So this weekly round-up is a bit different from my usual semi-regular link dump of stuff I’ve been reading. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been lax on blogging the past couple of weeks because I’ve been busy firing my little synapses at issues surrounding the how branding + geotagging/location check-in (e.g. foursquare, gowalla) affect how we encounter urban and public space (and each other within it. It’s quickly turning into a full blown captical-P Project. I’ll start posting some prelimenary thoughts/questions next week, but for now, some of posts, articles, and books that I’ve been drawing on in the initial concept mapping phase.
So, in a way, this is part link-dump, part project-emergence-documentation.
I started thinking about these issues with the recent surge in discussions of brand collaborations with popular geolocation social games, especial with all the chatter in SXSW reports about the rise of location-specific (I know people are using the term geolocation, but I’ve yet to really embrace that tautology) games and social networking tools.
And universities are jumping on the wagon, with Marc Parry at the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing the rise of “virtual graffiti” initiatives.
Location check-in networks therefore have two obvious precedents: display advertising and graffiti culture.
For display advertising and public space, I’ve been digging into City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York by David M. Henkin, which discusses the way branded communications and marketing transformed public space and how we perceive information as a culture.
One of the (geographic) sites of interest is Sao Paulo, a city famous for its unique graffiti culture and for banning outdoor advertising. Hector Fernando Burga’s briefly outlines [pdf] a number of papers given at the Decentering Urban Theory conference at UC Berkeley focusing on new productions of urban space, including one by Prof. Teresa Caldeira on the “auto-construction” of Sao Paulo, where citizens engage in slow, collaborative, ad-hoc rebuilding of the city. These and other sites like it reveal “another dimension of place-making” that geotagging and location check-ins also seem to fit into.
Also on the urban theory front, I’m looking into a classic in the field, Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City.
And going in the other direction, I’m trying to think of how to situate the geolocation social activities between public and private, and starting with The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, which explores how we encounter the most intimate and domestic spaces.
First, a couple of pieces that looks at “traditional media” concepts in light of new media practices and insights:
Over at Harvard’s Berkman Center, there was a recent talk from Jure Leskovec that tracks quotations-as-memes use in news cycles. While I’m more of a qualitative gal myself, I do have to admit a certain amount of geeky quant envy whenever I hear “mathematical model.”
Speaking of design, basic web publishing is almost “traditional media” by now too, isn’t it? BBCbreaks down its design overhaul in light of how digital publishing has changed, making it more social, accessible, and global.
On the media+globalization front, there’s an interesting post by C. Custer that asks if Twitter use in China might not be more dangerous than liberating. I brought up a similar post in a post I wrote for C3 back in early 2008 about how the discourse on Chinese digital censorship has been too tech-focused. Pervasive and deep censorship operates at a much more profound level through social, economic, and political controls — blocking websites is merely a surface symptom.
Jace Clayton has posted up excerpts from an interview with himself and Kelefah Sanneh from Bidoun Magazine all about noise music. As he puts it, it’s for anyone who’s ever wondered about “what that distortion pedal has to do with American race relations.”
Race-relations related, Alex Williams at ReadWriteWebreports that Google, Yahoo!, Apple, and Oracle refused to release the gender and ethnicity breakdowns of their employee base, declaring the information a “trade secret.” Either they’re afraid of bad press due to their white male make-up, or they’re stockpiling minority innovators and don’t want all the boys’ club tech companies to know that minorities and women can be good at innovation too.
And on the less political, more wonderful side of technological innovation, a simply gorgeous sound visualization project from Jonas Friedemann Heuer.
On the media consumption side, I’ve been marathoning Lost, hoping to catch up before the end of the season, since I’m pretty sure there’s no way to remain unspoiled for the finale. Plus, it’ll make Lost fans less annoying.
