Thinkcorps

I guess we’re always gonna want it both ways—eat our cake and have it, too. But it seems obvious to me that if you want people to embrace your “brand,” to create communities under its tent, to integrate it into their lives, then your going to have to be willing to give up control of that brand—for better or worse (hopefully mostly better). To that end, you should be providing those folk with the tools or elements to mold your brand into their identity. Not many people do this, actually. What’s viral about viral marketing is that the marketer creates an idea, packages it with any necessary assets, and pushes it out into the sea—just like a message in a bottle. The waves are going to take it where they will, you have given up control of that message. Now, it’s true that you retain the illusion of control because you’re sitting in a helicopter, dropping bottled messages wherever you see fit, but those are adjustments from the 30,000 ft. view. Give up control. Offer tools to manipulate your brand. And just put it out there. You can’t really have a conversation if you’re not willing to listen to what the other party has to say.

I don’t have a definition of blogging on hand here, but I’m beginning to think that the Gawker sites (Gawker, Gizmodo, etc.), by removing comments from their sites, have forfeited their status as “blogs.” They’re just tiny newsy sites now, link aggregators that don’t innovate much on the editorial front. I think comments are a key component of blogs, and one of the reasons blogging is so special.

I liked the idea that I think Doc Searls put forth the other day that old news stories are often little more than fishwrap, which calls into question the value proposition of a walled online archive. Now, I don’t totally agree with it, since there are many stories that involve collecting research and information that retains value over time. But time is an important factor in determining the value of editorial that I imagine most media execs are loathe to admit. There is a long tail in editorial, but it involves only a tiny fraction of your total archive.

The other thing that bugs me, is why can’t I customize the display of the NYTimes? It’s not a real paper, all the content is in a database. I would like to control what I see. I want stories from certain sections, over a certain time period, sorted in a certain way. I’d also like to see (on the originating site) some Technorati data, something visible like a popular icon, or something more graduated, colored degree of popularity. Something like that. Everyone will admit that people take the paper, and grab the sections they want to read, discarding the rest. It’s high time they enable that same kind of interface on the Web.