Reading a recent interview with Shirky and thinking about a recent assignment at work, I got to thinking about how marketers are going about getting involved in the fanaticism around their brands in social media. I often type a brand into Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or Google to see how many enthusiasts were out there for a brand/product or just expressing themselves and the brand was involved.
What Shirky describes below is very interesting in that he talks about a show like Lost and how because consumers today are accustomed to interactive mediums they created their own. But of course you don’t have to just listen to Shirky you can look for yourself the way I described above. Or at any moment in time, you will come across countless examples, like this site created for those that empathize with the shoe thrower during Bush’s recent visit to Iraq. The later I think takes us further it’s not just media it is a news piece, for marketers this could be news about their brand.
It’s clear to me that we live in a world that Shirky describes well: where people can create, author and develop with great ease. Many brands see the activity and want to take part or inspire people even more. If your fans can create with little effort and say what they want, it’s appropriate to consider what characteristics of what you do will embrace these sentiments.
Patterns of media consumption in recent years are very complicated to study, in part because we have a hard time right now separating fads from cohort effects from real deep structural shifts
But, the deep effects seem to me to be that when people are given media that isn’t interactive, they invent their own interactions around it. You will see this around television shows. Lost and Heroes are probably the most famous in this mode where the enormity of fan activity around the show is vastly larger than it was around equivalently popular shows in the ’90s, much less ’87, as its era. And so, where the creators of media aren’t adding interactive effects, users are stepping in on their own, right?
