Silent Signal 1/2012

SilentSignal

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!e Silent Signal trend report discusses the digital revolution and the multiplicity of consequences it has for the lives of

companies, consumers and media."

!e report, scheduled to appear three times a year, consists of expert articles by top actors of digitalism, marketing, advertis-

ing and communication both from Finland and abroad.

!e Silent Signal trend report is published by Vapa Media in order to inspire discussion around the central functions of the

web and in order to further collective thinking.

You are welcome to take part in the conversation on the Face-book page of the report.

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Ida Hakola & Ilona Hiila are the founding partners of content agency Vapa Media and the #rst heralds of content strategy in Finland. !is duo believes that web contents will play an ever-larger role in the success of the web-oriented everyday life of companies.

Rachel Lovinger is the leading content strategist of Razor#sh Ltd., one of the leading digital media agencies in the world. Lovinger, with over ten years of digital publishing, websites and content strategy under her belt, is one of the international pioneers of content thinking.

Kaj Storbacka is a professor of business economy, an author and the founding partner of Vectia Ltd.; he is currently a visiting professor at the University of Auckland Business School. In Finland, Storbacka is known as a top expert of his #eld and the consultant to call when the business economy is facing changes.

"Emma Storbacka is a management consultant, specializing in the e$ects of the social media and its potential for business development. Currently she works for Capgemini Consulting and authors the blog Social as Usual. Emma is writing the article in a joint e$ort with her father, Kaj.

Perttu Tolvanen is one of the few Finnish CMS experts and the editor-in-chief of the well-known Vierityspalkki.#. Tolvanen believes that web publication problems stem not so much from the CMS but more from the cultural changes taking place.

Henri Weijo is a researcher of consumerism and urban culture, working on his disserta-tion in the Department of Marketing at the Aalto University. !e keywords for Weijo’s research are urban culture, consumer habits, media, politics and brands.

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The Silent Signal Vapa Media publication

What’s all this about?

!e authors of !e Silent Signaltrend report 1/2012

!e Silent Signal, No. 1:Of Contents and CommitmentIda Hakola & Ilona Hiila, Vapa Media

Content Strategy: Why Now?Rachel Lovinger, Razor#sh Ltd

!e age of reciprocity – and the end of #rms, customers and consumersKaj Storbacka, VectiaEmma Storbacka, CapGemini Consulting

Don’t Let the Tech Get in theWay of Content Renewal!Perttu Tolvanen, Projekti55

What Sort of Content DoCommunities Form Around?Henri Weijo, Aalto-yliopisto

About the report and the publisher


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The Silent Signal, part 1: Of content and gaining commitment!e world keeps turning and changing. But how should companies change when faced with digitalization?

ou are now holding the #rst !e Si-lent Signal trend report – either in you hands or on your screen. !e idea of this publication was born in the conference room of the content

agency Vapa Media in the spring of 2011. We wished to raise more coherent, guided and and clear discussion regarding the state of %ux of the web and communication in general.

!is report brings some of the top experts of the #eld onto the center stage. !e title of the report, !e Silent Signal, refers to the nature of the change taking place, and the pressure of being the guiding oracles in your #eld, which has been built on those develop-ing the web protocols of companies. !is re-port o$ers tools for creating change for those everyday oracles.

!e guest writers of the report work in the #elds of media, marketing, technology and business – or sometimes in the core of soci-etal research. !e #rst Silent Signal tunes in to analyze the changes digitalization has brought to the everyday of companies and audiences.

!e change digitalization has brought a$ects consumers, companies and societies – and above all, the ways in which they communi-cate with each other. At the same time, the changes give birth to new ways of understand-ing business and the market in which compa-nies do business. As digitalization changes the nature and distribution of the resources we work with, the models of earning and ways of confronting the client also change. A profes-sor of marketing, writer and founding partner of Vectia, Kaj Storbacka, shares his visions of

Ida Hakola & Ilona HiilaVapa Media Oy Y

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the end of customership and consumership as we know it along with the management con-sultant of CapGemini Emma Storbacka on pages 18–23.

Also the giants have heard the frail signal. !e Coca-Cola Company published a video in January 2012 where they open up the com-pany’s future strategy. According to the video, Coca-Cola’s marketing will rely heavily on the web and contents in the future. !e goal is to get people to commit to the company in a way that is not possible anymore through mere marketing and communication.

!e next decade shall be the era of commit-ment in the web. In that situation, how do you gain the commitment of your clients and how do you get them to create content related to the brand? Consumer researcher Henri Weijo unravels the problématique behind brand communities and content production on the pages 28–33 of this report.

!e change also a$ects some actors in negative ways. Not every service provider has begun in-ner development on their methods; instead, old ways of action are o$ered for the changed #eld of the web. !e next phase will be to see how old partnerships measure up in the world of today. Now if ever we need smart web de-sign, fresh ideas and their %exible realizations.

Changes become topical issues when a com-pany sets out to renew its website. Functions that used to be located under a single system have scattered into social media and the pub-lication methods must be chosen according to what sort of action is in question. CMS consultant and the editor-in-chief of Vi-erityspalkki.# Perttu Tolvanen writes about webpage makeovers and the choice of techno-logical solutions on pages 24–27. !e readers will have access to #ve theses to bear in mind when executing a webpage makeover.

Even though the signal of change might still be a quiet one, the needs for planning new kinds of web action grow constantly. Along-side the technical and graphical experts, we are now witnessing the birth of an actor who has previously been missing from web plan-ning: the content expert or the content strate-gist. Someone who plans, manages and devel-ops a company’s communication on di$erent web platforms.

