the collapse of marketing

This is the latest post in my expanding series on “success,” and covers projects like micropublishing (blogs, podcasts, etc,) creative work (consulting, cottage industry), and community in a digital/cybercultural context.

I talked about iterative/agile improvement and progress and about the way communities develop and “level” up, and it seems that the missing piece at this point is “marketing.”

When you’ve “broken through,” and you have a vibrant community, you basically don’t do any marketing. You say “_hey folks, please check this out, you rock, thanks!_” and it works. When you don’t have a community, what you do is much less clear.

I think the answer to this is pretty clear: first, talk to people directly about what you’re doing, listen to them talk about what they’re doing, find the connections to their projects; second, do awesome things and keep doing awesome things; third, the more specific and focused you can be without loosing interest yourself the better.

The first two, basically explain themselves: develop a network of people who know you, and are interested in you and your work, because it is easier to be interested in something if there’s a face behind it; and then do good work, because that’ll help.

The third is a bit less self-explanatory, but it boils down to the fact that people join communities to feel like they belong, to meet other people with sympathetic interests, and to fulfill a social need that’s not met anywhere else. If your community exists to support and discuss your works and you’re leading it, that’s kind of boring and it’s clear that you’re the one reaping the most from this relationship.

If you’re the only (or first) person on the web talking about toaster-oven modification and networking, or writing science fiction songs in the sacred harp/shape note tradition (dibs!) if there are other like-minded people, they’ll flock to you. If you’re writing about current news and speculations about the Apple/Macintosh platform, or cataloging news, social oddities, and steam-punk fashion from a futuristic/civil libertarian perspective, there’s not a lot of room in these big niches for you.

Embrace the niche. Use the niche. It’ll work. Really.

That’s part one. Part two, is about advertising as we’ve conventionally see it. Every few years there’s a little “bubble” on the Internet fueled by advertising income. People pay money to get their name, perhaps an image, and a link out in front of eyeballs that they hope will draw attention to whatever they’re selling or making.

This is basically the same advertising model that print media uses, though there are some innovations in advertising on-line: (links, contextually targeted Ads, etc.) The only problem is that I don’t think it works very well.

There will never be research on this,¹ but I find it hard to believe that advertising continues to be a fundamentally successful way to spread the word regarding products and services, particularly on the small scale. Because we’re so used to being around advertising, I think it takes more push to have a successful advertising campaign.

In point of fact, one successful business model is to charge subscription fees to users to avoid ads. Advertising, as we’ve known it for the last 50 or 60 years, is on the brink of collapse. That doesn’t seem particularly revolutionary.

This isn’t to say that advertising has died, and that the only way to generate income on projects is subscription-based. I actually think there’s a lot of promise in direct sponsorships and underwriting-type relationships, but that’s sort of a different beast, and we don’t really have a system to make the underwriting process “easy.” Which may be part of the point, but it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to talking about this kind of thing (if you’re interested,) with me in comments.