www.MarkTAW.com/blog/TheMerchantsOfMeme-2.html (printable version)
The Merchants of Meme |
| Getting Things Done |
I've been checking my log files, and I lately I see lots of sites linking to my Getting Things Done! page. A lot of people have been bookmarking me.
I eventually found a page that claims GTD is a Meme Exploding.
I read Getting Things Done in late 2003 and immediately started recommending it far and wide in the Joel on Software forum. 1 I've done so at just about every opportunity I could get. I almost have to wonder if little old me and my forum posts were somehow the seeds that caused this book to take hold in the nerd consciousness.
I'm not saying I'm in any way responsible for it's popularity, the book itself is the answer to a question that was just about to explode in a big way with or without me, and there's no way I directly had enough influence to cause four people I'd never heard of to recommend it to some other guy I'd never heard of. But I what if my loud and frequent advocacy of the book started the snowball rolling.
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| I doubt any of those dips into double-digit sales ranks had anything directly to do with me, but what if I managed to start a trend? |
The Tipping Point
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| The Tipping Point |
Earlier today I read a blog post about How your blog will get discovered, and it occurred to me just how viral weblogs are. For a while the main concern about the rabid cross-linking of webloggers was how it affected Google Rank and how a single blogger could suddenly have hundreds of links pointing at her, making her the most important (in Google's eyes) authority on a given topic.
Now that Google's tweaked it's ranking so that isn't happing nearly as frequently anymore, it still seems that the use of referrers, "talkbacks," "linkbacks," and comments is still a rabid force in getting people moving from one point to the other.
This is actually a perfectly encapsulated example of what Malcolm Gladwell (one of my favorite writers) calls The Tipping Point. This is a distilled and refined concept that's been around for years in marketing. Find the opinion leaders and give them samples of your product.
I've actually had one software company contact me to try to get me to upgrade to the 2.0 version of their product. I told them I lost my order number, but they sent me an upgrade ID anyway, or maybe they really found my old order code - in either case, it's a lot of effort for them to go through just to get one guy to use their product.
Apparently they identified me as an opinion leader. Someone they want to use their product because I'll tell the world about it. Celebrities talk about the irony of being rich and famous - "When I was poor I had to buy things like nice clothes and cars, now that I'm rich and can pay for it, people give them to me for free."
Another time, I was invited to a gallery opening in the hopes that I would write about it on my website. I was unsure exactly what to think. It might be fun to go and meet an entirely new set of people, on the other hand, did I really want my site co-opted as the marketing tool for anyone who cared to extend an invitation?
The Tipping Point identifies several different types of opinion leaders. People you might never think of could be essential to getting the word out for your product. Some of them love to talk about new products. Some of them know the right people. Some of them just know lots of people.
It's not always about giving the product to the person who will show it to the most people, sometimes it's about giving the product to the person who has credibility with that person. The hollywood movie cliche version of this is talking to the secretary or manager and getting them to recommend it to the person everyone listens to, but identifying that person isn't always that simple.
What if I was the start of the GTD meme? Across a dozen or so posts in one forum, maybe an opinion leader picked it up (maybe someone at O'Reilly books), and mentioned it at a conference. Then maybe someone at that conference wrote about it in their weblog. Over the next few months, more and more bloggers picked it up until it reached a critical mass and it moved from Early Adopters into the Early Majority.
Acceptance of a given product can follow different adoption curves in different markets. Tech heads would adopt a book in a different way and for different reasons than business professionals.
Guerilla Marketing
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| Guerilla Marketing |
I remember one phone company introduced their picture phone (one of the first, now they're everywhere) by having actors pose as tourists at the Empire State Building and getting other people to take their picture using the phone. This is Guerilla Marketing. Advertising that doesn't look like advertising. At least, not at first glance.
Guerilla Marketing spends their energy getting their message heard in as many places as possible, but trying to make it sound like a whisper instead of a shout. The Tipping Point spends it's effort trying to find the one person you can give a phone to that will either promote it widely, or get it into the hands of someone who will.
The Merchants of Cool
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| Frontline: The Merchants of Cool |
Douglas Rushkoff (Another one of my favorite writers: Media Virus!: Hidden Agendas In Popular Culture, Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say) directed an excellent Frontline called The Merchants of Cool (viewable online, or you can buy the DVD) about how the media and advertisers are consuming culture and regurgitating it to us at an alarming pace.
50 years ago, it was difficult to measure the impact an ad had on sales. Today we have MTV where every single moment of programming is advertising to us. If it isn't an actual commercial, it's a music video telling us to buy a CD, or it's an outfit being worn by Carson Daly (who is surprisingly lucid and aware of the market research that goes on in the MTV experiment). TRL (Total Request Live), the show where they play the top 10 videos that fans request is actually one giant focus group. You tell us what's hot so we can sell it to you better.
In the documentary, Douglas introduced me to the concept of Cool Hunters, (a term that seems to be picking up more and more steam in the media: google). People whose job it is to identify the next big trend, so they can sell it to the media conglomerates so the can repackage it sell it back to us. Today's cool underground fashion trend is tomorrow's music video look and will eventually filter it's way into Every Mall, USA.
It was probably people like this who told Microsoft that Blogging was cool and they needed to start doing it.
What you eventually end up with is an endless feedback loop that's as close to instantaneous as the mass media & corporations can keep up with. Cool new trend -> Spotted by a Cool Hunter -> Sold to MTV -> Turned into a Music Video -> Voted on by the public on TRL -> Repackaged and sold back to us -> Counterculture rebellion -> Cool new trend -> etc.
It's cultural cannibalism. In an endless effort to get us to consume more, we're being spoon-fed ourselves.
Back To The Bloggers
Of course, nobody knows this better than the Bloggers. They cannibalize each other constantly, but there's a major difference. The Bloggers do it to spread information and cool ideas. To better mankind. The few that are in it to make a buck are smart enough to know that they have to provide a real value before they can gain any credibility, and that credibility would be instantly lost if they blatently sold their products and/or services in their weblog. Talking about it is fine if you're also providing another value, like the trials and tribulations of bringing it to market. Then you're letting the reader in on a secret while you're selling to someone else. If that someone else just happens to be your reader, or perhaps in true Tipping Point fashion, your reader's boss, so much the better.
There are plenty of people monetizing the Blog trend already, but I have to wonder when it will really hit the mainstream. I remember the first mentions of "Just Google It" on broadcast television. It will only be a matter of time before your favorite television character has a fictitiuos Blog instead of a fictitious Journal (the latter with complete with fake paper diary graphics).
But I want to know when it will really start to become monetized. Maybe it's happened already. Maybe the secret weblog of the cog in the wheel at a major corporation who secretly hates his job and uses his blog as an outlet is really a paid advertiser who figured out that this is a good way to get credibility before dropping a new product name. Maybe the Mixerman Chronicles was really a marketing tool designed to get you to buy certain products he mentioned.
For just the price of web hosting and hiring a writer, advertisers can now reach an audience at the almost intravenus level. We all know Television is one giant advertisement, but the Internet still has hope. Sure lots of the Internet is paid by and for the giant corporations, but so much of it is community driven it can still be trusted... right?
Added October 15, 2004:
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page first created on Tuesday, September 21, 2004
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