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Digital Immigrant Or Digital Native?

In a world of connected consumers creating their own content, uniting in communities of interest and even becoming citizen reporters, how do brands engage, asks the co-author of 'Communities Dominate Brands'...

We face a world of connected consumers creating their own content menus, playing, sharing and networking in communities of interest, and free to be citizen reporters. Even Rupert Murdoch has twigged. So how do brands engage, asks the co-author of ‘Communities Dominate Brands’...

By Alan Moore

Reported widely in the online world, capturing the imagination of Rupert Murdoch and now picked up by the FT, Epic tells the story of the creation of a single source of media content that contains everything that anyone would possible want to know.

The "Evolving Personalised Information Construct" springs from the rapid mergers of today's most powerful technology companies - among them, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and TiVo. Eventually they form Googlezon, which unleashes epic.

You can see the film here

Epic is worth a perusal as it sets the backdrop to the widening debate about big media, content, news, information and how we might use these things in the future.

Jeff Jarvis at Buzzmachine mentions Merrill Brown, author of a Carnegie Corporation of New York report on media consumption.

Merrill Brown says:

The future course of news is being altered by technology-savvy young people no longer wedded to traditional news outlets or even accessing news in traditional ways

Having read various online reports, blogs and newspapers. One can see why some argue that we are not ready to cope with such radical changes. What is content and who owns it? Who has control of distribution?

Rupert Murdoch speaking recently to the American Association of Newspaper editors had this to say:

"Like many of you, I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web, nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few proprietors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives....

The peculiar challenge then, is for us digital immigrants – many of whom are in positions to determine how news is assembled and disseminated -- to apply a digital mindset to a set of challenges that we unfortunately have limited to no first-hand experience dealing with. We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.

What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel. Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle. In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse."

I quote Rupert Murdoch at length because it is key for companies and marketers to acknowledge that what we have all experienced IS a paradigm shift.

Korean trailblazers

Want a tangible example – well we can look at OhMyNews in Korea. The third largest newspaper. It is a digital newspaper – but that is not the interesting bit. The paradigm shift is that it has 26,000 citizen reporters that contribute to the newspaper. Get your story published and you receive $20 USD and your name in print.

Founder and Editor Oh Yeon-ho said in an interview with Wired Magazine "With OhMyNews, we wanted to say goodbye to 20th-century journalism where people only saw things through the eyes of the mainstream, conservative media. Our main concept is every citizen can be a reporter. We put everything out there and people judge the truth for themselves."

The article goes on further to say that the Guardian has described it as the world’s most domestically powerful news site and a South Korean diplomat was quoted as saying that the no policy maker can now ignore OhMyNews. Rupes would have been well aware of these developments as he gave his speech.

Re-set your mindset for the four Cs

What does all this technology do? Well it enables us to go to market, and totally rethink how we might engage our audiences. So you need to set your controls for the heart of the 4C’s: Commerce, Culture, Community and Connectivity. Briefly, connectivity provides companies for the very first time the opportunity to generate two-way flows of information, feedback and engagement.

Connectivity, enables us - via the internet and the mobile phone - to identify who are prolific connectors and social networks that could be key distribution points to viral contagion and sharing word of mouth messages. But connectivity alone is not enough, there must be good content (culture) and a population of interest (community). If this can be combined with a genuine business enterprise (Commerce). One is looking at a powerful business and marketing model.

Co-created agenda

The revolution of engagement is built upon the power of the meritocracy of ideas, and the strategic combinations of different media to propel that idea into the world. But more fundamentally than that, IT IS about connecting large or small communities with engaging content to a commercial or social agenda. Rather than boiling everything down to a unique selling proposition, engagement marketing is able to create bigger ideas that emotionally engage its audience. Rather than focus on the single proposition that would result in a manufactured communication strategy, engagement marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared and co-created experience, something which ‘interruptive’ communications cannot do.

Cross media melting-pot

"If as a brand you’re not a provider of a valuable experience - go home, hang up your boots and retire. In this new world the key to commercial success is to make your customers successful: understand your customers’ needs; involve them; engage them; develop strategies that by holding their attention willingly mean you can also have a commercial relationship.

As a practitioner of cross-platform engagement strategies - I see more and more and more requests for 'big ideas' - cross platform strategies. Terms increasingly used are about engagement, and cross-platform creative content strategies, an area which we do indeed specialise in. Customers, you see, embrace the world holistically funnily enough, whereas we marketers like to chop, chop, chop everything down into little tiny pieces.

IF ONE THINKS THAT AT THE POINT OF PURCHASE YOU HAVE JUST MADE THE FIRST STEP - WHERE DOES THAT TAKE YOU? Remove the notion that marketing is 'adversarial' and you start to get into a really interesting place - that can be tailored and enhanced by new digital technologies - one can create and co-create value in so many ways.

Media meritocracy

Customerbase is replaced with customer community - And all brand interaction should deliver an experience that actively links customers, media and brand in relevant and meaningful ways. Brand experience replaces broadcasting in its broadest sense.

And finally from Bob Garfield at AdAge

Fragmentation, the bane of network TV and mass marketers everywhere, will become the Holy Grail, the opportunity to reach -- and have a conversation with -- small clusters of consumers who are consuming not what is force-fed them, but exactly what they want. Producers and broadcasters capitalized with billions of dollars will be on approximately equal footing with podcasters and video bloggers capitalized with $399.99 12-months same-as-cash from Best Buy. And just as DailyKos, Instapundit, Wonkette and Wil Wheaton have coalesced large followings in the cacophony of the blogosphere, some of the citizen-video programmers will find not just a voice but an audience.

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This is the third in a series of four articles Alan Moore (along with Tomi Ahonen) is writing for NMK exploring themes from their new book 'Communities Dominate Brands'. Check back for more articles between now and June 2005.

Read the first article: From Customer To Community
The second article: The Story of Mobile Versus TV

About the Author:

Alan Moore, branding and advertising expert, is CEO of SMLXL, the engagement marketing specialist firm. www.smlxtralarge.com. Alan is speaking at the conference In The City Interactive with NMK on 7 June at the ICA which will bring together content creators and distributors to explore the issues and opportunities facing us in the convergence era.

His co-author Tomi T Ahonen is a bestselling writer and a consultant in technology and telecoms, especially the emerging areas of next generation wireless. Ahonen set up and headed Nokia's Global 3G Business Consultancy Department and wrote the world's first book on 3G services ‘Services for UMTS’ (2002) and its follow-up, ‘3G Marketing: Communities and Strategic Partnerships’ (2004). www.tomiahonen.com

About The Book:

‘Communities Dominate Brands’ by Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore is published by and available to buy from Futuretext (April 2005). www.communities.futuretext.com

The book also has its own blog at http://communities-dominate.blogs.com