David Pensato

David Pensato

11p

7 comments posted · 0 followers · following 0

13 years ago @ David Pensato - We are no longer your ... · 0 replies · +1 points

Indeed. Though, if you think I'm stating the obvious, then you clearly get it. Unfortunately, in the marketing world, that isn't as common as it should be.

As I see it, TV as a medium allowed the marketing industry to become what it is today. All of its biases, all of the lenses through which it looks at communication is built around TV as the dominant form of public discourse. TV has certain biases, such as the immediacy of visceral emotional impact, which have guided the very notion of a brand.

The industry has built structures, models and entire career categories around the TV lens of the world. With the Internet, people are looking at the world with a whole new set of glasses.

Where does this take the brand? In directions that traditional agencies can't be comfortable with (and to be fair that also goes for, governments, big businesses and other large institutions). Controlling the message is no longer an option.

The brand becomes interactive. Rather than something that is communicated with audiences, it becomes one hub at the centre of a series of interconnected networks.

How does that work? That's where things get a tiny bit more scary, especially for people that are caught off guard by phenomena like Wikileaks or Anonymous or Bit Torrent sites.

The brand adopts a certain level of flexibility. It adapts as it makes different kinds of connections. It finds ways to take note of significant activity within it's network and responds on the fly.

Vetting and calculating and testing and measuring are done as you go instead of as a precondition for moving forward.

Branding, in short, becomes more like jazz and less like a metronome.

And thanks so much for your comment. The fact that you "get it" is why I read your blog and follow you on Twitter. You often have a great deal of insight.

And the fact that it has taken me this long to respond goes to show that my alternative to the agency model is a work in progress. If I had "staff" I wouldn't have weeks at a time where I have no time to tend to the very thing I preach!

13 years ago @ David Pensato - The Network is the Mes... · 0 replies · +1 points

Good points Erica. You're definitely right about the data that we collect online being incredibly rich, and there is no doubt that type of data can form one aspect of network measurement. I think that where I may have been overstating my case is in the inference that all measurement is useless; clearly, it is not.

What I'm driving at has more to do with the multidimensional nature of our interactions and the sophistication and complexity of assessing networks as opposed to measuring audience response.

The internet, as our dominant form of public discourse becomes our metaphor for understanding communication, even beyond the internet. Where we used to see speaker and audience, we see various nodes, connections and repeaters.

Social networks, and even the internet itself becomes one (central, powerful and multifaceted) aspect of the web of communication. Think of all the times you repeated in conversation something your read online, or of all the times tv clips, photos of billboards or book excerpts served as fodder for blog posts which then feed back out into those offline conversations.

How those interactions spread throughout a given network needs a different kind of measurement and various techniques, including the raw data you glean from online analytics, will be utilized to varying degrees and in varying combinations depending on the particular network being assessed.

13 years ago @ David Pensato - It's 2010. Where's My ... · 0 replies · +1 points

That's really interesting. I figured someone out there must be working on something like this. I just can't fathom why no major project has emerged. It would have been a good idea 7 years ago, but by now it seems essential.

13 years ago @ David Pensato - It's 2010. Where's My ... · 0 replies · +1 points

I'm hoping so. If they follow this kind of thinking, that of a dashboard, instead of just another alternative network, I will be very happy.

13 years ago @ David Pensato - It's 2010. Where's My ... · 0 replies · +1 points

True. Many of these are close. I've played with a handful, and that's why I think that one of the attractions of Facebook is it's simple ability to handle multiple kinds of streams in one single place. Photos, Statuses, Email, etc. I just want that dashboard to be open and controllable by me, and connect to the services "out there" that I choose, rather than be corralled within a gated community that has control over all my interactions.

13 years ago @ David Pensato - It's 2010. Where's My ... · 0 replies · +1 points

This is why I can't build it myself! But it seems like it should be simpler than this. You could even just start with a simple aggregator and a fancy form that connects to other services.

13 years ago @ David Pensato - It's 2010. Where's My ... · 0 replies · +1 points

True. There have been several attempts at this (don't know about GOtrieve), but none that I've seen that meet all the criteria I've listed here, and none that look like a combined aggregator/publisher which Ross mentioned in reply on the thread over on scripting.com with a PubSubHubBub. This is really what I'm getting at.

I want a trustable public profile that connects with my streams and allows me to aggregate them and publish to them. It has to be open and live on my machine, and like SMTP, when I "publish" it should go into a queue that will go send when the service is open. For others on the same network, it can just go direct.