Ryan Anderson dot ca

It’s been a little while since last we met, but we’re kicking off the first Social Media Breakfast of the year in style with special guest speaker Stuart MacDonald; CEO of TripHarbour.ca, founder and former CMO of Expedia.ca, and co-founder of the MESH conference.  He’s going to talk about how social media has helped him build the community-driven travel site and the lessons he picked up over his career launching and building online businesses.

This is a must for anyone interested in social media and business.  Stuart is not just an experienced marketer, he’s a fantastic speaker who understands the role of social media in business.

The event takes place on February 20 at the offices of our wonderful sponsors Gowlings, located at 160 Elgin Street.  Tickets are available at http://smbottawa6.eventbrite.com/.

As marketers, it’s easy to lose perspective on how the content we create affects the people we are talking to.  In many ways, we’ve been trained not to even think about it and view marketing as the unwritten contract price of media subsidization.  The old way of thinking is that we create ads, and the audience owes it to us to watch our ad as payment for the show they’re watching or the article they’re reading.

In reality, the consumer owes us nothing – quite the opposite.  Great marketers get that, and build their marketing, or better, their business, around the idea of giving something back to the user.  The question becomes – what is the role of the marketer in creating content?  We used to be the host of the party, who would, in exchange for the invitation, spend 20% of the time publicly patting ourselves on the back.  Now, that role has changed, and many interactive marketers moved to creating destination sites or social networks based around their brand.

Before making strategic or creative decisions, you need to decide this interaction.  Most brands want to create the playground – a social network, a virtual world.  They put up a few swings and a see-saw, and expect the world to come and play.  The problem is that a playground is only as much fun as the equipment within it, so other companies make the jungle gym, but put it in an out of the way place that requires people to go out of their way to get their, assuming that their content will attract people far and wide.

These tactics have some validity and can work occasionally.  But the most strategic marketers combine the playground and the jungle gym together, and provide the tools to the community to make it what they want, rather than prescribing the experience for them.

Twitter is an interesting example of this.  On its own, Twitter is nothing at all – an empty, unlandscaped lot.  The reason that they’ve been successful where other, similar but more complicated services have failed is because they gave the community the tools to build the lot into whatever they wanted.  Through the Twitter API, the community created desktop and mobile clients, games, competitions, visualizers, tools and much more.  As a result, the playground is owned by the community because it was built by them.

As marketers, the best thing we can ask for is to have consumers interact with our brand in a meaningful way.  What we have to realize as we transition into a new phase of communications is that we can create playgrounds or we can create jungle gyms, but it’s the community that’s going to be what decides if it’s worth playing in.

I was in NYC last week, and got to spend a bit of time chatting about advertising with one of my favourite New Yorkers, Noah Brier.  Of course, we talked about the way media consumption is changing and what it means to the traditional view of advertising, and one of his comments really clicked with me.

I won’t attempt to paraphrase, but his point was that advertising has always been about media ownership.  That is to say, advertisers paid to own a small piece of the media that could be used to carry their message.  Buying an ad in the New York Times is the rough equivalent of owning a portion of a page – it’s yours to do with as you please.

This was valuable because the media was controlled by a small number of people and corporations.  Media was scarce, therefore it had value.  Now, thanks to the web, anyone with broadband and the inclination to do so can be a media owner.  Sure, a tumblog probably doesn’t have the reach of the Times, but it has the potential to, just as a YouTube video has the potential to exceed the viewership of a prime time network show.

When you’re selling media ownership in a world that’s giving it away for free, two things happen.  First, as supply approaches infinity, value approaches zero.  Second, the number of choices that any one person has keeps getting higher, and as a result, their individual tolerance for noise goes down.  People now have the luxury of consuming media on their own terms, and if they can’t get something the way they want it from one source, they can get it from another.

Of course, none of this on its own is completely groundbreaking, but one of the nice things about talking to smart people is that it often leads to small moments of clarity, as this did for me.   Hopefully it did the same for at least a couple of others.  If not, go read Noah’s blog… it’s always good for a dose of clarity.