New kinds of Brands
Its great to hear that Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are extending their D conference 365/24/7 with an -on-line version of it. This is the same thing I suggested to Tony Perkins and Kevin Werbach in 2004, Chris Pirillo, Ponzi and Doug Gold last year and to Rafat Ali this year. And it looks like Rafat and Staci are taking me up on my offer.
Continue the momentum and conversations started at a meatspace event into cyberspace and create persistent conv ersations that are stored - and re-entrant-able. That’s why we came up with ThreadsML and the need is still here today.
With all the hub bub of Amanda and Rocketboom and Jeff Pulver who’s upping who, and podcasting and vlogging and who’s getting all the traffic, etc. - I think we often forget about good old fashioned brands. I mean - who cares whether its a real Vlog or not? If people are watching and she’s on ‘network TV’ - that’s alll that counts! And competition is good - and healthy. And where is Ze Frank, Hugh, Anina or pk - afterall - when we need them?
People read Dave Winer’s Scripting News or watching Robert Scoble’s videocasts - ’cause they are loyal to the brand. Folks have been reading Walt Mossberg for years and I guess they like what they read.
For some reason - folks are attracted to Amanda and Rocketboom and all those ‘people’s recommendations’ from Digg, Techmeme, etc. And most of all - they LOVE those YouTube videos.
What’s going on is brands are morphing into something that the people can vote on directly - with their mouse clicks and attention. What they haven’t really been able to do - yet - is vote with their wallets and social capital.
Once viral invitations, meme mining and good old fashioned spiffs and promos are the verified purveyors of traffic - I think we’ll see several hundred true blue ‘brands’ emerge which will drive not only traffic, but serious monetization.
I know that’s what John Furrier is betting on and Eric Rice - too. I know that’s what Adam Curry thinks he’s gonna do with all his VC money and what folks like Dooce, BoingBoing and Nick Denton do pretty well today. It’s what Federated Media is betting on as well as BlogAds and AggregateKnowledge - too.
Wouldn’t it be cool if one of those controversial Michael Arrington/TechCrunch controversies - were played out live in front of everyone at some conference, and then was followed up on-line - and debated in public? Then Om Malik could weigh in, flow the conversation to his site and have Doc Searls or Kaliya Hamlin - take a stand as well.
A distributed mesh of inter-connected conversations, social networks and review pools could all hang off of open community event servers, shared pools of public domain content - or even (shudder the notion) a People’s DNS.
Now that conferences are staying on-line and morphing into brands, we’ll soon see the emergence of micro-communities or decentralized social networks. Call them what you will, but the average person will be a member of 8-10 or even more of these networks - and participate, blog or lurk - as the case may be, just like we join mail lists today.
These on-line communbities will come to life with community blogs, media galleries and event pools - which will help unite and keep the shared persistent conversations going.
In addition to new brand types evolving, there needs to be a major way in which brands are marketed. In the old days one could buy advertising space, pay celebrities to endorse, and so on. Now, with so much being done over the internet (and commercials being optional, unlike TV advertisements), the old ways of advertising brands no longer work. In combination, on the internet there is massive information overload. I think this is way social networks (e.g. Furl, del.icio.us) are evolving; it is a way for people to cut through the information to see the brands that other people believe in. I can’t predict where this will go, but I see in future brands being much more bottom up (public consencus) rather than top down (advertising dollars).
In addition to new brand types evolving, there needs to be a major way in which brands are marketed. In the old days one could buy advertising space, pay celebrities to endorse, and so on. Now, with so much being done over the internet (and commercials being optional, unlike TV advertisements), the old ways of advertising brands no longer work. In combination, on the internet there is massive information overload. I think this is way social networks (e.g. Furl, del.icio.us) are evolving; it is a way for people to cut through the information to see the brands that other people believe in. I can’t predict where this will go, but I see in future brands being much more bottom up (public consencus) rather than top down (advertising dollars).
In addition to new brand types evolving, there needs to be a major way in which brands are marketed. In the old days one could buy advertising space, pay celebrities to endorse, and so on. Now, with so much being done over the internet (and commercials being optional, unlike TV advertisements), the old ways of advertising brands no longer work. In combination, on the internet there is massive information overload. I think this is way social networks (e.g. Furl, del.icio.us) are evolving; it is a way for people to cut through the information to see the brands that other people believe in. I can’t predict where this will go, but I see in future brands being much more bottom up (public consencus) rather than top down (advertising dollars).