Kings Fall to Fans

News Type: Opinion — Fri Mar 31, 2006 4:32 PM EST

In the April issue of Business 2.0, Erick Schonfeld writes that content is no longer king. His article, "Tuning up Big Media" claims that the audience is king now. Companies are asking for a struggle if they take that approach. Monarchies are not the most popular forms of government.

Perhaps that title was a little misleading. Sorry.

Conversation Not Content

The majority of the content we are putting on the Web today isn't created with the intent of being consumed. We are creating conversation not content.

The morning discussion with our spouse over coffee is not content.
Banter with friends via IM or over a beer is not content.

Our conversations do not transmute into something entirely different just because they are on the Internet. The sites emerging from Web 2.0 encourage conversations over content.

Participation Rules

Our intent is participation. Intent defines our product. We do not expect our conversations to be monetized. We expect them to improve our relationships and our understanding of each other.

Our goal is to participate. Our objective is to build an understanding of ourselves and others. The commonly held perception of content does not exist where participation is the goal. But participation, or creation in Erick's words, does not make the audience king. And why all this talk of kings anyway?

Power Struggles

Kings have power which is a corrosive force and mires people into constant struggles.

We have long heard that the customer is always right. I had a fun discussion on my blog about this point of view. Any attempt to claim that someone is right leads to someone else being wrong. Which can lead to a power struggle, and while one might win a power struggle the costs are usually very high. Monarchies may be able to survive the high cost of battle, but democracies tend to fragment under stress. And the Internet by nature is more democratic than any government.

Promoting the audience as king creates a hierarchy. A hierarchy of one.

We are the Audience

I meet a few new people in person each month. I may not know how they feel about the issues of our day, but I get a vignette of who they are.

When I browse the Web, I am looking for people. Sure I'm reading their opinions or looking at their photos, but what I'm really trying to do is connect with a person even if that person doesn't know it.

When all I can see, feel or intuit about a person is what they've placed online; am I experiencing content or am I experiencing a person in the only mode open to me? I think I know the you you have shown me.

And in the process of browsing I am leaving a trail of markers so that others can seek me out and get to know me. I am part of the audience that I am watching.

Perception is Reality

In marketing we talk about perception being reality. This is true in all parts of our life. We make a number of assumptions about a person when we first meet them. This creates our context or reality and we respond accordingly until we have a reason to change. That is until we get more information from that person or a trusted source.

This is how we develop relationships online. We read, watch and learn about each other and strengthen our connections to each other.

We are the Content

Our profiles, comments, articles, photos are all a part of ourselves. They are our personalities. These are the building blocks of other perceptions of us, and they become memories for those that interact with us. They are the me that I show to you.

This is no different than when we meet in person. I choose to show you who I think I am with my clothes, where I hang out and what I do.

When we browse Flickr, MySpace, Frappr or other social sites, we are not looking for content in the traditional sense. We are browsing the people who populate row after row of an audience. And we are doing it by looking in a mirror.

The audience is the reason we read, browse, post, look and interact.

The King has Left the Building

The audience is the content. There is no king.

You may feel that this is splitting semantic hairs, but the words we use to describe a thing effects how we conduct ourselves in relation to that thing. We must define our terms deliberately. Content is the most important thing on the Web. We just happen to be the content of Web 2.0.

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Public Discussion (1)

What's this?

Who's leading the conversation?

This visualization below allows you to see the impact that each user has on the current conversation. The top row contains the group of users who have had the most impact, the 2nd row the group of users who have had the 2nd most impact (et cetera). Users with similar impact are grouped together, and the average score of the group is shown to the left of the group. The author of the article is also shown on the left, in their corresponding group. Each user's score is based on the number of comments the user has made plus the number of votes their comments have received. The scores are calculated relative one another, so while their absolute value is not particularly important, their relative difference does indicate a larger difference in impact on the conversation.

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Dimitri Glazkov

Hear, hear! The beauty here is in realization that Web writers are in the audience, too. And they look weird and out-of-place if they don't realize it, muttering and talking to themselves in the crowd.

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#1 - Fri Mar 31, 2006 4:52 PM EST

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BOB ROBERTSON-BOYD

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