Content strategy is a trend of web being that was born in the United States and has seen growth in recent years. One of the pioneers of the #eld is the leading content strategist of Razor#sh, Rachel Lovinger; in this report, she writes about why content strategy has got people talking around the world right now. You can familiarize yourself with content strategy and Lovinger’s thoughts on pages 10–17.

!e most important signal of the years to follow will be about a change in message. !e core of companies’ action in the web will move from static being to active sharing of stories and listening to their clients. In a world bloated with information, the only message that can reach your audience is the kind they want to hear. We hope that the ar-ticles in this report bring up messages that are useful to you. Tell us your opinion, ideas for improvement and feel free to suggest experts who might interest us at:

facebook.com/hiljainensignaali

Ida Hakola & Ilona HiilaVapa Media Ltd.

” Alongside the technical and graphical experts, we are now witnessing the birth of an actor who has previously been missing from web plan-ning: the content expert or the

content strategist.”


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“Digitalization changes consumerism, commitment, web planning & business. How to get companies on board?”

#silentsignal

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efore we talk about why content strategy seems so important right now, and where it is headed, let’s take a quick look at how we got to this point.

First, some of you may be wondering “What exactly is Content Strategy?” One of the most frequently quoted de#nitions is by Kristina Halvorson: “Content Strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.” !at’s pretty accurate, but may leave some people wondering about the details.

Content Strategists are responsible for many di$erent content-related activities and de-liverables. We could be asked to do literally anything related to content. I have done eve-rything from copyediting to writing a script for a video demo to creating taxonomies and content models, and a wide range of activi-

ties in between. Generally we’re more likely to do content planning activities than con-tent creation activities – writing guidelines for authors rather than writing the content itself.

Another major aspect of content strategy work is that it is interdisciplinary. We work with designers, writers, information archi-tects, marketing departments, developers, search professionals, social media experts, etc. Even if there aren’t people with the title “Content Strategist” in your organization, one of these people has usually been doing some aspects of content strategy work with-out even knowing it. Now that it is o&cially a practice we can start applying more stand-ards and processes to the work of content strategy, regardless of our title.

Content Strategy: Why Now?Content Strategy is a concept that has been around for a long time, but it is relatively new in the interactive industry. In the past few years, Web Content Strategy has exploded onto the scene as one of the new, interesting voices that must be heard. Since content itself certainly isn’t new, let’s take a closer look at why this is happening now.

Rachel LovingerRazor!sh Ltd.


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As I mentioned, Content Strategy is not a new concept. If you search for “content strat-egy” on Google and constrain it to a speci#c date range, you’ll see that there were men-tions prior to 2000, but not many (about 880). From 2001 until 2008 the number of results increased along a nice steady curve showing exponential growth.

And then something happened that com-pletely threw o$ the trajectory of the curve. It leapt from 286,000 results in 2008 to 4,210,000 results in 2009.

So what happened in 2009? A real commu-nity of content strategy practitioners was born. Two events announced its arrival.

First, in March 2009, there was a Con-tent Strategy Consortium. !is one day event at the beginning of the IA Summit was organized by Kristina Halvorson and Karen McGrane. !ey invited 20 people in the #eld to spend an entire day speak-ing together, talking about content strategy. Each person spoke for 15 minutes, or led a group discussion. We talked about di$erent aspects of our work and what we should do to develop the practice and the community.

I was in that consortium, and one of the most amazing things about the experience was learning that there were other people in the world who were practicing Content Strategy! I had never met any, aside from the ones that I already worked with at Ra-zor#sh. We left feeling inspired and moti-vated to keep this connection going, and expand it to the rest of the world where we were certain there must be many other

content strategists (even some who didn’t yet know that that’s what they were). Most of us were already on Twitter, several of the attendees started blogs that very week, and the word started to spread. Other like-minded people started to join in the con-versation.

!e second thing that happened, later that year, was the release of Kristina Halvorson’s book, Content Strategy for the Web. In ad-dition to being a useful reference for new practitioners, this book was also an incred-ible tool for evangelism. Many of us were still #nding ourselves having to justify our role in projects, and the very existence of such a book helped legitimize us. On top of that, it was a short book and easy to under-stand, so you could actually give it to your boss or your stakeholders and say “Read this and you’ll understand why Content Strategy is important.”

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Over the next few years the Content Strat-egy community grew like crazy. Discussions bloomed on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Groups. Local Meetups started all over the US, and in many other coun-tries throughout the world. Two new con-ferences focused exclusively on Content Strategy. CS Forum took place in Paris (2010) and London (2011) and later this year will take place in Cape Town. In 2011 Kristina Halvorson’s company Brain Tra&c started a conference called Confab, which will take place again this year. Other con-ferences, such as SXSW, An Event Apart, Web Content, and Webstock have an increas-ing representation of content strategy top-ics. And there have also been many more blogs, books, an online publication called ContentsMagazine.com, and even some col-lege courses.

!at explains how we, as a group, got to where we are today, but how do individual people get into this practice? Let me start with my own story.

Currently I’m an Associate Content Strategy Director at Razor#sh in New York. I have been there for almost six years. As with many people now doing Content Strategy, I didn’t set out to be in this #eld. Prior to starting my job at

Razor#sh, I didn’t even know this #eld existed. I studied interactive media. !en I worked as a web developer for a major entertainment pub-lication, where a lot of my work was focused on the Content Management System. While the editors were thinking about the handful of content that would go on the home page, I was thinking about how we could make the best use of the other 10,000 articles in our archive.

