Presenting with Balls (um… not how it sounds)
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve twice had the great privilege of talking about media, new media, marketing and what people do with the culture they consume– first as the opening keynoter at the HTMA in San Diego and then at Dr. James Loper’s Masters in Communications Management Class on American Media Institutions at USC’s Annenberg School.
In both talks I discussed something I call “The Media Pyramid” (more on that coming here to Mediavorous.com soon), and in both I opened by attempting to illustrate the new relationship between media and the people who read or watch or listen to media — a relationship in which the audience has a much greater voice than ever before — by throwing approximately 100 soft plastic balls into the audience.
(Side note to public speakers: Throwing things at an audience, even soft things, tends to wake them up. The goal is not to turn them into an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob.)
With either the old marketer-to-consumer relationship or the homologous old media-producer-to-audience relationship, the marketer or producer sent the message to a passive receiver. Up onstage, I was the marketer or producer, hurling the soft plastic message at my audience.
In both cases, the audience got the first part of what I was driving at, which is that consumers or media audiences now can easily and actively respond to the creator of the message. So, at both talks after a few tense moments — where they were clearly thinking, “he doesn’t really want us to throw these things at him, does he… oh, I guess he does” — they started throwing the balls back at me.
Here’s the interesting part.
What they missed at first, both audiences, was that they should have been throwing the balls to each other.
The most interesting dynamic is not B2C or C2B but C2C. Whether you call them consumers or media audiences, the thing that’s important about the internet is that it lets them talk amongst themselves. Sure, the well-funded marketer or media producer probably has a louder voice, but the consumers can ignore the corporate speaker if they want to do so.
More significantly, it’s not what consumers say to a brand marketer or media creator that should keep the latter two up at night, it’s what the consumers say to each other about the brand or media property.
The marketers at HTMA, a bright crowd of people if ever there was one, didn’t get it. They half-heartedly tossed balls at each other, but didn’t pay much attention. It seemed emblematic of the problems that most marketers have changing how they think about the conversation in which their previously one-sided communications are taking place. “Markets are conversations,” the Cluetrain Manifesto said back in the late 1990s, but lots of marketers are still talking at rather than with. Media properties too. With luck, by the time I finished my talk they were more ready to see what I was talking about. Looking back, I should have tested them, gotten them to toss the balls back into the air, but by then I was in full PowerPoint mode, and resistance to the call of the slides is futile.
The USC students, another bright crowd and a lot younger, got it much more quickly. They kept an eye on me, but started throwing balls at each other with abandon. Later, I asked them if they had MySpace and Facebook pages. All but three of them did.
If you’re a marketer or a media property, a social media strategy isn’t a nice to have; it isn’t a secondary revenue stream or a vague way of communicating with your audience. It’s important to your brand’s survival.
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