I’ve also gotten hooked on Echobazaar from the folks over at FailBetterGames, a great little indie twitter-integrated social game with wonderfully evocative worldbuilding in a twisted-classic seedy steampunk London underworld, and infuriatingly addictive game-play mechanics. My only complaint is that there’s no way to send direct invites to my twitter followers so that I can recruit more compatriots for my shady dealings.
Another great twitter-related amusement: New York Magazinebook critic Sam Anderson is tweeting the best sentences he reads everyday. Awesome use of twitter as an on-the-fly curation tool.
Recently, a string of prominent vloggers on YouTube have been having a conversation about advertising, product promotion, and the notion of ’selling out’. This was triggered by their experiences with various companies who courted them to help promote their products amongst their viewers and community and generated a lot of great conversation around how to integrate brands into their videos.
The first video was one by UK vlogger Alex Day (nerimon), who called on vloggers to discuss the topic of “selling out” after turning down an offer from Sanyo for a free camera and 1000GBP (~1700 USD) in exchange for sticking a 15-second spot in one of his videos:
In it, Day makes the very compelling point “that advertising agencies think that putting commercial in the middle of stuff is how the world works. But on YouTube, it doesn’t work like that,” pointing out that he would much rather have made a whole video about him using the camera, in his own style, speaking to his viewers the way that he has always spoken to them, rather than inserting something he had nothing to do with in his videos for money.
Day then asked for other vloggers to share their opinions. There have been 29 video responses so far, among which are this video by AlanDistro (fallofautumndistro):
Alandistro elaborates on Day’s point, saying that it’s not that vloggers are or should be against bringing money into the equation altogether, but that they need to be allowed to do so in a way that respects the relationships they’ve built with their community:
“The people receiving these offers spent a lot of time building up their channels and their audiences, and I don’t think they’re going to accept just a couple of dollars to destroy that overnight . . . Until advertisers get their act together and realize this is a conversation, not me talking at you, they’re not going to find very many people to participate.”
In brief, the Fiesta Movement gave cars to a number of prominent vloggers to use as they liked, while occasionally going on themed “missions” and making videos about them. Horner points out that what makes the Fiesta Movement’s tactics different from the experience Day described is fundamentally that Ford is letting the vloggers do what vloggers do best, instead of trying to get them to do what mainstream media does. Rather than asking her to simply product place, they let her choose how to integrate the brand into her daily activities and her vlog in the way that she thought would be best-received by the community she’s a part of. As Horner explains:
“Instead of paying me some crazy lump sum and see how many times I would fit the words ‘Ford’ and ‘Fiesta’ into one of my videos, Ford has kind of adopted the model that our success is their success . . . Basically, the question, is which companies are doing it right, and which companies are doing is wrong, and when is it okay to say yes. And I do feel like it is okay to say yes if you don’t feel like you’re compromising what you’re personally trying to do on youtube with your videos.”
There are, I think, three major lessons to be learned from these insights:
1. You can’t stick an old model atop a new one
This is a point that I feel like I belabor to death, but it’s a mistake people keep making, so it’s a point worth remaking: communities and other groups and affinity spaces online have their own systems of value, with their own criteria for what is worthwhile and what isn’t. And more often than not, money isn’t the big headliner. So if you’re hoping to monetize or extract some form of value from their activities, you can’t just slap your revenue or promotional model atop their social system and hope for the best. It results in people feeling exploited, people feeling like someone has “sold out,” and general resentment because it asks that these communities compromise the things they value for the things advertisers think they should value. And at the end of the day, that isn’t good for anyone, because the relationship with your brand will be stronger if it’s associated with the things these communities already value.
2. Let your participants be intermediaries
One of the most telling statements in these videos is the idea that advertisers don’t seem to “get” how their communities work. This is always, always going to be true. In line with having to understand what these communities value, advertisers have to understand that their insight will never be as rich as the people in those communities. In much of our work over at the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), we talk about the way fans work as grassroots intermediaries, helping act as translators and promoters of media they love to others, and this is true for other types of communities online too. These vloggers are a great example. They have put in enormous amounts of time and labor building relationships with their viewers and community — give them the tools and let them show you how best to sell your brand to that community.