We had editorial people who planned and created the content, business people who made deals for special sponsorships and rich media advertisements, and technical people who managed the systems that deployed the content and ads. But something was missing. !ere were gaps in the way we worked togeth-er, and sometimes it seemed like we weren’t all speaking the same language. I often found myself helping the developers understand the editorial vision, helping the business people understand whether the ad deals they were selling could be supported by our systems, and helping the editors understand the technical capabilities and limitations of the publishing system. When I saw a job opening for a role called “Senior Content Strategist,” I realized that that was what I had already been doing for several years.

!ere is no single path to becoming a content strategist. People come to this #eld from many

backgrounds, and as a result they tend to focus on di$erent aspects of Content Strategy. Rich-ard Ingram, a writer and content strategist with a talent for creating infographics, speculated that there were three main approaches: Techni-cal, Editorial, and Web Planning & Strategy. He created a diagram1 illustrating how various roles and activities #t into each of these ap-proaches. Last year he decided to back up his speculation with research. He posted a survey asking Content Strategists to provide informa-tion about their background: their job title 5 years ago, 10 years ago, and what they studied in college. From the 265 responses, he plotted the paths towards six di$erent areas of content strategy2.

!ere are two important learnings from this research. One is that there is no set path to becoming a content strategist. Everyone brings di$erent experiences and knowledge, and that is what makes it a really robust discipline (as long as we keep learning from each other, and don’t just stay in our comfort zones). !e sec-ond important point is that you don’t have to have “Content Strategist” in your title in order to do content strategy.

1) http://www.richardingram.co.uk/2010/08/approaches-to-web-content-strategy/2)http://www.richardingram.co.uk/2011/09/content-strategys-well-trodden-paths/


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Some businesses and organizations have been online for over 15 years. Some enter-prise systems go back even further than that. We are rapidly digitizing older materials and bringing them online as well. !at’s a lot of content – text, images, video, audio, docu-ments, comments, email, etc. But we don’t usually have people whose job it is to make sure that we optimize the way we create, #nd, and use that content. Not just on the days leading up to launch, but for the full life of a project. !at’s why we need Content Strategy. Let’s take a look at some of the key ways that Content Strategy can add value to a digital initiative.

After so many years of creating digital con-tent – often in a disorganized way – there’s

bound to be a lot of junk content lingering around. “ROT” stands for “Redundant, Outdated, Trivial” – important criteria for evaluating content.

Content Strategy includes guidelines to help content owners evaluate their content so they can get rid of or update the stu$ that’s no longer useful. In addition to ROT, this can include criteria such as content qual-ity or accessibility. To make sure that ROT doesn’t creep back in, a good content strat-egy should also include guidelines for crea-tion of new content that’s relevant and on-brand. Periodic review of content that could become stale will also help.

Companies that weren’t traditionally in the business of creating content are now dis-covering that being online means sourcing or writing articles, creating videos, seeding social media campaigns, monitoring com-munities, and performing a whole range of activities that they were never equipped to

do. Often these responsibilities get dumped on someone who already has a full-time job (typically in marketing or communications) and may not have the time or experience to ful#ll these new duties.

Content Strategy can help these organiza-tions establish editorial capabilities. !is in-cludes de#ning the messaging goals – what do they want to say to their audience? From there they must choose the appropriate for-mats and channels for connecting with the audience they want to reach. Once they have established an editorial strategy, they should identify organizational and operational changes that need to take place to support the creation and governance of content. !is way, even if the work ultimately falls on peo-ple who already have other work to do, there are at least structures in place to support them in their new tasks.

Companies that do have a history of creating content, primarily publishers, are in a panic

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because audiences are increasingly turning to digital content and this threatens to make their print products obsolete. At the same time, audiences are more dispersed because there are so many sources of information and entertainment competing for their at-tention. !is is damaging to both sales-based and advertising-based business models.

Content Strategy can help publishers adapt to this new landscape. !ey can #gure out ways to use the rich content that publishers are already creating to build new, engaging digital experiences. !is can include new marketing approaches, new products, and new ways to connect with their audience, as well as innovative ways to support new busi-ness models in the digital realm.

Many people have computers at home, as well as at work or school. But digital experi-ences are no longer limited to the computer. We read on our tablets, upload photos from our phones, stream online videos directly to

our televisions, and ask our cars to play songs from our personal music libraries. People are engaging with content on many di$erent de-vices, but no organization can a$ord to sup-port all the necessary formats and delivery methods if the content has to be produced and published separately for each platform.

Content Strategy can help optimize systems and processes to streamline the delivery of content to multiple platforms at once. But that doesn’t mean deploying the exact same content to each type of device. It’s important to think about the type of experience that would be most appealing to a user in each case, and deliver the content that supports that experience.

Even on the computer, people are engaging with content in many ways and in many channels. We might watch a TV show on-line, share a link to it on a social site, Tweet about it, check in to GetGlue and receive a sticker, read an episode summary, or talk

about it on forums. Real serious fans might enter an o&cial contest, engage with char-acters from the show on social networks, or create their own fan art. Most of these in-teractions are not taking place on an o&cial brand website. You can no longer expect to exert control over the online conversation about your brand, but you can (and should) be a part of it.

Content Strategy can help identify where and how your audience is talking about your brand online, and how you can engage them more e$ectively. !is can include taking ac-tion to counteract negative sentiment. But mostly the focus should be on giving people the content they want, answering questions, and encouraging fans to become brand ad-vocates.

