Uneven Distribution.

For Love or Money.

October 18th, 2008

While out riding this afternoon I noticed a poster for The Australian. The headline ran along the lines of “In times of uncertainty, you should only rely on trusted sources” (due to safety issues involved in piloting a pushbike while operating gadgetry, I was unable to snap a photo). This attitude amazes me. Yes, newspapers are facing a colossal challenge in the digital world, but rather than try and paddle upstream, why not use that energy to go with the flow? Work out how to harness the new tools available. The Australian may have 200 reporters doing their jobs for money, but they could also utilise an army of people willing to do a similar job purely out of love.

When I was a kid, I built a billy-cart out of love. Holden built cars for money. This simple idea has now been turned on it’s head, just look at Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, even Google is essentially an algorithm applied to user generated content. Big things now happen for love, and at the heart of these big things are social tools.

We have always been social, it’s in out nature. But the tools we find at our disposal today amplify our socialness. And while the printing press put new tools and ideas in the hands of an undisciplined reading public, now the internet has created a similar scenario, an undisciplined creative public. This public don’t care that they’re not supposed  to be creating something, they just do it. The easiest demonstration of this is the fact that a user-review is just a google search away. Go google your brand (or your clients). After all the marketing dollars and brilliant creative thrown behind the brand’s advertising, a few bad words from a consumer, ranking highly in Google, can turn sentiment against you in an instant.

The result of this is that your customer will soon be more powerful than your marketing department (and arguably already are). Even as a loosely gathered group, the public has more control over your brand than you do. Anyone in marketing knows not to turn the consumer into the enemy, so it’s baffling how many marketers are happy to work against the flow of culture. And The Australian’s campaign is just one example of this attitude.

While loosing control of your brand may seem like a negative outlook, it doesn’t have to be. You can leverage this change and make it work for you. People will create for love, and if you have a successful brand, someone, somewhere, must love it. So enable them to create. Rather than a newspaper telling me to read their paper (or visit their site) because they have 200 professional journalists, why not acknowledge that an army of bloggers are probably better than their staff of 200? Find a way to allow people to contribute, and in doing so make their brand, communications, essentially their entire offering, 2-way.

People will create, they love to do it. You just need to work out where your brand fits in to that creation.

Comments

The problem I have is that if newspapers employ an “army of bloggers” we will lose on quality. That’s not to say that there aren’t bloggers out there that are high quality writers, but the reason that I would prefer to have journalists writing my news is that they are trained in how to construct a good article, where to look for the stories that matter, and how to check their facts.

Plus, when I do something for love it’s because I want to do it. But if someone asks me to do the same thing that I love so that they can make money, I’m going to ask for a bit of that money as well. If newspapers want to hire bloggers to write their articles, bloggers will start to expect to get paid. As this happens, bloggers will need to be trained to write quality articles to get the jobs. Journalists already have this training.

Finally, I agree that newspapers need to discover a way to still be financial in the digital world. I figure it’s going to include a mix of journalists and opinion writers (traditional news) and on the street reporters and bloggers (digital news). This would allow for more up to date news, as it happens, focusing on local news as well as national. It’s just finding that replacement for the classifieds and ads that are in newspapers that give them the money to hire those highly trained journalists.

Hi Ben,

I did actually wonder about using the newspaper example in this post, because I knew how quickly it would attract the journos vs. bloggers argument. In the end though, I realised that the idea of love or money could actually be quite relevant to that argument, not just to marketing/advertising/brands.

In terms of losing on quality because a newspaper employs an army of bloggers, I completely agree. But the idea of simply engaging bloggers to write ‘professional’ articles is overly simplistic. If the journo’s/papers and the bloggers can move beyond this outlook I imagine they will find some amazing solutions. The newspaper industry has, for 400 years, been in the business of filtering, then publishing. The online world is built on the reverse, publish then filter. The right technology teamed up with the right contributors teamed up with the right strategy could actually settle the journos vs’ bloggers argument (for now), and also create a profitable proposition for the publishers.

Your point about creating something out of love for someone to profit on is completely valid, and is a whole other side to the love or money idea. If you’re really interested in the implications of bringing profit into creation out of love, have a read of Yochai Benkler’s “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” here. I do believe though, that it is possible to integrate people creating out of love into a profitable model, whether that’s a knitting circle or a publishing giant. It’s just a matter of working out how (and humans are terribly unpredictable things in these types of matters).

Ever noticed in a conversation with someone new that when you strike a thread that they are passionate about they suddenly come to life - comment, engage and contribute.

You see the true person and where they should be.

Ideas, brands and services customer embrace and advocate - tis a beautiful thing.

[...] on insights from Clay Shirky (which I talked about in For Love or Money and Getting a piece of the cognitive surplus), and a 50 year economic theory, I created something [...]

Nic

I’m inclined to agree with Ben but think you hit the nail on the head when you said:

“The right technology teamed up with the right contributors teamed up with the right strategy could actually settle the journos vs’ bloggers argument (for now), and also create a profitable proposition for the publishers.”

Of course, niche publishers - digital or otherwise - have been exploiting the goodwill of contributors for eons, extracting great content in return for the occasional concert ticket or backstage pass.

Their problem comes when they sell out to a Murdoch-like juggernaut because the same contributors then fail to embrace the new corporate ethos, which is fair enough.

Maybe part of the answer lies in offering contributors a percentage share of advertising from the pages where they appear. I also see potential in building certain contributors up as category experts who readers can trust for recommendations, then forming some kind of revenue share from targeted newsletters.

If you come across any sharp-thinking boutique publishers in the Sydney market will you let me know? (I have a new online title in mind.)

Cheers
G