3. Not all “conversations” are the same (or equally valuable)
It’s become somewhat of a tired truism that brands need to be in “conversation” with their consumers. And while keeping the lines of dialogue open is very important, brands have to consider whether or not their conversation style is to join into a discussion, or try to hijack the discussion, potentially interrupting a more valuable conversation. As several of the vloggers pointed out, they’ve built relationships with their community. That is, they’re already in a conversation and the worst thing a brand can do is try to disrupt that with their own message. If brands want in, they have to be prepared to talk about what these people care about, because no one likes the guy who comes over just to talk about himself.
What this ultimately means for brands is that the best way to integrate your brand into communities online and launch campaigns that depend on social media participation is to offer yourself as a resource and let the participants decide how to make you valuable. It feels risky, but people build a more lasting relationship with your brand if you let them use your brand as a means to build relationships with one another, in their own voices, on their own terms. And at the end of the day, when you’re talking about vloggers or fan producers or other people who are remixing, remaking, and creating in these new media spaces, consider what vlogger Alandistro points out: “You really can’t go wrong asking creative people to be creative.”
A funny thing happened on my way to check out the new Skittles homepage-as-social-media-experiment that’s been generating all sorts of attention over my twitter feed. I went to the homepage, and in my sleep deprived idiocy, entered today’s date in their terms of service agreement instead of my birthdate.
And since Skittles decided to take my word for it that I was born today, it deemed me underage and thus not the appropriate audience for it’s free-for-all social media aggregation scheme.
While it was indeed my own oversight that got me blocked from their page, the block speaks to the underlying problem with this stunt, which is that while the idea seems interesting, the execution and practical application might fall somewhat short of potential.
There is, of course, the technical side in which their terms didn’t manage to catch that I’d entered an impossible birth date. But beyond that, there are other practical issues, such as the overlarge navigation console pointed out by Stan Schroeder at Mashable. Moreover, as Christopher Carfi astutely observes in his blog, with no way to regulate the signal/noise ratio, the site runs the risk of people loosing interest because of the sheer volume of content.
However, what interests me is that my mistake this morning presents a dilemma that has yet to be discussed in the first flush of interest and excitement over Skittles.com’s new strategy. For all intents and purposes, in aggregating this content through their site, and thereby putting it under their terms of service, they are effectively taking content that is otherwise open to and created by the public — what is essentially public discourse — and branding it as their own, then resetting the parameters for access.
What in one way appears to be a handing over of control to the consumers to discuss and use the brand as they wish, is in another way an assertion of a measure of ownership. Skittles owns the site and set the regulations and protocols of interaction there, but the site is composed of content created totally outside of those regulations, content created through social relations that did not agree to the boundaries that Skittles requires for its site. In other words, by asserting their right to not only aggregate, but then redefine the conditions through which the content can be viewed, Skittles is suggesting that they have some claim over the content by virtue of it being about them.
Of course, though this echoes of the notion of “fan labor,” Skittles’ incursion is fairly minor . After all, your content is still available openly elsewhere, and the terms Skittles has imposed on it seem to only be limited to age to prevent minors from open access to potentially objectionable content, which is a perfectly understandable, if somewhat ironic, concern. But it makes you think: in talking about Spreadable media, we had always been so focused on instances of individuals and communities appropriating and claiming ownership of the content of corporations for their own ends, but media spread is by nature multi-directional, so we can only expect that it would work in the other way as well. Is it different when companies appropriate content created by individuals for their own purposes?
And while this stunt certainly generated the attention it was looking for, is any of that sustainable? It is merely a flash of PR hand-waving or does Skittles actually have an idea of how they want to begin facilitating relationships between both the brand and its audience and between audience members through the brand? And more importantly, is this really the right step towards the kind of relationships they will want to cultivate?
