HENRI WEIJO*
This was pretty neat. The year in films, edited into a 7 minute trailer-like story as if they were from the same film. 342 films in all.
Via /Film, again.
This kind of ultra-condensed video editing is something that I’ve seen pop up every now and then. It relies heavily on the audience being familiar with the material, and it’s made for the “snack” era.
Anyway, happy holidays and have a great new year!
While companies are still somewhat figuring out what to do with social media, one of the most immediate benefits that companies have recognized has been Twitter’s value in customer service. Customers are usually notoriously bad at giving feedback, so services like Twitter are very valuable for companies wishing to understand how their service processes work. It’s a low-hanging fruit even for the more timid companies to get started with social media. But I think there’s an even more important benefit of social media that will prove immediately valuable for companies once they get into it: the use of social media in doing qualitative consumer research.
Very recently there have been two rather important books written relating to the subject either directly or indirectly. The first one is “Chief Culture Officer” by Grant McCracken, which came out just over a week ago. The second one is “Netnography” by Robert Kozinets, which is still in print. McCracken’s book argues for the necessity to create an organization that “gets” culture, or at least have somebody in the organization who does. An organization should be aware of its and its brands’ place in culture to manage its meaning (and most of all, not to mismanage it!). Kozinets’ book on the other hand is – as the name suggests – about how to do ethnographic research online. It’s intended for researchers and companies alike. Of course, Kozinets’ book also has some arguments as to why a company should do this kind of research, but as a general rule I’d say that McCracken’s book is more about the “why” and Kozinets’ is more about the “how” of uncovering a brand’s meaning.
I haven’t had the time to read either book completely (there are free previews available, check the sites), so apologies if the following arguments are featured in the books and I seem like I’m passing them as my own (I’m not). Also apologies for either author if they felt misrepresented in the the “why/how” categorization above.
In the past, only a few companies (usually big ones) actively engaged in ethnographic research. To some degree it was a matter of a unappreciation for cultural aspects of the brand, but for many companies I’d guess engaging in ethnographic research may have been just too costly or time consuming to do. You’d need to commission a research team, arrange the interviews or field work dates and then wait a rather long time for them to decode the findings and write a report, and even then you couldn’t be sure you had enough data. And sometimes you’d have to do is in multiple locations if you were a global brand. To put in simple terms: it just wasn’t worth the ROI for many companies.
This is where a method like netnography comes in. If anything, social media sites offer an almost endless stream of different and rich cultural meanings – especially for brands – that can be accessed quite quickly. If a skilled researcher spends an afternoon scouring through social media sites, he or she will have at least a preliminary feel for a brand’s meaning at the end of the day. This I think is another benefit of netnography for companies: to be able to do scale your qualitative research projects from “quick and dirty” with limited but somewhat relevant results to large scale meaning mining. I have my reservations about Twitter, but its value in getting a quick feel for your brand’s meaning is invaluable. Twitter really is zeitgeist on tap. Status updates on Twitter (or Facebook) are what McCracken calls “phatic communications” or to quote McCracken:
This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.
I suspect both McCracken and Kozinets would cringe if the principal arguments for buying their books were “doing qualitative research is faster and cheaper now”, but I think this is an important perspective as well. If anything it’s a good additional selling point to get your company at least consider taking qualitative research more seriously. If you need more convincing about the importance of qualitative research, I’m sure both books have more than plenty compelling arguments. My guess that in the future companies will have a netnography team or a “cultural social media team” sitting next to the social media customer service team they have in place.
Here are the book covers to help you spot them on the bookshelf.
The cultural “plight” of the contemporary male in an age of contradicting male roles is one of the most powerful cultural tensions around today, and it has been written about extensively (even I am guilty). It’s a powerful source for brands and other cultural texts to play with cultural fantasies and offer temporary soothing to men. But book called “The Perfect Gift for a Man” is aiming to more than that. It aims to actually give men an outlet to talk about these problems and act as a cultural agent of sorts.
Here’s the description:
Putting our heads together, we hit upon the idea of a self-published book. Blurb.com came to the rescue, providing an easy way for us to design, publish and distribute the book. But then – it was a matter of stories.
Putting the call out, we asked for other men to join us – sharing your thoughts on a blog is one thing – but committing them to print is quite another (plus we needed various disclaimers and so on) – so we didn’t know who would respond.
In the end, 30 writers heeded the call. The resulting book is a compilation of stories about reinventing manhood. It follows the life-arc of a man, from its beginnings through the trials and tribulations, challenges and jubilations that we all face.
I’ll definitely order a copy. 30 different writers writing about their own perceptions of being “male” sounds like a gold mine for different meanings and ideas. If you want to just download the free e-book, just click here.
This made me laugh and think:
It’s a mashup between Star Wars and a news clip that made the rounds a few years ago. It wasn’t the most popular of YouTube clips, but apparently popular enough that it inspired some people to mash it up with something more familiar. I’d like to think that this is sort of a new baseline for how obscure your references and mashups with popular culture can become while still remaining somewhat relevant. No reason to think that mashups like these will become increasingly obscure and weird, pushing our limits of both media and pop culture literacy.