”The focus should be on giving people the content they want, answering questions, and encouraging fans to become brand advocates.”


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Now that the industry is starting to recog-nize the value of the Content Strategy dis-cipline, here are some trends that we should keep an eye on.

Increased content strategy collaborationLook for greater alignment between content strategy, social media, search, marketing, an-alytics and technology. !is should include both integrated processes within organiza-tions and the development of commercial tools that facilitate coordination of content activities.

Structured dataContent creators will be adding more struc-tured metadata to their content to facilitate development of dynamic, cross-platform, cross-channel, ad-ready content products.

Semantic Technology.Älykkäät järjestelmät ja työkalut tulevat ntelligent systems and tools will make use of both structured and unstructured con-tent to connect people to the content they

are looking for more e$ectively and to auto-matically create deep connections to highly targeted related content and advertising. Finely tuned semantic analytics tools will gather metrics on both publisher and user-generated content.

Globalization/LocalizationIn order to increase a brand’s reach, content will need to be translated and localized. !is creates new challenges, but also a lot of ad-ditional opportunities.

Multiplatform publishingTools are already starting to emerge to help facilitate content creation for multiple plat-forms at once, but they’re still too limited. Market demand will have to push further development.

One thing is clear, Content Strategy has ar-rived and it’s a discipline that will continue to develop and grow. But why now? Taking a look at where we have come from, it is clear that many of us were already doing Content Strategy without even knowing it. Now we are just giving more structure to our work. It is work that matters because almost eve-rything we do online involves content, and, increasingly, we are connected to each other and to the world through our digital devices. Content Strategy is going to help us make sense of this digital world.

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“What is content strategy, what value does it offer to companies and how is it done? Points of view from the big world.”

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The key drivers of change

ur path towards the age of reci-procity opens up interesting new opportunities, driven by the ability to dramatically increase resource density for any given actor, active

in any place at any given time, and the in-creased importance of co-creation in all as-pects of the business process. !e outcome of these changes is the new role of the cus-tomer – a change from being a passive re-cipient towards being an active player on the scene.

Digitalization means that resources are de-materialized through the separation of in-formation from the physical world. !ese dematerialized resources can easily be moved about, creating an opportunity to quickly re-assemble them in setups that make them valuable to various actors. !e key proposi-tion is that resources are available for cus-tomers ‘any time, any place’. As a result, we see new business models, such as Google. Comparing the ‘googling’ practice with the practices used for #nding information 30 years ago illustrated the practical meaning of

digitalization. !e improved availability of information resources helps actors to inte-grate these resources in any relevant practice at any time.

Another opportunity that digitalization al-lows is the compression of more tasks into the same time and space unit, known as multi-tasking. As a result, all actors have the opportunity to become more e$ective, i.e. to achieve their goals faster, with smaller costs. Richard Normann suggests that den-sity would be a good measure of value. He proposes that density expresses the degree to which resources are mobilized for a ‘time/space/actor’ unit. Greater density of resourc-es, relevant to a speci#c actor, time, situa-tion, and space combination, corresponds to more value.

!e downside of digitalization is the abun-dance of resources. All these resource are not relevant to all actors in all situations. Adding resources that are not relevant will lead to value destruction; this could be a diagnosis of marketing’s contemporary sickness.

It is important to realize that density also relates to various forms of socio-cultural re-

The age of reciprocity – and the end of

!e digital revolution brings with it many changes to how "rms and individuals go about their daily practices. !e cumulative e#ect of the changes is a complete re-de"nition of roles. No longer does it make sense to think in terms of "rms and customers, where "rms produce something that customers consume. Instead, we have to start to view all actors in value creating networks as equal. Every actor in a network makes their resources available in a reciprocal process, where value is created as actors exchange service for service.

Kaj Storbacka Vectia Ltd.Emma StorbackaCapGemini Consulting

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sources such as meanings, designs or sym-bols. For example, the aesthetics of laptops, phones and music players produced by Ap-ple seem to increase the density of meanings (and, hence, create value) for customers us-ing them in their everyday practices. !is highlights the role of design: i.e. #rms can help actors navigate in the stormy waters created by the explosion of resource avail-ability by designing the actors’ experience.

!e abundance of resources leads to a stronger emphasis on customization and rel-evance. !is triggers the need for aggrega-tion and content curation, i.e. ways to #lter and curate the unlimited information and resources available. Out of the vast amount of material, only input that is relevant and

meaningful adds value. From a network per-spective it becomes obvious that the more actors there are in your network that are us-ing the same piece of information, the dens-er it is, and the more likely it is to be of value also to you.

Much of marketing and brand-building investments are still allocated according to the uni-directional paradigm of sending messages to a supposedly passive audience. And this goes on although we know that this paradigm is fast becoming obsolete.

!e notion of the customer as an active and engaged actor has great relevance. In order

to create dialogue and learning, business models and marketing initiatives should be designed to facilitate participation from all the relevant actors in the network.

In the age of reciprocity brands become dy-namic, social processes and customers have to be approached in a di$erent way than be-fore. !e meanings attached to a brand are located in the minds of the wider commu-nity of market actors. !is means that the brand is a shared reality, dynamically con-


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structed through social interaction. !e role of the brand is to support the co-authoring of relevant meanings.

In order for market actors to be able to co-author meanings that are relevant either to them as individuals or as a part of a com-munity, the #rm has to accept many brand expressions. !e #rm cannot be a brand po-lice, aiming at controlling the visual expres-sions of its brand. !e most important thing is consistency in thought, not consistency in style.

