Co-opting the Corporation

The jury is still out as to whether the indigenous culture of the internet and the corporate world sit easily with each other.

Sometimes the chemistry seems wrong. The big corporates often look self-conscious, not sure quite how to behave. And aside from the few internet mega brands like Google, many web businesses stumble and sometimes fall at the hurdle how to make money online. The relationship between commerce and the web is a fractious one.

People speculate about whether the internet will become ever more corporate or if instead corporates themselves will become more de-corporatised? There is a power struggle yet to come. On the internet, major brands can seem vulnerable; they don’t have the skills of the open sourcers, the web-in-the-blood instincts of generation Y, and as events in China have recently proven, they can’t keep up with the cyber-terrorists.

This challenge to big business is undoubtedly a good thing. They can’t just set up camp online. Many have had to borrow the techniques of viral, P2P and buzz, the brightest offline businesses have had to become a little bit guerrilla themselves –  acknowledging that the online world is not a place originally created for them. Thinking in this way has created the most productive period of progress in the commercial world in decades.

Now we’re entering a new phase. We’re moving beyond web 2.0, characterised by global conversation and participation -albeit in often pre-prepared experiences. Now, somehow, the opportunity has been blown open. If customers aren’t just happy to be receivers, or customisers, or participants, but are instead making the web on their own (with the iphone, Apple has its customers making its product. Aol is about to do the same.) then the web is presumably about to go through another innovation surge. In this new scenario, there are new rules, to free up thinking rather than constrain it. 

The digital and actual are equivalent

For a long time, the digital world has been treated as a copy of the real world. The add-on bit. The truth is, its impact on our lives is as material as anything else – this will become more obvious as geolocation and real time become dominant features. Better still than the actual world, digital space is reality that can be moved around, distorted, injected with imagination.

Great brands will not then be simply extending their businesses on line. They’ll be starting from the fictional possibilities of the online world, in order to re-boot the hum drum of daily life –  in terms of business models, products, services and environments. Gaming scriptwriters have something to offer the brand and innovation managers of online business.

In commercial terms, this is not just a nice idea. If brands online simply set out to replicate the off line world and take advantage of the web’s easy distribution, they do everyone a disservice. It’s the quick way to commoditisation. Poor versions of offline originals will have their value whittled away to zero. Instead, it is singular and new products and experiences, which are imaginative and immersive, which will hold their value and provide the greatest financial return. As web world and ‘real’ life merge, there is only one option: innovate, don’t replicate. Don’t make the mistake of Second Life.

Get precise with the media

All brands can benefit hugely from digital but some are much better at using digital than others. It’s entirely right to jump in, to revel in the technical possibilities – they are what make the internet magical – but imagination has to be accompanied by real identification with the user. Technology shouldn’t block the relationship between the experience you are offering and the person on the other side of the screen.

It is easy to overlook context, to forget how technology slots in with daily life. The challenge is to know the mood, habits, pre-conceptions, time of day, stress levels, time pressures that users bring to their relationship with you and then to choose the exactly the right feature to delight, ease, speed up, or organise, fulfill their needs.  The more you know about the user, the more imagination can be pointed in the right direction.

The obsession should be with the right imaginative fit between medium, message and audience. Enhanced editions online books expands the concept on a book in line with the possibilities of the medium in the right way – it is much more imaginative that a replica of a digital book, but it doesn’t tip into features for the sake of it. It leverages the technology to create a unique experience and keeps a close eye on what things feel like for the user.

Draw a crowd not a herd

There is no greater sign of a result on line than critical mass audience. But let the crowd rule itself, and herd-like, mindless behaviour can take over. Some people say the app market has already gotten too free-form and that beautiful ones are being tarnished by ‘crappy apps’. There’s now the phrase ‘loser generated content’.

The challenge is to keep a crowd a crowd – a self organising, mutually supportive system, pointed towards a common goal. Steer the crowd, inspire them, curate, shape and edit for them. The challenge is not allowing a crowd to drown in all kinds of everything, or else it could end producing all kinds of nothing. This leads to lost and unsatisfied users, and a brand which has lost its bite.

The role of a good digital brand is to keep making its presence felt, to keep dropping things in that change the dynamic, the conversations and actions. This means never fading away. Brand presence takes on a new meaning in the digital space – keep asserting it, not just managing it.

The groundswell of the internet today is an active and turbulent one, fuelled by pro-active, self-motivated, impassionate, social people. Brands need to find them. And people need brands to be thinking about more things than the size of their wallet. The best new rules of the internet come from its users and builders which is why, of all the scenarios for the future of the internet, corporates dropping the front, finding some imagination and properly joining in is the best scenario of all.

16 February 2010, posted by Suzanne Livingston