The Internet Is Not a Field of Dreams

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If you build it, they will come.

That’s the line from the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. I’ve been reading Joe Trippi’s book in preparation for his lecture on March 5th at QUT, and a lot of it is resonating with me. The political side is interesting, but it’s his description of finding and encouraging an online community (or an online revolution…?) that is the real treasure.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, p106:

“[American institutions] operated under the Field of Dreams paradigm: If you build it, they will come. And so from 1993 to 2003, they built their web sites and waited for the people to arrive, assuming they’d just appear one day like ghosts out of the corn.
[...] We operated under a different paradigm: If you ask, they’ll help build it.”

Today, I put up the first post on the QUTAHRS blog, and as I was writing it I realised I’d forgotten something. It took that quote to remind me what it was.

Collaboration.

The internet isn’t a top-down, management driven corporate machine. It’s a tool by the people, for the people, and open to everyone. It can not, and should not, be censored or contained.

So why do we see digital and social media campaigns treating online communications as if we build it, they will come?

We build microsites, Facebook groups and fan pages, Twitter accounts, start blogs. Are we just corralling our members into easy-to-measure channels that suit us? Is there room in your everyday online campaign for collaboration, conversation, and engagement that isn’t forcibly created?

It would take an incredible amount of work and willpower to actively go against our own preconceptions of how to run a campaign. It lines up with my beliefs about marketing - but I’ll cover those another time.

This post isn’t a slap in the face to The Institutions of Agencyland™, or even those on clientside. It’s more to start thinking about alternative ways to the accepted practices. It shouldn’t come across as quirky, strange, naive, or blase. I’m just questioning the Hallowed Tenets of Marketing, as handed down by smart old men in the 1920s and 30s who had no. freakin. idea. that the world’s communications could change so dramatically in 80 years.

Everything we base our work on comes back to their ideas of selling product. Audience research, market segmentation, frequency and reach, unique selling propositions, telling the story, competitive positioning, price wars and discounts, advertising and promotion. Some of it is still good, but the statue has feet part of iron, and part of clay.

There are a few original thinkers out there. There are a lot of carbon copies too, that are simply rehashing the same thinking over and over again, just with a bit of new gloss each time.

Right now, I just want to know this: If we accept that the internet has altered forever the power balance in communications, and that we need to rethink the fundamentals of marketing to be of any use in this new age - where has our own revolution begun?