Alwayson annual show is on in NY. The opening session was all about user generated content, blogging etc. And they had screens that were showing real time comments from users over the internet — well, the session itself outlined challenges of handling this medium.
Bill Cleary of CKS went around SFO interviewing people, and in the process landed up making fun of an old chinese gentleman, referring to the railroad work he might have done. Immediately, the screens started buzzing with racialism — I could see Bill watching the screens and still managing to keep composure. Next on was Peter Hershberg, Chairman of Technorati — he started well, but ultimately the talk started dragging and the audience was up again — and both times around, the organisers had to shut the user comments off! If the very conference that is evangelizing UGC has challenges handling it, one can only imagine how the larger media and advertising fraternity feels challenged by it.
Anyway, the Alwayson top 100 companies are here – check them out!
- Promoters or Entrepreneurs – A choice for Private Equity players - August 3, 2019
- Startup Marathon Mindset - March 25, 2019
- What’s your Customer Culture? - March 4, 2019
Neat Alok. Hope to exchange notes post your return.
Cheers.
Aseem, the conference is being webcast live, and you can enter comments at their website mentioned above
Alok,
The raw power of UGC was at work there.
Blogs can be instrumental in two-way marketing, and in today’s world of ‘citizen journalism’ they can make for great customer evangelism tools, or if you’re not careful, a public bashing from online and offline press. People are more polite when they know you are listening.
It’s a proof that technologies are converging to change the way we live: mobile communications, social networks, distributed processing and pervasive computing. Collectively it can outwit the top down forces of the establishment.
I think the real takeaway is the Old Economy ethos of control is being replaced by a New Economy ethos of influence. The real power of the web lay not in the technology behind it, but in the profound changes it brings to the way people interact with business.
That’s why more than the larger media and advertising fraternity as you seem to fear, UGC’s impact is more pronounced on the businesses which used media to *one-way lecture* its customers. It’s time they realize markets are in fact *two-way conversations*. This is the transitional age of marketing with a vendor perspective to the one with a customer perspective.
In the aggregate, the combined preferences, insights, and purchasing power of all Web denizens is vastly more valuable and relevant to business decisions about production, quality, and services than any “push” marketing hype or engineering presumptions about what people might need.
How were the people in the audience “commenting” on the talks? Were the talks online?