August 5, 2007
Gender and Fan Studies, Facebook, and The Death of Marketing

Over the weekend, I thought it might be helpful to point the way to a few recent posts from the blogs of some C3 Consulting Researchers and corporate partners.

First, the ninth round of Henry Jenkins' continuing Gender and Fan Studies series posted late this past week. This round features Cynthia Walker and Derek Kompare. It can be found here and here.

I continue to do a lot of thinking about virtual networks and how they are transforming social and professional relationships, as I've written about several times here on the C3 blog. For instance, see my post from back in June on personal questions on maintaining personal relationships raised by social networks.

That takes me to this interesting post from the Idea City blog from our partners over at GSD&M. This focuses on how Facebook is being heralded as the next big breakout star of online networks, based particularly on its surge of popularity since going public and away from high school and college registration.

First, I have to say that a lot of people researching media and the like came onto Facebook simultaneously. I got invites from a variety of fellow bloggers throughout a few-week period in the spring at an astonishing rate. But I think one of the key insights from the article is this: "What MySpace is experiencing is not a loss of interest but a loss of novelty. I would argue that people were never really that interested in MySpace to begin with; they just thought it was a novel way to interact."

I've said plenty of times before that those interested in the YouTubes and MySpaces have to distinguish between the users and the company. For the users, to me, it's more about what the space enables than it is about the brand itself...

Finally, Grant McCracken poses a question over at his blog about the beginning of the death of marketing. Although written tongue-in-cheek, he is reacting to Piers Fawkes decision to drop the work "marketing" from his company's PSFK conference planned for next month.

Grant writes that marketing is a brand that already has an incredible following, like Windows. "No one likes it very much, but it makes the world of computers (read business) make sense. By this reading, we should just stick with orthodoxy. It might not be very good, but it's better than its alternatives." However, he muses at the value of toppling the whole idea of marketing. You might be interested in what he writes, as well as some of his readers.

2 Comments

 

"toppling the whole idea of marketing"

More and more I get the feeling I'm not alone in my thinking that things are getting ready to be turned inside-out. When I was commenting on "news" brands earlier, it was from the perspective of someone watching what's happening to a profession in anticipation of it hitting his own (the same way I've been watching other professions). Marketing is no different. We're all in for an interesting ride, I think.

 

True, and as I've been pointing out lately, the key is not to expect things to change overnight and then claim that it's obviously not because you woke up the next day and things looked more-or-less the same. Most of the time, it's just the kind of change Grant is writing about...very gradual; a step at a time.