Actors take part in marketing by sharing new meanings with fellow actors in their community. !is sharing of meanings is increasingly being conducted through pres-ence in social media channels. But in order to take advantage of social media, #rms must ensure the authenticity of the brand. Cus-tomers will not agree to be intermediaries of ignorant and super#cial messages.

As a result of liberated sharing of contacts, insight and information in social networks, actors will also take on di$erent roles. !eir interest in engaging in various forms of co-

creation will depend on the role they are tak-ing. To illustrate, consider a business manag-er who is networking online. He is engaged in multiple networks at the same time, with potentially very di$erent outcomes; as an industry expert; a purchaser, or a seller of goods or services; an employer; an employee; a jobseeker; a university alumni; a follower of a certain sports team or organization, and not to forget – a friend or a family member. Previously invisible ties are now made visible by social networking platforms, and a more holistic view of this person is made available. As not only the social ties of individuals, but also of corporations are becoming increas-ingly transparent, the same holds true for any setting. Labeling actors in your network will give a one-sided view of reality, and the actor’s potential value adding capacity may be overlooked.

!e idea of reciprocal value co-creation in a network requires us not only to be freed from a customer relationship perspective but also from the provider-customer notion. We need to stop thinking in terms of business-to-consumers, or business-to-business, and take an actor-to-actor perspective. All actors in the value-creating network are resource integrators that interact in a longitudinal process of value co-creation.

Firms do not exist in order to distribute value along a value chain, but rather to engage in

value creating processes. !us, market actors are not to be viewed as extensions of #rms’ production processes - #rms have to view themselves as a part of a network of various actors and their value creating processes.

In the A2A view, actors are involved in a spectrum of co-creation forms, such as co-conception of ideas, co-design of services and goods, co-production, co-promotion, co-pricing, co-distribution, co-consump-tion, co-maintenance, and co-disposal. All of these forms of value co-creation will require di$erent resource con#gurations among various actors.

Building a platform for reciprocity

ow is a #rm, wanting to embrace the reciprocity logic, supposed to act? !ere is obviously no simple answer to this, but some issues seem perti-nent to success. Firms need to #gure

out how to deal with the growing amount of data that is generated in the interaction with other actors. Additionally, the role of learn-ing will become increasingly important: how can the #rm learn from other actors in the market and how can these learnings be ap-plied in improved practices? Finally, #rms need to reorganize themselves in order to allow for a more e$ective cross-functional co-operation.

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A key implication of digitalization is the explosive growth of data availability. Every touch point with any actor in the value net-work creates a data point, and this data can be used to deepen our understanding of how value can be created. !is data can be any-thing from communication with an actor (or independent of the actor) on more informal channels such as social media, to analyzing the point-of-sale data of every customer to identify purchase patterns. A recent McKin-sey Quarterly article used the term ‘big data’ to illustrate the fact that #rms are faced with the task to work out how to make the best use of this new resource.

!e fact is that there is now so much data available that there is speculation about whether it would be possible to replace some management activities by a better analysis of data, which would be fed back to the op-erations. At the same time is seems evident that though there is no lack of data, there is a major lack of the deep analytical skills required in order to prune insight out of the data. Nowhere is this lack more evident than in the present day marketing departments. Most people that choose a marketing career seem to do this because they dislike the ana-lytical side of many other possible business careers. !is leads to management practices that are less informed by data and e$ectively driven at its best by intuition and at its worst by copying.

Firms wanting to prosper in the age of reci-procity need to invest in hiring people who can jumpstart the development of a better ability to deal with big data. !e data avail-able gives tremendous insight into the minds of customers, the market in general, and even

partners and suppliers, but the challenge lies in #nding the needle in the haystack. Many technology providers have already jumped on the challenge, and we will see a growth of data mining tools incorporating elements of statistics, machine learning and arti#cial intelligence in the coming years.

In the age of reciprocity #rms need to im-prove their learning abilities in order to ac-celerate their learning. !e ‘new normal’ will continue to be a process of swift and dy-namic changes and #rms wanting to exploit these dynamics have to be able to modify their business model and operations quickly.

!e process of market learning or market sensing has traditionally been built on the assumption that the market is given and that

the objective of the #rm is to learn ‘about the market’, i.e., identify opportunities as precursors of business development. In the age of reciprocity #rms, however, need to realize that there are no given markets ‘out there’ waiting to be shared. Instead, #rms will need to apply market-driving strategies, i.e. make their subjective market de#nition and then engage other actors in processes aimed at in%uencing their view of the mar-ket. A contemporary example of a market in the making is the mobile payment market, with the big credit companies, as well as Google, Apple and PayPal lining up to have their solution become the de facto standard. !e result is a fragmented market of di$er-ent technologies and platforms, awaiting the real break-through of the de facto standard to-be and postponing any major return on investments made. A zero-sum game caused by the fear of being the #rst one out, and by that giving the other players the advantage of learning from your expensive mistakes.

To avoid this kind of stalled development, actors wanting to in%uence the becoming of markets, hence, have to focus on learning ‘with the market’. Learning with the market means that the learning should happen not only inside the #rms, but by a number of

”Firms have to view them-selves as a part of a network of various actors and their value creating processes.”


22

market actors as a group, aiming at shared meanings. !is requires a totally new level of openness and transparency that many or-ganizations will #nd di&cult to accept. You cannot learn with the market if you want to control the outcome of the learning process. Instead, you have to accept uncertainty of outcomes and be ready to adjust your busi-ness models based on the learning. New business models and new revenue streams can be created faster by combining forces, joining alliances and bene#tting from the other powerful players in the network.

