I was challenged regarding my last post on how marketing is changing about whether Twitter is a broadcast medium.  That my point regarding word of word to spread ideas was a nice but vaguely naive notion. The argument was that it Twitter is used in a one to many manner, I send out a tweet which all of my followers read  – that equals broadcast.

The answer I suppose in that simplistic context is that it can be used that way, in fact many of the tools being used to get followers (none of which I subsribe to) have been created to turn Twitter into a broadcast medium, but its inherent character is not that. Its character is a massive simultaneous conversation in which people listen, talk back and then talk to thier friends. In any conversation the person talking carries some status in the community and in twitter its no different. The words some people say are just carry more weight than others. These people have influence and this is derived from the nature of their relationship with others

Influence, not numbers, is the currency of the internet  and they are not related. Numbers on the other hand are the important factor of broadcast media which is aimed at getting eyeballs (opportunities to see) but the conversation stops there, the audience sees and may notice, but there is no way that it becomes a conversation, people cant answer back and people cant share.

For a medium like twitter its who sees and the influence they can have as they pass the message on. A massive difference in my mind.

As an example I very recently came across a tool called Topsy, its a twitter based search engine and it ranks its search results on the basis of the tweeters influence. To quote them, “Topsy sees the Internet as a stream of conversations. Topsy treats people differently from the webpages they create and the things they say. And Topsy sees that people in every community are connected in a web of relationships, where each person influences other people to read, talk and think about things.”

This is a cool idea and specifically cool because when I checked my status I was amazed to find that it ranks me as highly influential (a status reserved for the top 0,2% most influential of twitter users) and I have only just about 2000 followers. As with all of this I think that you can take yourself too seriously and I take it with a pinch of salt, but it does illustrate the point.

Walter's status on Topsy

My argument about the change in marketing is just this phenomena. The object of marketing has always been to spread an idea, the idea that the consumer should buy my product or service instead of someone else’s. The  best way in the past was to broadcast it over and over until the audience did, but as broadcast media loses effectiveness the best way in the future will be to produce something remarkable and get the former audience to talk to each other about it.

That’s why you need think of Twitter as anything but a broadcast medium.

photo credit: x-ray delta one

At the TEDx event TedxNewtown I spoke about how marketing has changed since the Internet. This is what I said.

Once upon a time someone would stumble upon some stuff or craftsmen would start making something that they thought people would buy. They would then take it to a place where they thought people would buy it. If people liked what was on offer they would buy and they would tell their friends and pretty soon there would be demand.

Then along came industrialisation. The way business won the industrialisation game was to standardise offerings because by doing so they would enjoy the economies of scale, reduce costs and maximise profit. The focus was therefore productivity and efficiency and this is why companies are still run by efficiency experts.

The process of getting the word to spread so that people could buy in volume was taken out of the hands of the customer because modern broadcast media was far more effective at doing so and too expensive for ordinary consumers. Television was the most effective of them all. Branding attached the meaning the marketeer wanted for the brand and it was broadcast over and over again until it was believed, where else was the consumer to get the information to dispute it?

It was the widescale  use of broadcast media such as television that sparked the invention of the discipline of marketing in the 1960′s and supported the underlying principle of mass marketing, in the words of Seth Godin selling average stuff to average people (the most acceptable product to the largest possible market)

The Internet changed that. It changed it because it has altered the balance of power in the transaction.

Power can be thought of as having been derived from three sources, the threat of violence, from wealth or from knowledge and information. The Internet changed the source of information from the brand to the masses because it made it easy to access trusted information and opinion from friends and your network.

Brand control evaporated as information became searchable and free.

At the same time the Internet provided the cheapest and most effective tool for the spreading of ideas for the consumer, the one to many channel of television could be replaced by the more trusted one to one channel of the Internet. The consumer now had the knowledge, the information and in his hands the cheapest and most effective tool for idea dissemination ever invented.

How do you market products and services when the basis of modern marketing has been eroded?

The answer is simply that that you go back to the core of the process which was established long before marketing was even invented:

You make stuff that people want and you offer it in a way that is remarkable – so that people talk about it and so they will spread the word for you.