Found this among my drafts. Apparently, I had forgotten to publish it. I had intended to publish this on April Fools.
Scott Brown on Wired: “Humor is the Lingua Franca of the Internet”.
Because “funny” is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world. You can’t update your Facebook status without a self-deprecating quip. You can’t respond to a Gawker post unless you’ve got something equally snarky to add. Snark, of course, is Web comedy’s most renewable resource. [...] And if you’re still worried about bombing in what is, basically, the world’s biggest, cruelest comedy club, don’t be. I assure you, you’re getting funnier all the time, simply by dint of being plugged into the collective e-conscious and keeping up with the high-bandwidth badinage.
Marshall McLuhan’s first and second laws of media ask what does the new medium enhance or make obsolete in a culture. An instant and participatory medium like the Internet has replaced jokes of the traditional variety (“a Finn, a Norwegian and a Swede walk into a bar…”) by something more instant, more contemporary. Today’s jokes are YouTube clips, PhotoShop manipulations, Facebook comments and the like. In the old days, jokes could be retold over and over, some jokes were deemed “classic” because they were more general and based on timeless notions. But now, jokes have a shelf-life that is measured in weeks, even days.
Granted, “reactionary” jokes are not a new phenomenon (just think of political cartoons and talk show monologues), but the Internet has made them common currency among us regular folk. A good “snark”, as Brown calls it, will not be limited to the cocktail party it was uttered, it can catch on and become sort of the joke of the week. Internet memes are a great example of this. But as said, these kinds of jokes don’t last long, and because of their contextual and contemporary nature, they rarely if ever become classic jokes that stand the test of time.
Kanye West has been under fire a lot lately. First South Park made fun of his out-of-control ego in an episode which West said hurt his feelings, but was also a wake-up call and he promised to deflate his ego a bit. Not too long ago, his outbursts at VMA where he bumrushed the stage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech earned him the questionable honor of inspiring one of the year’s most popular Internet memes. Murmus of West’s troubles have only gotten louder, as quite recently he canceled his tour. Meaning-wise, West has bee damaged goods for a while now.
The old way of diffusing this situation would have been for West to go on a few talk shows, publicly apologize to Swift and vow to change. In fact, initially that’s what he did. In the old days, the worst case scenario for West would have been that Saturday Night Live parodies the situation, and even that could have been handled with a guest appearance on the show later on. Problem solved.
But now we live in an age where meaning management is more nuanced and difficult. West’s meaning management efforts are in direct competition with those happening in social media channels, and the most intriguing and culturally relevant meaning will prevail. Going on Jay Leno’s show and saying you’re sorry is calculated, obvious, and uninteresting. It had no chance against the “I’ma let U finish” meme’s cultural momentum.
So what’s Kanye to do? One fairly good solution would have been to confront the meme head on, be seen in a “I’ma let U finish” T-shirt. West could have showed he was aware of his current perception, and he was willing to confront it and even make fun of himself. This, too, could have been seen as a callous and calculated effort though.
Instead, West has gone for something really bold and interesting, something that could in fact trump the meme. He has made a short film with Spike Jonze where he literally rips out his ego from his intestines, and kills it. See the video here.
We’ll see how this rather unusual but highly intriguing mea culpa plays out with the public.
UPDATE The video was taken down from Vimeo, but I posted a new link to it.
/Film reported that there’s a movie in the works based on an article in GQ called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” There was a link to the original article, which was a fun read with a good eye for detail and reflection.
But this especially caught my eye (emphasis mine):
There’s a psychological term that’s used to explain why white people and black people aren’t friends: homophily. It means that people are likely to be friends with those who are similar to them. (There’s an aphorism about homophily: “Birds of a feather flock together.” One of the peculiar duties of social scientists is to prove the most obvious things, make them seem complicated, and then reconstitute them as simple. For examples, see the work of Malcolm Gladwell.) I would argue that the modern world is, in many quarters, dominated by increasingly extreme homophily. If you don’t want to, you’ll never have to talk to anyone whose jeans are different from yours. And there’s the trend toward so-called cultural cocooning, where you only have to listen to people who have the same opinion as you, be it on Fox or MSNBC or Lou Dobbs, depending on if your philosophy is galvanized around conservatism or liberalism or angry people with wet piano keys for teeth.
I’ve seen many a presentation or blog post that raves on how the Internet and especially social media will make us more informed readers. The reasoning goes that if you’re interested in something, say like the current economic crisis, you can use social media to read about it from a variety of different sources and from different viewpoints. Compared to the Average Joe who only gets his news from the evening news and the local newspaper, this social media reader and his pluralistic worldview is painted as almost an “undupable” force of nature that will save society as we know it from the manipulators (and killing traditional journalism along the way).
The truth is, as you might have guessed, somewhat different. Media technologies are always cultural and social systems; the possibility of some kind of behavior with a media technology doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily going to happen. For example, you already see worrisome examples of partisanship in the US where conservatives and liberals only listen to their favorite talking heads and get their news and the interpretation of the news from like-minded folk online. This makes mutual discourse with people outside of you’re “cocoon” increasingly difficult as the shared understandings are eroded.