Reciprocity cannot be delegated to any speci#c function – it has to be a #rm-wide initiative crossing functional boundaries and smashing existing silo thinking. Creating a business model that can be adapted swiftly to new situations requires the active involve-ment of marketing, product management, operations management and support func-

tions. Marketing cannot proclaim that the #rm is ready for reciprocity if the value of reciprocity is not fully understood by other functions. And operations need to inform marketing about what kinds of promises are possible to be delivered, before the #rm en-gages with customers and other actors.

!e outcome of this will relate to managing the #rm by processes rather than by func-tions. Cross-functional process development will alleviate the problems that stem from silo-based thinking. However, it will require systematic application of modular think-ing in order to enable the %exibility of the processes. Flexibility is needed when coping with rapid changes caused by reciprocally aligning around value creating opportuni-ties, identi#ed together with other market actors.

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“The challenges of the age of reciprocity: managing large data, learning to learn again and destroying silos.”

#silentsignal


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!ere has always been a strong technological streak into designing and implementing web commu-nications. Sometimes the discus-sion centers around understanding

html, other times it is %ash animations, and on some days it is a question of program-ming languages and content management systems. Many web communication experts have developed themselves into quite the IT-nerds along the years.

Many things have changed as time has passed; at least web communicators usually don’t need to do any actual coding anymore. Knowing the tools and the technology is, however, of growing importance in 2012. Many things are nowadays better solved by trying for yourself and doing some #nding out rather than writing emails to the service provider and asking them to “#x it”.

I have listed here #ve points of view you would do well to keep in mind when your organization is about to undertake a web-page renewal.

Especially with webpages, the abilities of the service providers have just about plum-meted in recent years when compared to the solutions that can be acquired as third party services from the web.!ere is absolutely no sense in asking your

IT service provider to “code your own so-lution” for something like showing videos on your website. Services that are a bit like “YouTube for companies”, like Vimeo Pro, solve the challenge of saving and publishing videos much better than any CMS function right now. !e same kind of development has been observed before in newsletters, web analytics tools, forms and commentary func-tions. Also, the control and observation of, and multi-channel publishing in social media are now advancing to a direction where the CMSs are in risk of getting left behind.

You can’t help but wonder at how much time many web communicators use to study the di$erent traits of CMS’s and simply wait for “that big CMS reform” to take place. For many of us, CMS has become “the magic key to paradise” and we keep on waiting for that new CMS like rainfall in times of drought. I’ve often heard the words: “As soon as we get rid of this current CMS, then…” Everything will change for the better? Web communica-tion will suddenly become multi-channeled and have a bigger impact?

No, it won’t. CMSs have naturally devel-oped along the years but not dramatically so – working the web hasn’t become a simple thing. On the contrary. !ere are more and more di$erent possibilities, di$erent chan-nels, di$erent forms of media and di$erent

Don’t let the tech get in the way of content renewal!

Perttu Tolvanenprojekti55 T

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chances to participate in web communica-tion. Content management systems only de-termine how easy and light it is to alter your webpage and to create content on it. A CMS that #ts its purpose will certainly make the work of content creators more e$ective, but unless there are dozens of full-time content creators in the organization, even the user-friendliest of tools on the market won’t help you achieve major di$erences in e$ectiveness compared to your competitors.

Web communicators should, instead of wor-rying about the CMS, focus more on what gets published on their website, what purpose the various social media tools are used for and if, for example, videos can be published through some third party service. !ese are examples of key questions in modern web communications. Leading your organization’s web presence is more and more a task of ma-neuvering a whole, consisting of several small pieces. Progress needs to be made constantly and it can be made simultaneously on many di$erent #elds. Improving your own webpage should only be one small part of the whole.

Switching from one CMS to another is al-ways a major project and should never be ap-proached as “just changing the technical sys-tem”. It is sensible to always conduct a change

of CMS during conceptual and content-based renewals. Simply changing the CMS technol-ogy without renewing the website itself makes about as much sense as changing the struc-tural points of a house without making any changes with the structures of its walls.

Rather than performing a complete makeover

on your website, you should more likely con-sider small development steps or perhaps just changes in content. As a rule of thumb, your website should undergo a complete makeo-ver every #ve to seven years – and then you’d better really put time and e$ort into it. !ere are several possibilities for the constant updat-ing that takes place between major changes. !ese are usually also easier to justify and budget when presenting them to the manage-ment – and you don’t always need to have a project of “everything must go”.

CMSs are nowadays specialized in di$erent tasks. One is good for controlling product information, another makes for a great web store platform, a third one is meant for event

organization. You should pick the CMS that is best suited for what you do in the web.

Nowadays, this sort of “right tools for the right job” thinking takes an ever more important role in the ability expectations of web communicators. CMSs are just one of the tools and channels that web communica-tors must constantly choose from.

When working with a whole, built out of several parts, it is good to keep in mind that you shouldn’t get stuck on making a single choice for too long. !e choice needs to made reasonably fast and with determi-nation. After that, you need to focus on piloting and content work. !e ultimate purpose of web communication, after all, is the creation of contents that have an impact and making sure they are within the reach of the recipients.

In 2012, this calls for more and more smart choices of tools, but don’t get stuck too long on one choice you make. !e important thing is to put time and e$ort into those pieces of content, the publication of which should be made as easy as possible with the right tools!

