Behavior of a Blog Reader

Ok guys, this is a straight-up request for feedback.  If you have a moment, either comment here, or respond on twitter @SEMiotic5, or shoot me an e-mail (since most of you know me).

I have been finding that if I post a new update in the afternoon and tweet a link, I get very little traffic compared to when I do the exact same thing around 10 am.  My rationalization for this is that people are most likely to be active on Twitter/blogs between 10-11, once they have had some coffee and checked their e-mail, but before the pressure of the end-of-day deadlines start getting to them.

Is this accurate?  I have a very small sample for this, so I can't be sure if you just don't happen to like the content that I have been posting in the afternoons, compared to the pieces that have gone up in the morning.  This could easily be random based on the amount of data that I have, but the beauty of having direct connections with your audience is that I don't have to wait for the sample to grow.

Also, if I am way off base feel free to let me know.  If the content is bad (or too long), I can't promise that it will improve, but it can't hurt for me to know about the problem.

Here is my grumpy kitten:

Content: Curation Versus Creation

Looking back to an earlier post, I touched briefly (sort of) on the shift from a monolithic system of branded content creation to a more diffuse system in which the end user can also generate media that ties back to or directly represents a brand.

As this diffusion of publication capability through social media has made every consumer a potential creative force, media has become as much of a horizontal process as it was vertical in the past.  Media is no longer simply created by a handful of agencies and pushed out through narrow channels to an end point.  It is created at downstream points as well as upstream, and can be passed easily from one person to another.

The dream has been realized; everyone can find any information and themselves contribute to the global discussion.  Some will get to write for the Huffington Post, or get mentioned in a Penny Arcade comic.  Maybe you will meet Mitch Krpata sometime at a convention, and hear some pretty smart things (you could read them at Insult Swordfighting also).  You can debate writers from The Economist now on their site, and brands like Ford are actually launching new product promotions entirely using social media,with the new Fiesta.

This change has led to the rise of the importance of the concept of "curation" alongside "creation."  Marketers and social media companies have to become aggregators and collections management specialists as much as creative agencies.  With all of this content being created and spread on the web, organizing it, packaging it, and making it accessible is a big deal, and a big business.

The issue for me is that after spending all of this time getting to a point where the end of the content production chain is no longer a dead-end at the consumer, the channels by which we access all of this media are quickly consolidating.  New boss might be the same as the Old Boss.

All we see these days are stats and articles about how big and how fast services like Facebook and Twitter are growing.  Facebook is unapologetic about wanting to be the connective tissue for the entire internet.  Think about it this: how often do you read articles now that you didn't come across via Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Digg?  I admit, aside from the NY Times and the Economist, I get most of the rest of my news from links that come from those sources.

Granted, the obvious argument is that these content aggregators simply provide the vehicle, and that the sources of information that I get are actually myraid, since there are people behind those tweets.  Still, most articles that trend online are those that get passed around and around, tweeted and liked and re-tweeted, in something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I am afraid that as we become more passive media consumers again, allowing information to be given to us rather than seeking it out, more and more editorial power will come to those services that are the conduit, even if they don't exercise it.

I get nervous when a handful of private enterprises, now matter how benevolent they claim to be, or even are, have so much control over the content that we see.  Hopefully, I am worried about nothing, but even if it isn't a matter of some vast conspiracy or information monopoly, I just worry that fewer sources channeling information will inherently lead to a narrowing of worldview on the part of the people who depend on them. 

When everyone reads the exact same articles that circle the social sphere, the conversation gets boring fast. 

Content is King (of Kings)

As a man who was trained not in marketing, but in history and sociology, I often end up viewing paid search and online media through a somewhat different lens than my peers.  I can’t help but look for the patterns and symbols embedded in user behavior, and like a good structuralist I believe that those currents reflect the same basic needs and feelings that all societies have had.  After all, don’t the members of the internet using world make a society at this point?  The very emergence of the “social space,” “social media,” and other such terms tell me that they do.  Like-minded people band together online just as they do in the physical world, communicating and trading with one another, and linguistics and resource economics are two of the main pillars of any cultural study.  Therefore, I don’t find it far-fetched to think that anthropological lessons can be applied to digital advertising, in the same way that art history majors were brought into print marketing in the last century to ensure that the correct symbols would be used to appeal to a consumer’s unconscious.