Originally written for the Convergence Culture Consortium blog. For details about how Carnival works in Bahia, please refer to Ana Domb’s post.
It’s fitting that we’re closing in on the end of our Spreadable Media white paper series on the blog just as Ana and I begin to discuss our experiences and research in Brazil, beginning with our time spent in Salvador for Carnival. In Spreadability, we propose a model of thinking about media brands and properties as not only consumer products, but as symbolic goods that circulate and thrive due to the adaptability and customizability of their social value. That is, media is spread when we can make personal and social use of it.
In particular, the use of the required camarote t-shirts caught my attention as a particular apt example of how to spread “media,” or in this case, brands. Referencing Fiske, we suggest that the in part 6 of the spreadable media paper that advertising becomes spreadable when it becomes “producerly,” that is, when it tried not only to speak to consumers, but allows for consumers to speak to one another — communicating community affiliations, performances of identity, social values and so on– through advertising.
Logo-splattered t-shirts were the required dress for the camarotes (large private tents with capacity into the thousands for viewing the parade) and to ride inside or walk along with the trios (enormous truck riggings that carried bands and dancers), acting as part of your “ticket.” Thus each trio or camarote had their own shirts, covered in the logos of their sponsors. Here we already begin to see a merging of brands and social affiliation declaration — the color of shirt you wore declared your membership to a particular group, and in some cases your devotion to a particular musician or your socioeconomic status (since the availability and price of acquiring these shirts can range).
More interesting, however, was the practice of customizing the shirts. While looking into a crowd, you see a mass of the same t-shirt and same logos, the close-up view shows extraordinary variety and detail. Customizations ranged from basic scissors and safety-pin jobs to professional level alterations with detailed paneling using other fabrics, zippers, draping, and gathering. And while on the whole, the women were more inventive than the men, there were some stand-outs, such as an older gentleman who had not only altered his shirt to fit him perfectly, but had used the excess fabric to construct a dress-shirt collar.
Even more surprising was that within our camarote, there was a station provided by one of the sponsors with several girls who could cut and decorate the shirts of attendees with ribbons and other accessories for those who didn’t come with their shirts already customized.
While they had a couple suggested designs on display, most people gave them specific instructions for how they wanted their shirts altered. This transformed our boring t-shirts (which, with our recent arrival and limited resources, we were unable to alter ourselves) into much more lasting symbolic goods that both Ana and I packed up into our already overflowing luggage as we left, fully intent keeping them for good despite, which we would not have otherwise.
Though it might seem trivial to think about how people might alter and customize t-shirts they’re forced to wear, this act is an expression of taste and as sociologist Don Slater suggest, “Taste . . . Is seen as a ‘cultural arbitrary’, a matter not of instrinsic value but of classification grounded in social processes. But it is not socially arbitrary: tastes correlate closely with social division” (Slater 1997, 160). Thus, we are seeing a case in which branded good that are monetarily not terribly valuable are being repurposed into objects of more lasting social value. Not only does the customization provides individuals with the ability to express take and cultural values, but the customization inside the camorotes, during the party, transforms the shirt into a unique artifact of that moment, turning it from a uniform, mass commodity, into something far more meaningful.
In addition to being an unparallel social and cultural event, it was evident from the 500% hotel mark-ups and tightly and intricately produced events that Carnival is also very much an industry, especially in Salvador. And much of that industry has to do with event-based advertising and sponsorship. Thus, advertising at Carnival serves as a provocative example of precisely this hybrid social/commericial space, as Ana suggested in her post with the notion of “brand syncretism,” in which brands provide rich materials for cultural expression and the articulation of community or loose social affiliations.
Xiaochang is what happens when academia meets industry meets madcap spy caper. She recently graduated from the Comparative Media Studies at MIT, where she worked as a researcher in the Convergence Culture Consortium. In her time there, she has amassed considerable expertise in ill-timed shenanigans, unrelenting glee, and general tomfoolery.