”The important thing is to put time and effort into pieces of content, the pub-lication of which should be made as easy as possi-ble with the right tools!”


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“Effective web communication demands more and more successful

choices of tools.”

#silentsignal

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All sorts of content-producing web communities have gained a posi-tion similar to the Holy Grail in the discussions of marketing experts. A living and content-producing com-

munity is seen as a sign of the magnetism of the brand and as a prime example of suc-cessfully reaching the digital consumer who has by now been estranged from advertising. It is no wonder then that marketers hope to build such communities at whatever cost so that “our” brand will receive the right kind of “buzz”.

Marketers have, however, been confronted with the di&culty of this task, as many on-line platforms that were meant to house such communities have been left with nothing but an empty space. What went wrong? In my opinion the problem is that this far com-panies have aimed their marketing action at communities and creating them, but not in making the brand itself more worthy of a community. !e current thinking in com-panies is quite clearly visible in the tactics they use in their attempt to get communities to create content: kick-starting a campaign where there will be a prize of some sort, raf-%ed o$ to the consumers that create content.

I’m not saying these sorts of actions don’t have their time and place since they can be seen as having a positive e$ect on sales and brand memorability. !ese campaigns become troublesome when they want to be

seen as an evidence of the brand’s pull: in campaigns like these people are not activated by the brand but by the temptation of win-ning the prize. !is is evident when looking at how quickly the content creation comes to an end after the campaign is #nished.

Marketing experts should view the problem from a new perspective and ask themselves the question: why do some brands inspire consumers to produce brand-identi#able content in di$erent online environments without asking for anything in return? To answer this question, it is useful for us to observe the history of content-producing communities and think about what sort of content these communities have most likely formed around. If we were to divide the here-tofore history of modern content-producing communities into three separate waves1, our era would only be the third one. !e digital revolution with its various online environ-ments (blogs, forums, Facebook, etc.) and especially its user-friendly content creation tools (Photoshop, Final Cut, smartphones, etc.) didn’t exactly create content-producing consumer communities but lowered the threshold of participation and brought them more visibly to the reach of the common consumer.

Since as early as the 1960s there has been signi#cant academic research among other things on the Star Trek fan magazines (fan-

What kind of content do communities form around?

Henri WeijoAalto University

29


zines) of those days. In the fanzines, “Trek-kies” switched alternative fates for their favourite characters (so-called fan "ction). Following this #rst wave, the second wave started to form around the early 1990s as similar communities moved with the birth of the internet onto digital and, in the begin-ning, very modest environments.

Many of these communities can be de-scribed, due to their topics of interest, slightly crassly as “nerd communities”. !e

description is not without some grounds since the most industrious of the origi-nal content creators were the communi-ties formed around sci-#, fantasy and soap operas. !is nerd label has perhaps been a contributing reason as to why all that could have been learned from these communities was not taken to heart. !e early web adop-ters’ communities were seen as a result of the members’ nerdiness and not as a result of the topics themselves. Many expected that as the rest of the populace would #nd their

way online, similarly vibrant communities would sprout around other areas of interest. !ese expectations were not met; even today the liveliest content -creating communities are circled around the nerd-labeled popular culture. Why?

33

22

11

0

1 Content producing communities per

se have of course existed for ages.

A typical example for the Finns is

Kalevala and its various poems which

spread and took shape as inherited

knowledge between different com-

munities. Here I’m referencing to the

so-called modern communities of the

postmodern consumer society. These

communities differ in their form in rel-

evant ways: they’re often temporary,

they cross geographical boundaries,

they’re overlapping and heterogenous.

Such communities are a remarkably

newer phenomenon.


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A major reason for this is that this kind of popular culture is heavily centered around storytelling, in which the characters repre-sent various archetypes or myths. Archetypes are sorts of basic cultural elements, simpli-#ed truths that form the background of why the characters act the way they do. As Joseph Campbell proposed in his famous !e Hero’s Journey, the characters are usually glob-ally known: the hero, the mother #gure, the prankster, the rebel and so forth. Myths are already a bit more re#ned than archetypes: characters that resolve a cultural contradic-tion between di$erent roles and in most cases are bound to a certain time. Especially

in sci-# and fantasy the use of archetypes is common as stories taking place in alien envi-ronments are made more reader-friendly by shifting the characters towards certain famil-iar archetypes.

!e culture research guru Grant McCrack-en said in his blog in 2009 that we as con-sumers have become so good at reading cul-ture that many things in stories can be left unsaid. !e viewers need only be given slight hints with view angles, use of sound, choice of dress and other familiar storytelling tools and we have already caught up with the story: there’s the plot villain, that one’s the hero, there’s the comic sidekick and that is the woman the hero is going to fall in love with.

!e same skill of cultural reading has since re#ned and found new shapes in digital en-vironments. Henry Jenkins said in his book

Convergence Culture (2006) that the charac-ters of these new innovative, digital worlds need not be made familiar to the viewer: more likely, we need to be reminded where we recognize them from. We are able to read the actions and motives of these characters and when necessary, create more of the story without too much underlining. !e con-tent creation of communities is more or less based on this ability to combine old and fa-miliar things in new and current ways.

Logically, the next question by marketers is if the brand can be a similar incentive for con-tent creation as these characters so loved by the nerd communities. In light of the most recent brand personality research literature you could say yes, but it will mean altering the way we understand brand personality. For the most part, personalities of brands have #t well on the traditional continuum of

3 32 21 10

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quality vs. inexpensiveness. For a long time, this was the only “acceptable” division for brand personalities.

