Prologue

I’ve always noticed that anytime something new is introduced to the world it will inevitably go through a certain life cycle before its effectiveness matures.

Stage 1: The New Idea

What I’ve found is that we’ll always start with the big idea, new medium, or new invention. It’s that idea that will change everything. The way we work, the way we live, the way we think. Big things will come from this as soon as we introduce it to the world. (See the MP3 player)

Stage 2: Just Add Insanity

For some time after, in a need to bring it down to a kitchen-table understanding, we’ll apply older designs, approaches, and thoughts to the new idea expecting this to work as well as it did in the past.
(See the Nomad MP3 player that looked like a portable CD player)

Stage 3: The Revelation

Suddenly there is a stage of relearning and training ourselves to look at the problem we are trying to solve differently. The light will turn on, and it’s at that point when we really see great things happen. (See the Apple iPod)

Stop Applying Insanity to Your Interactive Strategy

I look at the terms B2B, B2C, B2G, B2E, and every other term like this as an old world approach being pinned to a brand new medium.

Any marketing firm, design firm or advertising agency that looks at the interactive space through these filters has already began from a failing position.

Relearn the Medium

The problem with the above terms is that it groups people into irrelevant buckets. What you’ve done right out of the gates is set yourself up to look at your audience in industry segments, and not as individuals. This is acceptable in the traditional spaces of radio, print, and television commercials. You simply didn’t have much choice beyond a one-way, one-to-many message.

By taking this approach with interactive you ignore one of the core benefits of moving into the this space – creating a two-way, one-to-one dialog. No matter what industry you consider yourself to be in – interactive design always boils down to one person interacting with you at a time. Even at a global scale, it comes down to millions of one-to-one experiences. You have an opportunity to here to connect in unique ways and engage each person at a level they could never have experienced with traditional methods. So from this point forward I suggest throwing the old terms out when dealing with interactive.

Regroup Your Audience

All this talk of breaking down the groups, and now I’m talking about regrouping? Yes, but this is a different type of grouping. Not by market segment or business sector, but by type of individual audience member. Now that you have millions of one-to-one experiences between millions of different individuals, the next point is to understand with whom are you starting a dialog. With interactive you are really only talking about two different types: Visitors and Messengers.

Audience Type: Visitors

Visitors are the ones that will participate in your interactive experience. They will learn from it, respond directly to you with it, be entertained and informed by it. If done remarkably, they will return over and over, and be willing to lose track of time with it. The primary type of dialog they will have will be directly with you and the story you’ve shared.

Audience Type: Messengers

Messengers are your storytellers. They are like visitors, but they don’t stop there. They are the bloggers, the contributors, the responders, the visitors that decide to share your post or “email the page.” These are the people that share your story in a way that is relevant to them and their audience.

Now Create Something New

These are your two main audience types. If anything you’ve learned before doesn’t relate directly back to your audience at the individual level, forget it.

Going forward what you need to do is:

1. break down the traditional silos (or groups, tribes, whatever),
2. understand them as individuals,
3. identify with them, and then
4. enable them to engage as visitors or messengers in your story.

Making sure that you start from this point, and answering questions that enable your audience in either group will help you create experiences that you couldn’t have traditionally achieved or thought of.

If you retrain yourself to look at your audience in this way, you’re solutions will begin to change drastically. You will turn on the light, and begin to make great things happen.

So Much Interactive. So Many Buzzwords.

There were some excellent proofs of concept from the interactive space, but there was still a bit of a disconnect in the message when it came to the thread that tied those successes together. The convention moved into the different topics and paradigms within web and interactive. This included the subjects of tribes, demographics, psychographics, market segments… the list went on. What surprised me was that the most important identifier of the bunch – the individual – was only brought up sporadically only to then be lumped into the traditional business categories of B2B, B2C, and B2G in the same breath.

My advice to anyone working in or wanting to break into this industry is to forget the above categories. They don’t exist when you’re talking about the interactive dialog.

Great! Now What Does It All Mean?

I’ll jump back to a question that the emcee asked in Monday’s panel: “How do you give a unique message to so many different tribes?” There was a bit of bouncing around as far as a definitive answer, but in the end it came down to everyone landing somewhere between “provide unique messages” to “know your audience.” The correct answer would have been “We don’t give the message to these tribes. They do.” Let me explain.

When it comes to interactive, you never give out the entire message. Doing so would be a direct contradiction to the way this medium works. Instead you are simply starting the conversation. From here the members of your audience will continue the dialog. That’s the whole point of interactive design and marketing.

“We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States.”

That’s a quote from Barack Obama’s 2004 DNC speech. My apologies for injecting a bit of politics here, but if you follow along you’ll see the point I’m trying to illustrate. Let’s look back at the question of “tribes.” If you’ve now broken down all these groups to individuals, then you begin to see how an individual usually belongs to more than one tribe; all these people in different tribes will share specific traits. By providing the start of the conversation and enabling them to continue the story they will deliver it to their own tribe in a way that is relevant to themselves and to their peers.

To sum up, interactive isn’t about telling the entire story. As interactive storytellers we are simply starting the story and enabling others to share, evolve, and contribute to that story in ways that can’t be achieved through traditional mediums.

I plan to delve more into this topic over the coming weeks, but I wanted to make this point upfront since to me it’s the foundation of anything that exists in this medium now and in the future.