Time's Person of Year also is your customer
Brian Carroll, E-business Editor -- Furniture Today, December 31, 2006
Time magazine's "Person of the Year" issue last month celebrated the World Wide Web as a tool for "bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter." The cover had a mirror where, in years past, the person of the year was pictured.
Time was celebrating people power, user-generated Web content and the "de-massifying" of media.
In describing 2006 Internet trends, Time offered a colorful parade of characters selected to represent some of the larger sites and avenues for crowd-sourcing, community and collaboration, including MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, OhMyNews, digital vidcams and podcasting, to name a few. In total, these sites and tools represent a tidal wave of user participation, interaction, connectivity and communication.
My question: Is your company a part of this conversation? Is someone in your retail or manufacturing operation unleashed and empowered to communicate and interact with consumers online? Is someone exploring and enabling community and collaboration?
I have mentioned this before: The low-hanging fruit is growing in the blogosphere. As the new year dawns, about 60 million people read blogs and nearly 20 million write one, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Why?
First, it's easy. Anyone with an Internet connection can have a blog up and running in less than 30 minutes, with no special computer or publishing knowledge. Second, humans are social. Blogito ergo sum — I blog, therefore I am. We like to converse, interact and communicate.
Third, we increasingly are choosing who we listen to, where and when. With TiVo, podcasts and customized news feeds, individuals are tailoring their own media landscapes. It's the de-massifying of media and the death of broadcasting, the rise of narrowcasting and niche audiences.
To the extent your company relies on mass media, your message is at risk. This demassification isn't a fad or trend, but a fundamental realignment of how audiences attend to messages.
There are more important, more human reasons people write and read blogs, and it is these reasons that can materially affect your bottom line. Blogs, like much of the community and communication we see online, are about personal and interpersonal communication, not merely to rant, rave or spout personal opinions. The good ones are humanizing, transparent conversations about topics that matter.
But blogs are only the most popular of a new wave of media for and through which users and consumers are creating and sending their own messages. Even if your company is not active in the blogosphere, do you have ears to hear?
If a brand is a relationship, how are you "relating" to your consumers, who increasingly are communicating, trafficking and even "communing" on the Web?
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Time's Person of Year also is your customer
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