With time, brands have taken on consider-ably more depth. Already twenty years ago brand researcher Jennifer Aaker suggested that the personalities of the most success-ful brands can be ranked in #ve di$erent dimensions: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. !is sort of brand caricaturing is, however, still rather one-sided. !e most recent brand literature has paid more attention to the ability of the brands to represent archetypes and myths or at the very least act as backdrops in stories that include these archetypes. !is sort of approach has not really been justi#ed with digitalism or giving birth to communality, but I dare say that speci#cally in the age of digitalism the archetype and myth thinking will be in its most bene#cial.

Douglas Holt’s How Brands Become Icons and Margaret Mark’s and Carol Pearson’s !e Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraor-dinary Brands !rough the Power of Arche-types are perhaps the best known works of this movement. Both books suggest that brands can only be interesting if they can, in charismatic and dynamic ways, represent those mythical characters and archetypes that speak to us. Many organizations have

already begun consciously building their brands towards this: Nike has told the myth of an individual exceeding his or her bound-aries for years and both Harley Davidson and Apple are in their own ways rebels in our culture. Worth noting here is, of course, that especially Harley Davidson and Apple fans have for long already been quite productive content creators online.

As I proposed above, these are by their na-ture the sorts of brands that consumers can grasp and with which they are willing to produce content of their own. Let us look at some examples. Two of the most popular ad campaigns in recent years, both of which happened to be the campaigns that gener-ated most interest and action in the content creating communities: !e Man Your Man Could Smell Like by Old Spice and !e Most Interesting Man in the World by Dos Equis. In the Old Spice campaign you saw an ironi-cally modernized (even gigolo-ish) version of a dream man or lover who spoke about ful-#lling female fantasies. !e Dos Equis char-acter was in many ways identical to the Old Spice one, except much more restrained and more suave. Both were made into countless remixes, parodies and copies in both video and picture formats. Even though in these remixes the plot or the idea was completely di$erent from the original, they stayed al-most uniformly loyal to their role model’s

behavior and parlance. !is proves right the statements of McCracken and Jenkins: the characters of Old Spice and Dos Equis are so familiar to us that we can with ease impro-vise our own stories based on the material they give to us.

Branding based on archetypes and myths does not, of course, #t with all companies. A brand personality similar to Old Spice or Dos Equis wouldn’t necessarily go well with, for example, a B2B-brand working in heavy industry. Brand building that makes its foundation on archetypes is also con-siderably harder than the traditional brand thinking: it’s easier to communicate about the quality of the brand than play with cul-tural meanings that shift constantly as times change. Because of this, the success of the aforementioned campaigns has been dif-#cult to reproduce; their realizations with all their charisma hit the jackpot. Despite this, investing in such brand building would de#nitely be pro#table. In any case, it is high time for the quakes of the digital revolution to become visible through clear changes in company brand strategies and not merely as super#cial tactical tricks.

”It is high time for the quakes of the digital revolution to become visible through clear changes in company brand strategies and


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“What should the brand managers interested in

content-producing consumers learn from nerds?”

#silentsignal

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”At "rst, only the most observant will detect the soundwaves rippling in the air.”

!e Silent Signal trend report gathers the whispers under one title and presents fresh expert per-spectives on the e$ect digitalization has on consumerism, citizenship and companies.

!e report, scheduled to appear three times a year, consists of di$erent expert articles by top actors of digitalism, marketing, advertising and communication both from Finland and abroad. !e report seeks to create discussion and be the voice for the latest points of view.

!e #rst part of !e Silent Signal will be published in February 2012. !e report is free of charge and free to use, except for commercial purposes. Regarding the use of the report, the terms of the Creative Commons license apply. Please remember to make correct references (Vapa Media, !e Silent Signal trend report) and provide a link to the original report whenever you use or cite the contents of the report.

!e report is available for download in Finnish at www.hiljainensignaali.# and in English at www.silentsignal.#.

Join the conversation: write and comment on the changes taking place on the Facebook-page of the report at facebook.com/hiljainensignaali or comment via a tweet #silentsignal ! !ere you will also #nd additional information on the authors and their backgrounds.

!is report would not have been possible without the help of Matti Oksanen, Jyri Rasinmäki, Tuomas Mäkinen, Jani Hellström, Janne Melajoki, all the article authors and the active web public so interested in content. !ank you so much, all of you!

Contact:

Ilona HiilaVapa Media OyTel. +358 40 1467144Email: ilona.hiila@vapamedia.#twitter.com/IlonaHiila

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!e Silent Signal –trend report is published by the content agency Vapa Media.

Vapa Media is Finland’s #rst agency specialized in the development and design of web content. We believe in meaningful content and in its power to attract attention.

We create content strategies for companies and organizations and help various actors de#ne what platforms, messages and content solutions to use in order to best reach their clients on the web. In addition to this, we also do client-oriented website design for companies: we conceptu-alize websites and social media functions that o$er interesting content to target audiences. We also o$er content creation on several media from web videos to producing texts.

Vapa Media is publishing this report to inspire discussion around the central functions of the web and in order to further our collective thinking.

Vapa Media:

vapamedia.#facebook.com/vapamediatwitter.com/VapaMediaslideshare.net/VapaMedia

Contact:

Ida HakolaVapa Media OyTel. +358 50 5394912Email: ida.hakola@vapamedia.#twitter.com/IdaHakola

Matti OksanenVapa Media OyTel. +358 50 3878303Email: matti.oksanen@vapamedia.#

Silent Signal 1/2012

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