Archive for August, 2009
Top 10 Aha! Moments in ‘The Chaos Scenario’
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Chaos sometimes can be inspiring. And I definitely feel inspired after reading Bob Garfield’s new book The Chaos Scenario.
Garfield, an Advertising Age columnist and co-host of NPR’s On the Media, lays out the hastening death march of old media and the Brave New World of possibilities unleashed by bloggers, tweeps and the wisdom of crowds.
I’ve been on the front lines of this revolution since 1996. While covering San Francisco’s emerging “Multimedia Gulch” for the San Jose Mercury News, I got an early glimpse of technology’s potential to disrupt traditional media and marketing. I asked – okay, I begged — then Managing Editor David Yarnold to let me go work in the digital arm of Knight Ridder. I’m grateful he let me do it.
It’s been painful to watch the layoffs, the plunging profits, the acquisitions and general tumult as my former media employers grapple with a new way of doing business because advertising can’t foot the bill for the vast amounts of free content available online.
Garfield’s book lays out the reasons why anyone who’s in the business of marketing, media, government or religion must listen to the digital conversations or perish.
Here are my top 10 “aha!” moments while reading The Chaos Scenario:
10 – Why people share: “It goes back to something primal,” says Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. “There’s still a desire to have a shared cultural context. We hunger for things we can discuss.”
9 – “The opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. Apathy,” says Yakir Krichman, BuzzMetrics’ “Sentiment Master.”
8 – “Better yet, host the conversation.” Having dealt with the fallout from “Dell Hell” and other social media debacles, Dell now “embraces the crowd with the zeal of the converted.” Among other things, they host IdeaStorm, a place for customers to post complaints and product suggestions.
7 – “Practice Jujitsu,” turning “the energy of the aggressor into your own best weapon.” That’s the model used by National Express, the U.K.’s largest long-haul bus company. They ask customers to text or call a toll free number to file complaints. Those are immediately routed to employees on the ground, who do their best to take care of the messes, impressing their costumers and improving their business.
6 – “What’s in it for Us? Not You. Us.” “Do something nice for people and they will come to you,” says Jess Greenwood of London’s Contagious magazine.
5 – “Remember Siegfriend and Roy. Especially Roy. Just when you think you do have the tiger by the tail, do not ever forget, the tiger can turn against you. Word of mouth is a wild and dangerous beast.” Here’s some research to back that up: “A 2007 study by University of Michigan social psychologist Norbert Schwartz demonstrated that attempts to correct misinformation not only tend to reinforce people’s false beliefs, but to attribute the baloney to the very authoritative source trying to clear things up.” So the old saying, “‘I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right?’ It isn’t true.”
4 – “Listenomics” is “the art and science of cultivating relationships with individuals in a connected, increasing open-source environment.”
3 – “In the Listenomics Age, never get in a dispute with someone with access to a computer.” Case in point, Garfield’s creation, ComcastMustDie.com, a site bent of having the cable goliath deal with the wrath of dissatisfied customers.
2 – “We now have [total-population] data, and that changes everything,” says Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, a behavioral-marketing firm that’s now part of AOL. “With [that] data, you can know essentially everything. You can find out all the things that are non-intuitive, or counter intuitive that as excellent predictors…. There’s a lot of power in that.”
1 – “Chaos. Someday it will end. …Nah. The very nature of Listenomics is such that there will always be some level of chaos in the scenario.”
Are Bob Garfield’s views of the media industry’s future too extreme or is he right on the money? Share your comments.
ABOUT
Jeordan Legon
Content Strategist
For over 10 years, I’ve been helping companies tell a story that is relevant. The views expressed on this site are mine alone and don’t necessarily reflect those of my employer, Chevron.
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