Other than “the medium is the message”, I think Marshall McLuhan’s most important idea was how a new medium reveals more of the old ones it seeks to replace. McLuhan also taught us that new media channels almost never wipe out the previous ones, they just reorganize our media priorities and assign new roles to old media.
Marshall McLuhan
For example, cinema didn’t kill theater, it changed our perception of it and it became a more high class medium. We didn’t appreciate the richness in storytelling books provided until TV came along. Back in the day, TV pushed cinema into more of a spectacle medium (colors, 4:3 to widescreen, high quality sound effects etc.), and this progress is still continuing with 3D movies making a comeback. To put things in perspective, even the telegram (you know “I love you. stop. send food. stop”, THAT telegram) wasn’t discontinued until 2007, and even then over 20 000 telegrams were sent annually in the US. So the so-called “wipe-out scenarios” of new media just pummeling over old ones never really work.
This is something to keep in mind the next time you read a piece on how TV is “dead”. I think we’re in the process of seeing broadcast TV being redefined, as people start to realize what TV has to offer in contrast to downloading TV shows and watching them on your computer. For all the convenience that watching TV shows on demand has to offer, I think a lot of people are failing to see what they are giving up when they switch away from scheduled programming. I got a firsthand reminder of this last spring when I was watching the Eurovision song contest (yes, I know) with a bunch of friends. The atmosphere in the room was great and vibrant, people were engaging with the show and commenting every act with vigor. You can’t get that kind of atmosphere while watching it the next day on your laptop.
Somebody might argue that this is only true for live broadcasts or major TV events, like the season finale of a popular show or the Superbowl. I agree with this, but I also think that inevitably this might mean that all TV programming is either live or original programming (meaning very few reruns). One of the main arguments for the popularity of reality TV has been that it’s cheap to produce. This is certainly true, but I think it also comes back to the disposable nature of television programming nowadays where reruns aren’t profitable anymore and more current (preferably live) TV is favored. Also, as Grant notes, reality TV is often more on the pulse of culture, and this is its main appeal:
Reality programming is not just cheap TV, it is responsive TV. Surely, one of the most sensible way for the programming executive to get back in touch with contemporary culture is to turn the show offer to untrained actors who have no choice but to live on screen, in the process importing aspects of contemporary culture that would otherwise have to be bagged and tagged and brought kicking and screaming into the studio and prime time. Reality programming is contemporary culture on tap. It is by no means a “raw feed.” That is YouTube’s job. But it is fresher than anything many executives could hope to manage by their own efforts. In effect, reality programming is “stealing signals” from an ambient culture, helping TV remain in orbit.
The social aspects of TV aren’t limited to people watching in the same room. Even if a show isn’t important enough to “warrant” inviting your friends over, broadcasters are trying to make TV more social. NPR: Marketers Vie For TV Viewers Who Web Surf
Studies now show a significant number of TV viewers have computers perched on their laps while watching TV. They’re googling, searching and chatting online while watching football games and reality shows. Producers of TV shows and commercials are trying to capitalize on the trend.
We’re definitely in a transition period, it’ll be interesting to see to what TV will “regress into”, to quote McLuhan.
“Americans love knowing where their things are,” says Chris McGlothlin, chief information office at Domino’s. Folks constantly tell Domino’s how much they hate not knowing when — or if — their pizza will arrive. The Pizza Tracker, used by 75% of Domino’s online customers, is an attempt to solve that problem. While current technology also could track the whereabouts of drivers, Domino’s won’t track that for security reasons.
Besides connecting consumers to their pizzas, the tracker gives the first names of workers who make and deliver their order, says Russell Weiner, chief marketing officer. As a society, “We’re not just time-starved, we’re starved for connections to others.”
Emphasis mine. I think this is an interesting case of technology redefining old and existing consumption patterns. Does a service like this diminish the joy of hearing the doorbell ring and finally getting your pizza? How does it affect the socializing aspects that used to happen between the order and delivery? Are we really better off knowing exactly when our pizza arrives?
I thought I’d revisit an old topic regarding arms race advertising. This popped up on my reader: NPR: The Thrill is Gone: How Viral Marketing Will End Up Killing Viral Marketing and the new viral campaign for the TV show House:
Bottom line: Enjoy this kind of campaign while it lasts, because in short order, we’ll all be so jaded that we’d ignore the reappearance of the woolly mammoth, convinced it’s just a scheme to market the latest Ice Age movie.
To repeat what I wrote a while back:
Advertisers are in an arms both against other advertisers and against consumers. All new advertising innovations (new media to advertise in, persuasion tactics etc.) are quickly copied by rival advertisers and they lose their effectiveness quite fast. And on the consumer front, as time goes by consumers become increasingly advertising savvy and more likely to ignore or “see past” advertising (as outlined in the NYT article).
I guess this is and always will be the advertiser’s problem; how to deal with constantly declining returns on advertising. Some brands choose to just out-spend the competition, hoping for first mover advantages in new marketing tactics by hiring the advertising talent du jour. Some brands are more responsive and consumer-centric, and move their focus away from practices to which consumers are no longer responding.
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