I was reading through a post by Steve Rubel, discussing the declining value of content based on how an economic system works.
Steve got a few things about economic systems wrong -- and his readers let him know it in their comments, but that doesn't mean the conclusion of his argument is wrong.
As strategists and as marketers, we live and breath in an attention economy. You hear about things like permission marketing or interruption marketing because of how fickle, how scarce, and how precious attention really is.
Creating content and monetizing that content is only going to get harder and more costly. That's a fact. Media saturation will only continue to increase and unfortunately attention is a limited resource. Therefore, the time and the care we want people to give our content will dwindle and its effectiveness will falter. UNLESS, we get smarter. All the tools are at our disposal. We can poke and prod and study our users like mice in virtual skinner boxes, aka websites. Never before are we given such a two-way medium to better understand our customers, to involve them more richly in the production process, and of course to help promote our finished product. The real difference between old media and new media is the willingness, or the outright fear, to be driven to this conclusion and to embrace it.
User generated content is putting your toe in the water, user co-creation is being up to your waist. Companies like etsy, and threadless and countless more are at the forefront of this philosophy -- where moving forward, organizations will only thrive with an active cult of participants -- not de-saturated, numerated customers, but vibrant, voracious participants.
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