When I was in junior high school, a nightclub opened in my neighborhood. I grew up in the New York City borough of Queens, in a predominantly Irish neighborhood the epitome of blue collar; it should come as no surprise that when word spread of the club’s opening, a dissonance resounded throughout the neighborhood. Most disruptive was the manner in which the club was promoted: the owner would print out thousands of flyers and enlist neighborhood kids to distribute them, paying them for each flyer they were able to hand out. Over the course of the next month the streets of my neighborhood were littered with flyers – the aspiring promoters realized that they couldn’t get people to actually take them, and were thus forced to find alternate means of distribution. Soon after the nightclub closed; the space it once occupied is now home to a thriving Hispanic church.
Since at least 2010, when Old Spice introduced to us The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, the digital marketing industry has been obsessed with getting their content in front of as many people as possible (as cheaply as possible). In an almost collective sigh of relief, marketers effectively began repurposing the web into a broadcast medium under the flag of Content and its kingdom of “earned media”, or the paradoxically sinister banner of “going viral”. In an almost Pavlovian response, the focus shifted from “connecting with your customers” to creating as much content as possible in an attempt to tap in to the web’s capacity for distribution, like a thousand bottled messages tossed in to the ocean. Such an approach continues to embody the conventional wisdom, but it fails to recognize that unlike print, radio and TV, the web is not a passive medium.
If the web is an ecosystem, it is one comprised of many niche communities, distinct environments built upon the individual expression of ideas, emotions and opinions; it is an extension of who we are. For these environments to be sustained reciprocal self-expression is required, which in turn is contingent upon the presence of some common set of values or interests for the exchange to take root. For marketers, then, sustainability on the web is about tapping in to people’s values to facilitate that reciprocal self-expression. A vibrant, sustainable branded environment on the web doesn’t require content. It requires a brand.
The elegance of a brand lies in the fact that it makes all of the intangible qualities that distinguish a business from it’s competitors – it’s values, beliefs and attitudes - and makes them tangible. Advertisements, catalogues, slogans, logos and all of the other outputs of the marketing process are used to this end. Indeed, these are all forms of content in one way or another – but alone they are not enough to give you a brand.
Apple’s epochal “1984″ wasn’t what gave the brand it’s mythological status; it was the people who saw the ad and let their imaginations run wild. It was able to elicit such a visceral response because it spoke to people’s values and beliefs, allowing people’s relationships with the company to transcend the commercial and enter the humanistic.
Ironically enough, the best example I can think of to illustrate the facilitation of self-expression is the marketing industry itself. All of the blogs that sprung up in the early days of web marketing, the writers of which were professionals of the burgeoning industry; the hundreds of thousands of Twitter chats that occur every week, where you’ll find fervent discussion about everything from social media optimization to ‘social media manners’; the message boards, listservs, conferences, LinkedIn groups – the list goes on. The marketing environment on the web is vast, and it was built upon the reciprocal self-expression of a plethora of people passionate about a common thing.
We cannot let the web’s capacity for distribution fool us into thinking that it is just another broadcast medium; print, radio and TV are much better suited to passive consumption than the web. The web is self-sustaining, but only inasmuch as the environments that comprise it are allowed to flourish organically. The web is an extension of ourselves – collectively and individually – and so are brands. The only difference between the two is that on the web you can know what people are saying, and where they’re saying it. Listen to those people, find out what they’re saying about you – in what context – and find ways to help them keep saying it (unless, of course, it’s disparaging, in which case you would facilitate a discourse between your proponents and those who feel otherwise).
Instead of trying to build your brand’s presence online, try to cultivate it. Suddenly, we’re not so much Digital Marketers, as we are Digital Environmentalists.
“We shut down the site, and relaunched a free service with a few critical new features. The staffing problem hadn’t gotten better, so we brainstormed ideas for getting the Java community to help us solve their problems. We now have a free site with question-and-answer forums where developers answer each other directly. We added a tap into [our] software bug database and provided a means for developers to add their own notes and work-around to our bug information, as well as vote for the bugs they wanted us to fix soonest. A reverse pipeline into the company sent the bug votes to the engineers to help with prioritization…The site became a nexus for conversations about our products and services, and for conversations about other people’s solutions to our problems.”
