People creating content

Up until the last decade there has been one general model of content creation and distribution. Business paid to create the content and paid again to have it distributed to the masses. The masses consume the content and bought products.

The first decade of the 21^st century has changed several things to challenge that model.

1)    The “Democratization” of publishing via digital means.

2)    Advanced and cheap technology.

3)    Realigned expectations of content.

The New Model is that most any online user, be they a business or individual can create content at any level of cost, publish that content in numerous ways and have it viewed, on a potentially equal footing, with any other content.

Because the large businesses and professional content systems maintain the old model it is only them that suffer limited freedom in the information economy. The masses take full advantage of every tool at their disposal to publish themselves. What is critical is the simple dissemination of the message – it is the “what” not the “how”. By playing by the old model business often sacrifice the “what” because the “how” is unworkable, expensive or too time consuming.

When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility.

-Clay Shirky, TED

Lets look at two competing E-commerce organizations. Today we are going to sell decorative tee shirts. We will pit Massive E-tailer vs. Girl in School. Both want to sell tee shirts, both want them nicely modeled and both want them online as quickly as possible to respond to a trend.

Massive Etailer will require an official female model, a professional photographer, studio time, and support personnel for the shoot, an art director and a minimum of 30 days to prepare. Then there will be a web writer and other management processes before it can go live.

Girl in School puts her tee shirt on, stands in front of her web cam, and talks about her product. She uploads her video to YouTube and links that to her eBay and Etsy accounts. She will also show her video on her FaceBook page and tweet availability.

Girl in School’s overhead is much lower, of course, her speed to market is dramatically faster and she has video vs. Massive Retailer’s still photos. By using YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter (all aggregately indexed by Google) and her 30 day head start her natural search is, at least initially, higher than Massive Retailer’s for this type item. In a time sensitive market, this is critical.

An advantage, in the long run, will still go to the Massive Retailer due to overall Brand recognition and historical relationships but those advantages will even out as social media and content provider sites become the perceived “Parent” brand and the prosumers become the distributors of goods. We need look no further than the Amazon model.

The real power here is in combining the two. Established businesses are making hesitant steps in this direction but more needs to happen. Interestingly, smaller businesses grasp this easily. As an example I would use Uniqlo, a Japanese apparel retailer, and their brilliant model of content creation via public invitation. In the example they installed a low cost camera outside one of their store dressing rooms. They then invited anyone who tried on a tee shirt to photograph himself or herself. These photos became the product images.

Hundreds of photos capturing youth, diversity, comedy, variety, coolness, and fun!

An example here in the United States is the new Dominos Pizza Campaign.

Domino’s Pizza marketing campaign seeks to deny the use of professional, portrayed as “fake”, photography that are an established norm in modern marketing. Customers are invited to photograph the pizzas and submit those photos for representational use of the products by Domino’s. “Our pizzas are so good, we don’t need special photography”. This is brilliant and relevant marketing – it uplifts the product, invites the prosumer’s psychological partnership, produces an enormous amount of content which the company can exploit at no cost and elevates the brands genuineness.

In the Domino’s example the marketing Campaign is entirely conceptual – the content is provided by the paying customer.

The growth of Internet led technology has caused, and will continue, the evolution of established institutions. This evolution impacted obvious areas – news media, print and traditional television-are seeing almost over night change. The new content creation tools 

“History records endless examples of “revolutions” that replaced old technologies and even governments without significantly altering society itself and the people in it. By contrast, real revolutions replace institutions as well as technologies. And they do more: They break down and reorganize what social psychologists call the role structure of society.  … But anyone who underestimates the revolutionary character of today’s changes is living an illusion.”

-Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth

What has not been so obvious to large business is the growing erosion of high-end production content by low to medium quality content producers. All content creation has become cheap, disposable and fast, done by anyone from amateurs to skilled producers in direct competition to high-end productions.

Once anything is delivered on-line it can never be truly owned again. Our marketing should be designed with the intent, indeed hope, that it be reconfigured, redistributed and recombined. The 20^th century was dominated by the “read only” system of content delivery (entertainment, marketing etc.) and Americans could receive but not collaborate and create. The new age has given us the opportunity to collaborate again. This is a prismatic way of viewing personalization.

 “ Here's the argument. In my view the most significant thing to recognize about what this Internet is doing, is its opportunity to revive the read-write culture ... User-generated content, spreading in businesses in extraordinarily valuable ways like these, celebrating amateur culture. By which I don't mean amateurish culture, I mean culture where people produce for the love of what they're doing and not for the money. I mean the culture that your kids are producing all the time. … Taking the songs of the day and the old songs and remixing them to make them something different. It's how they understand access to this culture.”

- Larry Lessig, TED speech

If the content is compelling the public will co-opt it and redistribute it for us. Take for example the Back to School 2008 work from Kohl’s.

While the relative success of the program might be questionable, consider the fact that the above audio mash-up on YouTube, happened two years after the initial television spot ran.

 The informal model of content creation, provision, classification and distribution by users to the benefit of an institution is proved. Flikr, Wikipedia, eBay, Facebook, YouTube and many more are all, or nearly all, the aggregated content of its users. The institutions benefit from the content merely by providing easy, shareable, contextually relevant space for the clients.

The human desire to share combined with the global web and the plummeting cost of high quality equipment equal bad news for those hanging too rigidly to old content creation models. When we consider that the home equipment of many of our customers have capabilities beyond those of a professional television studio in 1995 the ability to communicate becomes unstoppable.

Ultimately, the passion of the community is for the quality of the work not, necessarily for the process we use to create it.

-Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

There is an even broader view of content to consider in this model and that is the product itself. Amazon is mentioned above as a “Parent” brand for client sales. In most other retail we separate professional retail goods from private sale goods. The trend toward customization has begun to rebel, to a small extent, against mass manufacturing. People want access to true exclusivity as personal statement. What if a major retailer allowed parallel product offering of small quantities, even one-of-a-kinds through the same channel as mass production? Imagine the order – Vera Wang top, Apt. 9 pants and shoes matched with a one-off handbag. Get it all and get it unique at Kohl’s.