I had a glance at the MasterNewMediaSite site today to find this post about Sony and its spyware rootkit.
The Sony Rootkit Story: Music CDs Hidden Malicious Software Creates Problems For Users While Destroying Sony's Credibility And Reputation
And then went over to boing boing to check out what was going on in a bit more detail.
All fascinating stuff - not much community inspired thinking going on. In fact quite the opposite.
What is my response to this - well peer to peer is different to criminal piracy. How did the Artic Monkeys get to number one, or why is pitchforkmedia so important?
So here you go:
Storming the Bastille
What happens when the both the supply and demand structures that have served us so well over the last 50 years start to simultaneously decouple from our most recent past?
Well, we get a revolution or what could described as a gradual evolving historic act of liberation And, history tells us that once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t really want to go back to your boring day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an; uninformed, unconnected, passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume what is put in front of them.
But its not only that that has changed, traditional media is unbundling whilst the structural nature of consumption of information and content are in a state of flux – Significantly, we are entering a world where content will be increasingly delivered through internet and internet-mobile-protocol-based networks that are non-linear, on-demand and entirely self-scheduled. In that world, the viewer – not the broadcaster – whoever that may be, will decide what is consumed, when, and how.
In a revealing thought piece from the Media Centre , April 2005 about the future of news and how we will create and distribute information is this point of view, that, access to knowledge has been a defining story of civil society. Information technologies have historically redistributed access and knowledge from controlling institutions to the masses. In the current epochal transition, knowledge and economics are redistributed in a connected society with ubiquitous access to news and information.
Let me make this clear privileged institutions are no longer able to dominate markets by exercising control over them.
Moreover with the emergence and convergence of the mobile phone and the internet we suddenly have immediate access to our peers, our friends, our colleagues and family members. And like ‘search’ that is changing peoples habits and attitudes. We are getting used to living in a connected age where we naturally and increasingly draw on our participation in various networks for assistance, information and support.
For example, Cap Ernst Gemini and Young in a report in October 2003 showed that whilst 17% of people were influenced to buy a car via TV, 71% said they were influenced via word-of-mouth or personal advocacy. CEGY also claimed in 2003 that 70% of car advertising in broadcast and print media in the US, is a waste of money. As a hard-nosed businessman would say, this is a no-brainer. Costs the least while delivers the most. There is no issue to consider.
The language of our post-modern culture is one of flexibility - fluidity - portability - permeability - transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation and engagement.
But the revolution is not just empowering consumers, technology has tooled-up 28 year old geeks with an idea to challenge the business models of corporations with a market cap of billions for example, Skype vs. BT. Or consider the overwhelming advantage of Amazon vs. WH Smith. Hideki Komiyama Chief Operating Officer for Sony Electronics said,
five of six years ago home electronics was a peaceful market. Now people are coming in like hunting tribes
In this context, conventional notions about what an organization is, how it is structured and operates, is the equivalent of the silent movies in the 21st Century.
Simon London writing for the Financial Times (Monday 27th June 2005) wrote
Everything you thought about business has been upended. The relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The old notion that producer’s produce and consumers consume is regarded passé by management theorists.
All businesses need to understand and respond to the paradigm shift of both empowered customers and the threat to their traditional business models. Because this goes to the very heart of a companies organisational structure and how it will in the future communicate and do business with all its stakeholders
My favourite saying Companies are from Mars, Customers are from Venus
The problem for businesses and marketers is that traditional marketing has become in the eyes of everyday people, adversarial. Customers have changed and adapted to this new always on, always connected, media fragmented world, they seek value by searching, they are not waiting for you to interrupt them with unwanted messaging, they look to their peers for voices of authority. They are in effect doing it for themselves.
Shoshana Zuboff, in her book The Support Economy argues,
In today’s market, supporting end consumers is not an occasional event, but a necessary condition of being in business.
Whilst the Economist, in its cover story ‘Crowned at Last,’ on April 2 2005, said,
Many firms do not yet seem aware of the revolutionary implications of newly empowered consumers. Only those firms ready and able to serve these new customers will survive.
These are not glib comments. Businesses and their brands are no longer in control.
Ebay, SMS, instant messaging and Skype in telecoms, music file sharing, Wikipedia and OhMyNews (the Korean newspaper produced by 26,000 citizen reporters), online role playing games, RSS feeds, myspace.com are all examples of how enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows can transform business models. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. As Kevin Kelly argued in Wired Magazine
Peer-to-peer flows of information and communications, unleash involvement and interactivity at levels once thought unfashionable or impossible. It transforms reading into navigating and enlarges small actions into powerful forces. We have gone from spectator art to full blown participatory democracy.
So let me pose a point of view on advertising and news,
The New Web/Mobile Advertising Paradigm: Bottom-up, Distributed, Customized, Credible.
The Future of news is: Grassroots, Mobile, Immediate, Visual, Participatory, Trusted
And this clearly has far-reaching implications for business. We have gone from a world of “Push”, of command and control to a world of “pull” of engagement and participation.
Many existing corporations have been built as rigid hierarchical structures, which was required in a command and control world. For a while it suited us and delivered exponential value for many years. But our world has changed. Living in a postmodern world means that we have to leave our industrial mindset in the past. Our means of production have changed and also our means of consumption.
If companies spent the 20th century managing efficiencies, they must spend the 21st century managing experiences
Creativity now needs to sit at the very heart of what we create, what we make and how we deliver it.
Companies need to inspire co-creation – stimulate peer-to-peer advocacy, think how it can make its customers and other stakeholders successful, it needs to stop thinking in silos, and embrace ideas that can redefine the purpose of its organisations.
The thinking at SMLXL is that government, businesses and their brands in the 21st Century have to give up control to gain control. They have to become facilitators, enablers, life-simplifiers, co-creators, they have to inspire greater peer-to-peer interaction and in that way they will get the most precious thing from their customers - personal advocacy.
Easy to say even harder to do but, necessary for survival.
Within 10 years communities will have replaced the orthodoxies of government, management, business and marketing as the primary medium by which these organisations will successfully engage with their audiences.
Further, enabling or capturing peer-to-peer information flows will transform these organisations, simply for the better.
And, that those organisations that ignore the newly empowered and connected customer/voter/stakeholder will simply struggle to survive.
This is the unsung, un-remarked media revolution. That the great explosion is in peer-to-peer communication - something many organisations up until now has overlooked.
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