« Austin Chronicle on Austin Wireless City | Main | Gina Gershon ~ Rocked » Remail, Identity, and MarketingDoc Searls posts thoughtfully about what RSS might bring to email, and he gets back to Andre Durand's three tiers of identity, where Andre talks about the "identity marketplace," a taxonomy of identity: T1 is a personal identity, owned and controlled by an individual. (You have to be careful here not to confuse identity with person – Andre's speaking in the abstract here. T2 is a corporate identity, or an identity that is assigned to us for some reason, and is conditional and temporary... Andre's examples being job title, cellphone, membership in United Mileage Plus, etc. T3 is a marketing or abstracted identity, like a marketing segment - 'frequent buyer' or 'one time customer,' etc. Doc's idea: maybe we can use principles from RSS to make email something he calls re-mail – relationship mail – using relationship to solve the email problem (by making our T3 email, i.e. spam, go away). Interesting thought - seems to me that's a lot like whitelisting? Doc links to his 2003 slides for his keynote at Digital Identity World that attempt to redefine marketing in network environments as customer-driven. Paco Nathan and I were talking about this in 1992 when we formed FringeWare, which I called a "street market in cyberspace." Our idea later popped up in Doc's thinking, when he says markets are conversations, kind of the same idea. Early markets were face to face, localized, and set in the context of community relationships. As mass markets evolved, sellers and buyers were disconnected and marketing evolved as an abstract layer between the two. Buyers saw calculated marketing messages, but not people. Sellers saw abstract marketing segments, but not people. Mass media enabled this disconnect and the gap just got wider. Paco and I saw a potential for the Internet to bring buyer and seller back to a more personal relationship in a community context, so we focused on community first. The business (mail order books and gadgets, what Paco used to call "a Sharper Image for freaks and geeks) ran in the back pages of our magazine, as a catalog or "magalog," and much of the energy channeled through our email list, the FringeWare News Network, which carried content a lot like the stuff posted on the boing boing blog (Paco and I had both been associate editors of bOING bOING, the zine. We caught on globally and locally, and FringeWare had a run of something like seven years, which ain't bad for an ecommerce company that can't do ecommerece (we formed pre-web, when the acceptable use policy of NSF wouldn't allow commercial activity across the backbone; when web technology appeared and the backbone was privatized we were set to do ecommerce, but the credit card companies weren't going for it because there was no standard way yet to secure the transactions). After I left FringeWare, Whole Foods Market hired me as "Internet guy," their first employee dedicated to the Internet, and we tried a couple of ecommerce experiments. Recognizing that an important aspect of the store experience at Whole Foods was about community, that the store forms relationships with its customers, I pushed for a strong online community presence which we eventually built as part of an ecommerce site that was also information rich (as are the store environments). The experiment seemed to be working pretty well, too, though for various reasons it wasn't sustained. It's hard to get away from the mass marketing paradigm because effective mass marketing can be so lucrative, and because mass market thinking is drilled so deeply into our world-view, which was shaped and conditioned by mass marketing messages over mass media. Whole masses of people forgot how to do the personal, having spent their evenings, not in conversations with others, but as passive recipients of commercial messages via television. Those messages are interspersed with programming much of which is calculated to feel like relationship. The Internet is somewhat disruptive of consumer culture in that it's interactive and can be truly personal. The best attempts at marketing over the Internet leverage relationships (consider the community aspects of ebay and Amazon). We still have a marketers to don't get it, though: the clueless spammers attempt to fill our inboxes with impersonal commercial messages that have nothing to do with who we are. I've always wondered how they could possibly be successful; no one I know actually reads the spam they receive; most filter it and toss it. Apparently they send so many messages that a tiny fraction of responses is lucrative enough to justify the ongoing deluge. It's time to change our thinking about marketing, and Doc (along with David Weinberger and Chris Locke) authored an important prescription for change when they wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto. (I'm rereading the theses now...) jon posted this at 10:53 AM |
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