So it was that while I watched Scott Sorokin deliver a presentation on the rise of user generated content and what the engaged consumer meant to brands that I began to think about the relationship of the masses to content and information in the digital age.  He made point that until very recently a company controlled the flow of information to the consumer, and that it was a one-way stream and extremely limited in scope.  As the internet grows and we move more into a world where content and information are both limitless and accessible however, the connection between a brand and consumers has become reciprocal.  What was once a monopoly on the part of the brand company is now an open platform, where user reviews, Facebook likes, YouTube videos and more not only respond to brand-created media, but augment (and in some cases stand in for) content that a company generates.

The importance of this shift in the fundamental relationship between consumer and brand cannot be overstated.  The move from a monopolistic to a reciprocal distribution of power is extremely rare and nearly impossible to reverse.  Generally you would expect the examples to be political, harkening back to the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20^th century, or the toppling of hereditary monarchies in the 18^th century, but these sorts examples fall well short.  Changes in political or technological control over information in a society do represent the movement of power, but the authority in such cases is always fleeting and illusory, because the society in question is not part of the loop.  Submitting to authority is not the same as granting authority.  A citizen of the Soviet Union who drove a Zaporozhet was not brand loyal, they simply weren’t allowed to buy a Ford.

The relationship that consumers have had with brands for the last 50 years has been voluntary though, if one-sided.  The information that you knew about a product, and the associations you made with the product, were (for the most part) based solely on what the company spread through media.  Now however, most savvy consumers can find all the information they need on a product without ever visiting the brand site.  What’s more, they can produce media of their own, be it a tweet or a 20-minute video, which provides a personal, positive or negative impression of a brand.  And with the accessibility of this content online, the difference is that now the brands need that content.  In the old days you could write a letter about a poor experience with a product to the company, or mention to your neighbor that you liked a commercial, but companies didn’t need that feedback, and it didn’t change what flowed the other way to the consumer.

What all of this triggered in my brain was the shift from polytheism to monotheism in the western world two thousand years ago.  When you study any society, one of the most important relationships that you will learn about is that between a people and their deity.  In most early, polytheistic cultures there is a very direct and personal relationship with the gods.  You generally don’t find a large hierarchical church structure serving as an intermediary, outside of a few priests or shamans.  This is where you have a sacrificial system (not necessarily the type of sacrifice that the word conjures up), which is simply the mechanism by which a society expresses their end of a reciprocal relationship with the deities.  In order to keep the god of fertility happy so that the crops will grow, you in turn provide the first and best results of the harvest, as a trade.  In these belief systems the gods are very close to humanity, and they are a reflection of the society and its needs.  These gods were petty, greedy, and humorous, and above all they wanted the same things that the people did, which provided the believers with something to contribute to the relationship.  This is the sort of relationship we are coming to now between the consumers and brands.  It is a close, two-way system in which both sides need something from the other, and where the connections between them are interwoven, the boundaries thin.  It is no surprise that words like “organic” and “holistic” are used to describe the new direction of marketing strategy, the same words applied to naturalistic polytheisms.

We are moving in the opposite direction as religious beliefs, and that transition was based on the requirements of a more structured and hierarchical society.  In a monotheistic culture God is remote, obscured behind layers of ritual and clergymen.  One of the issues that early missionaries faced was getting non-Christians to understand that the sacrificial system didn’t work because God didn’t want anything they had to offer.  The relationship was no longer reciprocal, because an all-powerful Lord can provide himself with anything he wants, and cannot be contacted directly.  God passed his messages down through a chain, whether in book form or the words of his earthly representatives, in the same way that a brand would disseminate its media through its channels.  Here is our product, here is what we want you to know about it, and how we want you to think about it.  What you thought about a product as an individual wasn’t really important, because there were plenty of other people who were happy to buy it.  In contrast with the druidic, diffuse nature of the polytheistic power exchange, monotheism was institutional and monolithic, a relationship that could be mirrored by centralized political authority, consolidating authority with the rise of “the state” as opposed to tribalism.

As consumers we have finally made the journey in the other direction.  Apple users now form a tribe that is distinct from pc users, where once there were just people who did or did not own computers.  There was once a segment of the market that was simply made up of car owners, but now the Ford Focus has a Facebook page and thousands of friends.  As the pendulum swings, the importance of embracing this new paradigm should not be lost on those brands who wish to become successful.  Users seek to engage with a brand because they have something to offer that is valuable, and in return they become an asset, a supporter, a (twitter) follower.  In a tribal system, you really want to have the biggest tribe.

Edit:  There is no intent here at blaspheme, nor am I attempting to elevate any belief system over any other.  I find this topic to be an interesting one, and I plan to go a little further into the matter and flesh it out, so that it is more than just idle ramblings.