Guagua Pública

I've been thinking a lot lately about my max-strategy theory. Even after watching the livestream of this year's O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, I still think it is valid. However, I do have a confession.

If you follow a max-strategy out to its' ultimate convergence point, it concludes in only one observation. By trying to be everywhere, all the time, you will eventually just clog up all of the user-generated content (UGC) and social media sites with a message so ubiquitous, it will become indistinguishable to spam.

One of the Ignite sessions examined the curious phenomen of @Horse_Ebooks. During the Ignite session, I saw a comment that quickly dismissed Horse Ebooks as a spam account. As an early adopter of technologies and hacking, I've even fallen into that categorization myself.

Who decides what is a spam Twitter account? Unless the account is reported and suspended by Twitter,  I guess spam is in the eye of the recipient.

Conclusion

I think the future of max-strategy will have to be more selective. Instead of a massive blast that blanket carpets every social media and UGC site, it will have to use some variant of sentiment analysis. It will have to choose the locations most likely to receive the marketing message. I'm not the only one who thinks sentiment analysis is an important technology, recently Google announced they were buying the sentiment analysis engine, fflick.

Hallelujah. Can a brother get an "Amen?"

Here's an interview of Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" from this year's O'Reilly Tools of Change For Publishing Conference:



Seems like I've been telling everyone Eric's last point for ever, well at least for the last 18 months. Every publishing company is now in the software business. Every content company, (TV, Music, Movie, Web, etc.) is now in the software business.

I'll go even farther. Any company who wants to know what people think about: them, their products, their ads, their employees,etc. (isn't that every company?) is in the software business. It's all out there.

Remember? Markets are conversations, and they're taking place on the Internet. Therefore, you must mine the Internet for those conversations, determine what the market is saying, and then join the conversation. Every company is a bigdata company. You've got to suck-in as much of the Internet as possible, and spit out information to support decision making.

I'm sorry you see it differently, but the longer you delay making peace with this shift, the lesser your chances are for survival.

Found this little gem in the archive of video generated from this year's Grammy Awards, Social Media Rockstars Highlights:


I found D. Wallach's comments particularly interesting. At about 2:30 he brings up the growing dilemma of the artist in the Social Media Age. He shares his annoyance with: "As a recording artist, being told to promote your music with everything but your music." As any content producer will tell you, blogging, Tweeting, using social media are probably not part of your core competency. Solving this challenge is the key problem for the emerging artist. Do you produce content or do you market?

It has become a paradox. If the artist isn't going to engage with potential customers on social media, then someone has to do it for them. Doing nothing is not an option.

I think one of the reasons Lady Gaga has been so successful on Twitter is because she has been able to incorporate it into her life. It's not an afterthought. Through her mobile phone she shares, interacts, and engages as she lives. I'm sorry  Margaret, but she has become a product. Every aspect of her life is a product, her process, her Twitter stream, her conversation is a product.