Mediameme

Most of us would say money. And yet money alone does not motivate better work or increase job satisfaction. Do we work for money because there is an underlying premise that people don’t like to work and must be bribed to do it?

That may have been true for the industrial revolution, but a key difference between the industrial economy and the digital economy is that the role of the worker has shifted from brawn to brain. Knowledge is now a key differentiator, so is it also time to revisit this most fundamental value equation?

A year ago, Seth Godin wrote about the passionate worker:

A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This is the person who works out of passion and curiosity, not fear.  The passionate worker doesn’t show up because she’s afraid of getting in trouble, she shows up because it’s a hobby that pays. The passionate worker is busy blogging on vacation… because posting that thought and seeing the feedback it generates is actually more fun than sitting on the beach for another hour.

A recent Businessweek article, “Will Work for Praise” describes how web entrepreneurs are making money through armies of volunteers willing to work for free to build their own personal brands. In a web 2.0 world, there is an implicit symbiotic relationship in place around resource exchange: entrepreneur(s) with money provide(s) platform and technology, volunteers with time provide relevant content to build a personal brand and help others.

Adam Smith, who is widely regarded as the father of modern economics, lived and wrote during a similarly challenging transition from an agrarian to industrial society. Before he published The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote a classic treatment of ethics that laid the foundation for his free-enterprise classic. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith proposed that beyond economic pursuits, there are moral pre-requisites to capitalism. Human nature isn’t just about self-interest but it also includes important motivators: sympathy, empathy, friendship, love and the desire for social approval.

The Wealth of Nations draws on situations where man’s morality is likely to play a smaller role — such as the laborer involved in pin-making — whereas the Theory of Moral Sentiments focuses on situations where man’s morality is likely to play a dominant role among more personal exchanges.

If people want to work and are willing to do it for free or some other value exchange in the digital economy, should businesses adapt to this new sensibility?

This entry was originally written by Lori Laurent Smith (moi), edited by Marta Strickland and posted on Threeminds.

Remember the party game “Telephone”, where a simple phrase is whispered from ear to ear around a circle of friends? The payoff is when the final phrase is uttered out loud by the last person and it is completely transformed.

Content flows online the same way.

No longer constrained to the artificial restrictions of a web site, or even the browser (mobile), content is ‘the story’ that is being passed from blog post to comment to tweet. Content takes on a new reality from its passage across the web. From a marketing and brand perspective, the challenge for content strategy in a social and semantic world (aka web 3.0) is to ensure the key messaging content is still accurate and complete as it evolves.

Before going much further, let me clarify what content strategy means for the social and semantic web. Content strategy is a 40,000 foot strategic overview of content, aligning content, its purpose, creation, publication, and use with the overall business strategy and marketing objectives of an enterprise. Developing a content strategy means it must be resilient against the web reality that the content will be adopted, mixed, mashed and recreated in a post-modern lovefest by enthusiasts and enemies, influencers and newbies. Additionally, there is the hyper-connectivity of users plus the immediacy and velocity of conversation so:

a. Inconsistencies or gaps between the message and the supporting content, or user experience will be called out
b. Gaps filled by users aggregating and adding to existing content
c. Online perceptions of brands, products, or services are created that are a new reality from the user’s perspective

This is complicated by the increasingly interactive nature of the web making not only the content but where, when and how its accessed, organized and read, viewed or listened to, important elements to consider.

To simplify this approach, here are the key questions marketers, strategists, planners and the like may find useful when developing a comprehensive content strategy:

1. Why communicate at all? What is the risk:reward?
2. What are the goals and objectives of:
   1. The enterprise, how can the content strategy help achieve them?
   2. For the content strategy itself?
3. What does real success for each of the above look like?
4. How is success measured?
5. What content already exists?
   • Where are there gaps
   • What content must be created?
   • Will fans create it?
6. What are the desired outcomes of creating and distributing this content?
7. Who are the uber-influencers to carry and serve the content?
   • Where are they?
   • How best to connect them with content?

These musings are most definitely a work-in-progress. What else would you add to consider when developing a content strategy for the internet as it continues to evolve beyond the browser?

Bud Gibson had a great comment on my last post, asking how do you establish identity with out a URL? The simple answer is: you don’t. Here’s why…

The corporate or brand URL / website as a keystone for both information architecture (I/A) and content strategy has already passed its zenith.

First of all, the majority of site visits no longer begin on the homepage i.e. www.brand.com or www.brand.com/product. When was the last time you typed in www.amazon.com? What about the last time you visited Amazon, how did you get there? More often people click on a link and recognize the ‘storefront’ but not because of the URL. Similarly, search engines have been serving up deep links for years, bypassing the master brand URL entirely in some instances.

