Communication development processes such as advertising, share some areas in common with product and service development. There is usually an ideation phase, some selection criteria for the ideas (what is deemed good, versus poor work) and then an execution and refinement phase. However the outcome is focused on the development of a piece of communication.
More ideas from outside
“thinking eventually becomes unsurprising and static. We offer an injection of dynamic thinking” – Matt Riley
(Ideabounty)
Much like the product development roles, ideas describe how communications might be carried out. This covers everything from the core creative idea to how the idea might be actualized (video, images, games, events or as one moves beyond communication, products, services and experiences). Since people are, in the end, intended to be influenced by communication it seems reasonable that they be included in the process of contributing ideas and stories.
In his exploration of participatory culture, Henry Jenkins (Jenkins, 2009), describes a number of roles for people within participatory culture, but one essential role is that of the multiplier. In fact he draws a specific parallel to the lead user definitions referenced earlier in Von Hippel’s product development work. The multipliers are likely to take cultural goods and use them in ways not anticipated by their creators. This makes these types of people ideal participants in the ideation process.
Propagation planning
“We needed acceptance. We needed permission…Acceptance only comes from dialog” – Gordon Paddison (Stradella Road)
Planning is ultimately concerned with how to reach the right people with a particular message or set of messages. In a participatory model, where the people formerly known as “the audience” are now taking on “distribution” roles, planning is far more dependent on Henry Jenkins’s multipliers – i.e. those that ensure that an idea will be spread.
Put another way, while many involved in the production of communication, buy and sell media in an effort to trade “attention” or “impressions”, in a participatory environment, agency increasingly rest with customers. They can decide what to recommend or what not to recommend – ultimately what to spread. They can choose to transform content to better fit their specific needs and therefore planning has to mean something different – one might still define who they wish to communicate with, however one has to understand why someone might choose to propagate your particular ideas or message to reach people in a given community.
Mass Collaboration is therefore an essential approach to ensure that the right content has the best chance of reaching the right people.
User generated content
“Our media model is predicated on ‘the audience is the content’" – Brian Benatar (Thunda.com)
In many cases, customers create content for communication. It is one thing to suggest an approach to communication or spread communication, but something else to create content to be propagated. One role for customers is to transform content, whether remixing in a classic sense or simply modifying through addition or omission or changing the specific language to meet the social content. Content is constantly modified by peers in the process of communicating – even when existing content is shared, it is often given new context through commentary, insertion into other contexts, etc. Mass Collaboration enables content production to be expanded – beyond ideas and propagation, to include new communication work.
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