James Cherkoff's Collaborate Marketing Blog

In discussion about Chris Anderson's article suggesting that the web is dead, Catherine Fitzpatrick's comment caught my eye over at the NYT Bits Blog : "Oh, of course not, that's silly. Where do people *go* with their lovely aps on their i-phones and droids? They go...to the web. To Facebook, to Twitter. That is, those websites might now be aps accessing servers and not "the web" in the same way, but they are still open public spaces. As aps mature and develop and take people to more log-on closed spaces, then you might start talking about a big change to the web. And that's ok. That's where the commerce is, and that's where people can make a living. Chris Anderson is wailing because Web 2.5 and Web 3.0 aren't the free opensource sandbox that it was in 1.0's day, hating on "walled gardens" and vandalizing them with technocommunistic formulas of "information wanting to be free". But eventually, organic human society prevails, and doesn't want to live in an open-sourced open culture that is so open that value is lost, that musicians, newspapers, book authors, artists all lose their intellectual property rights and all lose their livlihoods as a result. With the phones, capitalism returns to the web and flourishes on the ashes of the old 1.0 communism. It restores software and its contents as products you can buy with code that is protected and not forced free. It introduces the concept of hooks into proprietary software as API engineers, and not opensource mindless cultism. So it's all good. All sorts of things will start to thrive. Privacy and identity also have a powerful basis in dedicated phone numbers you pay for and which telephone companies, separate from the Googlized web, maintain for you, so that you data isn't scraped and datamined at least by all the IT giants. It's all good. Ads are fine. Put more in. Information wants to be paid for."

I thought Frances Grimble's comment about the way in which the Gift Economy has been adopted online but recently stretched beyond all recognition by mega-social nets is really insightful.  Here's a snippet : "But the Internet, and Internet-related businesses, have exploited this economy to the extent of breaking it down. E-groups consisting of hundreds or thousands of people are described as communities, but most of the members remain relative strangers, and membership is often anonymous or pseudonymous. So what happens is, a handful of people repeatedly supply the relatively higher quality of free information. Everyone else enjoys it with no sense that any return is ever required. There’s an assumption of a kind of Internet karma—no one feels obligated to return a favor because the person providing it will probably somehow, someday get some kind of return from someone else entirely. And, Internet companies where the users are providing the information/favors/freebies—Google et al—are doing their best to exploit any remaining feeling of obligation by taking the credit for what the users give away (or what they sell and parties like Google have appropriated) and transferring that obligation to their companies." Read it all here.

Eric Raymond’s seminal essay The Cathedral & The Bazaar remains one of the most powerful analogies for the world of media and marketing today. In case you aren’t familiar with Raymond’s work, he explained how in the world of software design, for many years, engineers spent long periods locked away creating huge operating systems in institutional settings that were then wheeled out into the real world for people to admire and to obey.  However, the open source movement changed all that with online systems much more like global street bazaars allowing programmers to gather in informal networks and collaborate on technical projects in an organic manner, adding a little stitch here and a patch there, and always feeding their knowledge back into the main market, which remained forever in public ownership.  For many years Big Brands operated in exactly the manner of Raymond's Cathedrals, building towering spires that required Brand Architects and Guardians to maintain their sanctity.  However, in the shadows of these vast edifices grew global online Bazaars made up of people who found they could organise themselves around their passions, as oppose to the demographical pews ordained by the marketeers.  And gradually the flocks flocked out of the Mainstream Media Cathedrals into the hustle-and-bustle of these online markets.  However, this was just the beginning and people quickly realised that they could not only hang out in the Bazaars but could also bring their own soapboxes along in the shape of blogs.  And eventually, as these little soapboxes grew into giant social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, the Bazaar morphed into a global conversation.  One where people trashed the Big Brand Cathedrals as they pleased, or even helped build new ones, ignoring the pained grimaces of the Brand Guardians and Architects who could only see desecration wherever they looked.  However, that’s now all changed.  Big Brands have come our from behind their lecterns and are fully signed-up...

...members of the Bazaars and the Global Conversation.  Why?  Simply because this is where the people are.  And Big Brand Values are most of all rooted in deep financial pragmatism.  Some of this new behaviour on the part of Brands is quite frankly, a bit creepy.  Just yesterday, I tweeted about a disagreement I am having with Thames Water.  Only a couple of minutes later, @ThamesWater enquired about my problems and asked for my address to, 'find out more'.  I replied that everything was in hand.  'Good. Here if you need anything/further help,' replied @ThamesWater, sounding very much like the local vicar going amongst his people, but also a bit like Lord Mandelson signalling a collegue his future support.

Other brands are much more daring, dropping off their vestaments and running directly for the heart of the most bustling bazaars.  Just take the Old Spice Guy’s recent excursions away from Big Brands' most hallowed halls (aka P&G) and into the bawdy inns of 4Chan, where the global conversation is at its most shadowy and conspiratorial.  It's a sign of the times that Old Spice Guy, whilst not universally welcomed, wasn't hung, drawn and snarked to death. 

While the world of Big Brands was initially too caught up in its sermons and fine words to notice the dwindling congregations, it has now woken up and joined the burgeoning world Bazaar.  In fact, I suspect, many people, wish they had stayed in their pulpits where they were easy to avoid.  But some brands are becoming very savvy and offering goodies including new soapboxes for people to use.  Like the ‘Best Job In The World’ campaign run by the Queensland Tourist Board, that invited people to share their wares and talents in exchange for the type of adventure that sets the Bazaar buzzing. 

Most ironically perhaps, the Bazaar and its global conversations have rescued some of the biggest Brand Cathedrals of all.  Although no religious icon, Simon Cowell’s empire has had a big hand in saving the fortunes of ITV.  Indeed, just as it looked like the Church roof was about to cave in, the most Reverend Cowell not only brought the Bazaar into the Cathedral, but put the congregation in the pulpit and replaced the learned sermons with the liveliest of public gatherings, letting people re-text the religious writings along the way.  And of course, choosing their own future idols to worship.

And these days, much of the chat in the bazaar, for better or for worse, is about Big Brands and Big Media.  Indeed, this year, Pew, the bona fide US research house reported that ninety-nine per cent of links from the street-market of the blogosphere were to content published in the Cathedrals of mainstream media.

Yep, everyone loves the Bazaar now.  But we still admire our Cathedrals too.  Especially, since they opened the stained glass windows and let the sunlight in.