As human behavior has adapted to the navigation of the world wide web, we have gradually dropped inclusion of ‘www’ and ‘.com’. Even the reduction of URLs into a more convenient format via TinyURL or Bit.ly for Twitter. What is more important is the relationship between the referring party to the TinyURL – that the referring party is trustworthy and is viewed by the referee as an authority in some way. The result is based more on individual needs and desires and the brands, products and services to meet them rather than the URL.

Underlying all this techno-stuff is a more important fundamental shift in the movement of the value provided by content, more sophisticated users. The brand is being defined by the consumer perception of the capabilities of it to meet their needs rather than broadcast its own unifying message. As smart content strategy practices accelerate and the underlying semantic web structure develops, content will seek out relevant viewers rather than enticing users to seek relevant content.

Having pondered this for a few days, now I have a much larger question: is the web site dead?

More to come…

We are in the early days of a revolution being played out in pixels across the digital landscape. A hundred years ago, social revolutions spawned global avant-garde art direction, namely Cubism, which in turn inspired many of the major art movements of the 20th Century: Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, De Stijl, Bauhaus, Constructivism, and others.

Today’s information architects, content strategists, designers, developers are the artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers of yesteryear. Historians will one day regard social media | web 2.0 as a pivot point in the evolution of our information society, much as Cubism emerged as a lynchpin between the classical aesthetic begun in the Renaissance era and the Modernism of the 20th Century. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

Dutch artist and professor Wil Uitgeest wrote in Aardschok – Bliksemflits, that the art movements of the 20th century were no longer about painting as a window to re-create a temporal reality but instead, these movements reflected macro changes in our collective consciousness as well as our actual, individual experience. Cubism, in particular, shifted perspective from the external to the internal, where artistic expression became individual self-identification viewed through a collective prism.

In web 1.0, the non-technical users were observers, visiting sites and slowly learning the vernacular of the digital medium. Gradually, the discipline of information architecture (I/A) emerged as a way of organizing web sites based on principles derived from library science, design and architecture. Like a Renaissance painter, the information architect wanted to make their ‘picture’ (web site) easily viewed by their community of relatively unsophisticated users who, in turn, could easily understand the content. As the medium matured, content strategy emerged as a compliment to the information architect so the I/A could focus on the structure and design of the more robust site experience, leaving the strategist to populate the framework with appropriate content for the user.

There is a strong parallel to be drawn between classical art forms pre-20th century and web 1.0. Just as Cubism played a critical role in the evolution of art history, I believe we can look to Cubism and its many progeny for cues on evolving the digital medium beyond the web site towards the promise of the semantic web. Instead of a single perspective (e.g. the ‘brand web site’) with limited demands, web 2.0 challenges the very definition of content strategy and information architecture to manage multiple, simultaneous perspectives against a human discourse in real-time.

With a robust content strategy distributed through disciplined and carefully constructed forms of I/A, like the Cubist painting: fractured yet cohesive, an individualized 2.0 experience can be developed and guided through rhetoric and content, freed from the framework limitations of a traditional web site.

Having been tagged by Marta Strickland (who was tagged by Stacy Lukas, who was tagged by Ken Burbary who was tagged by Shannon Paul… oh yes, it’s a tightly knit digital community here in Motown), here’s 7 random things about me:

1. I can cook anything from scratch. My passion for cooking started when I was 5 with an Easy-Bake oven. I was making fancy side dishes by age 10 and cooking the family dinner around 15. But I can’t stand rinsing lettuce.

2. I am a fantastic Rock Band / Guitar Hero singer, scoring in the 90th percents on the Hard level in RB2 training. My favorite songs to sing include: Kids in America, The Ballroom Blitz, Hungry like the Wolf and anything by Oasis. If I wasn’t a social media/marketing misfit executive, I’d be the lead singer in a rock band.

3. Having worn glasses all my life due to an astigmatism, I have 4 pairs that I view more as fashion accessories than Rx, although I can’t read a thing without them (including the lyrics to the aforementioned Rock Band).

4. My favorite cut flower is a tulip but I also love hydrangeas in garden beds.

5. I have hair OCD. Not mine — my daughters. Zig-zags, french braids, ballerina buns, lattice ponytails, twists, knots, up-do’s – you name it and I love to style it (when they let me). I’ve made more than 100 hair bows for them to match their outfits. My youngest daughter just mocks me silently with her Shirley Temple curls and slowly slides the bows out when she *thinks* I’m not looking.

6. My favorite perfume and ‘signature scent’ is Cartier’s Le Baiser du Dragon (aka “The Kiss of the Dragon”).

7. I am deeply religious — much more than people think I am. Every week, I dedicate at least 15 hours to studying scripture, religious doctrine and related books/magazines in order to strengthen my deep faith in God and to teach others the gospel.

Passing along the meme to:

Dan Sicko

Eric Cedo

Paul Isakson

Adam Wilson

Joe Minock

Leah McChesney

The Four Simple Rules:

• Link your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged