unlimited, says modern media consumers want to create, control and challenge traditional media owners online. And that spells bad news for Rupert Murdoch.

Though Rupes did spell it out pretty clearly that things had to change radically if newspapers were going to survive, when he spoke to the American Society of Newspapers Editors.

Mike then expands on Waldmans thoughts

Waldman talked about how online consumers want media owners to hand them the tools to interact with content.

He cited the phenomenon of Wikipedia, where a million articles have been posted, contrasting with the 65,000 articles on Encyclopaedia Brittanica.

This desire to create content is exemplified by OhMyNews.com in South Korea, an online newspaper created by 'citizen journalists'. He also cited the ability of bloggers to take out mainstream media, as in the instance of Rathergate.

Craigslist - which has taken £60m of ad revenue out of the San Fransisco newspaper market - and GumTree.com, are examples of how concentrating on managing "people and communities rather than just technology" can reap huge dividends.

For readers of the book - you will know that OhMyNews is one of our case histories from the book that clearly demonstrates the paradigm shift that is affecting our media, culture and business structures so profoundly.

Other favourite soundbites from the post

Waldman touched on the new wave of podcasting and P2P file sharing over BitTorrent as examples of how consumers are creating a market for "yesterday's TV and radio."

And

The ultimate endgame is that media owners will have to get used to change, and recognise that creating value for consumers can be a business online, but rarely a traditional one.