January 25, 2008 by Robert Kozinets.

This blog has been getting a lot of interesting comments lately, and those comments always spark further rumination. Ruminate. Ruminate. I may not always respond right away, but you should know that I’m ruminating on them.

Recently, Ron “humbly submitted” (hey, I recognize another Twilight Zone fan when I hear one), “that there are a couple pieces here that the industry, or the profession [of community management teams] has down much better than academia [because] we’re in this stuff up to our necks every day.”

I agree we always have a lot to learn from the people in the trenches. Problem in the trenches is, it’s a lot about problem-solving, sometimes not so much about understanding. Ron said that “community managers” are a special breed. They are engaged in an honest, open dialog with the community”jointly engaged in a long-term relationship,” acting, ideally, as “an authority in good standing.”

Ron says that”the whole gig” of being a community manager “is to maintain a trusting relationship with the community.” Sounds like the idea of being a brand manager. But in other words, the community manager is both part of the community, and a leader of it, an authority figure, at a higher lever in the hierarchy because she controls the resources.

Here’s what Ron had to say:

“The community manager guides it, at times with an iron fist, but only so long as their actions can be accepted and seen by the community as good for the community. It’s very much a case of leading by running slightly faster than the others, only with a handful of bright shiny objects to occasionally use for course correction as well as an ultimate authority to basically boot anyone who gets too far out of line.”

I like the Pavlovian feel of “bright shiny objects,” “iron fists,” and course corrections. They have the carrots and they’re not afraid to use them. “Well done, Jeffrey, here’s a free membership to Wii-Monthly and a ticket to see “Aeon Flux: The 3-D IMAX Edition.” And the stick and the trapdoor. “You, you with the big potty mouth: Out!” The community manager is in charge. They are in control. Boo-yeah.

“There is nothing wrong with your community. Do not attempt to adjust the culture. We are controlling transmission . . . we will control the feedback. We will control the commentary… For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all you see and hear… You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery that’s reaching from the Corporate Mind to… The Online Community.”

Now, as Ron points out, this is control for the greater good. The greater good being The Company’s greater good. Corporate community managers are beneficent rulers, online baron landlords with velvet gloves as well as “iron fists.” But even they have limits to their jurisdiction or credibility. Can’t push the people too far.

In case of a disastrous event, they need to deal honestly and directly, “always with the view that the goal is prolonged positive relationship.”That’s interesting because it says to me that this community might outlast any particular company or any particular brands–especially true in online land, and in the world of entertainment offerings, like games. So it’s not just this particular community, maybe, in part, but it’s relationships with a holistic, pre-existing community that also matter. And so it is “a very active and meaningful role.”

Although I’m having fun here, there’s really nothing I disagree with of Ron’s statement, except the notion that all communities can or should be managed. In fact, when you pose the question like that it sort of seems ridiculous. Should the Chinese-American community be “managed”? Well, not really. Should the Catholic community be managed. That’s interesting. How about the African-American community? Well then why would you want to “manage” the science fiction or RPG or MMOG or young mom or low-carb dieting or Cola-drinking community? The question of course is managed by whom, for what ends? And why the heck wouldn’t you just let the community manage itself, while you interact with it? You: emissary, ambassador of corporate community. Them: receptive-but-at-times-understandably-skeptical consumer community. Not necessarily Leader of the Communal Charge, Chief Online Overlord, Corporately-Appointed-Ruler of This Hear Brand Coh-munit-tee.
The key of course is what Ron is talking about in relation to what I’m talking about. We’re actually comparing mangoes and pomegranates. My big interest is in these grassroots, self–managed, organic, naturally-occurring gatherings, often based more on a group of individual’s common structures of interest than a particular brand or corporation’s interests.

But Ron says it himself: what he is talking about is “online community in a site, a social setting, built around and hosted by the corporation (this is not etribes, this is a community dedicated to an ongoing relationship with a game, product, brand, etc.).” Not etribes. Managed brand communities. It’s a social site, but it is built around and hosted by the corporation. That’s why they control transmission. That’s why community managers can dish out bright shiny objects (”Would you like to win an Underdog Pez for your suggestion this week?”). That’s why they have their hands on the trapdoor level (”Away with you, Foul Potty Mouthed One! An Never Return!”). They control the resources, therefore they are in control.

And so this was a response to my blog about Dean Devlin and the Godzilla board, definitely a corporate run site. But it could also have been in response to my many other blogs about Communi-space and the idea of managed, created, community. And that’s where I like to draw some differences and maybe a few lines in the communal kitty litter.

I’m back to a particular metaphor that I like, which is the managed community metaphor. Kinds of works with online and offline communities equally well. I think that managers have been working with the idea of the manager as Good Cowboy. As I’ve explained it in a number of presentation, the community of consumers is conceptualized pretty much in this way:

• As A Community of Consumers Needing to be Directing
• Community Needing to be Controlled (for their own good)
• Community Needing to be Owned (if we don’t Own them, our Competitors Will!)
• Communities Needing to Fed (if we feed them, they we like and trust us; and need our food)
• Communities Needing to be Weeded (mangy unkempt things!)
• But always Managing Community to keep consumers happy
• Happy, happy consumers

Mooo. Yeee-haw! Come on, Bessie. Move em out!

Yes, we’re “joint participants” in this community, but I’ve got the stick, the horse, the pen and the gun and it’s your job to eat the hay and make the milk. Or make the Wool and lie down and get shorn when we tell you to. Pick your metaphor. Don’t matter much to me.

Okay, that’s extreme. My point is that community is ALSO an emergent phenomenon. The E in eTribes Stands for Emergent. They emerge on their own. They are a phenomenon of Self-Organization. That doesn’t at all mean that they don’t have anything to do with managed communities. Of course they do. They are both manifestations of culture world and online world, two permeable, connection-seeking realms that dissolve boundaries. They merge, combine, and hybridize in all sorts of interesting ways.

An interesting example of this hybridizing just given in a BusinessWeek article about SmugMug.com, the online photographic service. It’s a family run business, but where did they hired their additional 22 workers from who weren’t family? They recruited them from their message forum, Digital Grin (dgrin.com). They found people they knew, people they could trust, fellow members of their interest community, their affinity group, who already had an affinity for their service, brand, and company, and they helped them turn their hobby into a career (just as the owners had done). I saw the same sort of fan-amateur to professional evolution happen all the time in the fan community. Those are very permeable borders, and in the past I’ve called fandom a breeding ground for professionals. Why wouldn’t it be? And the same thing holds true oftentimes for online communities.

But Emergent etribes are different from the managed herd that Ron and the Communi-space people talk about, lead around, and experiment with. There are lots of interesting real-world intersections between these two types of communities that we need to explore, but they seem like two distinct categories. The Exchanges are different. The Benefits are different. The Rules are different. And what might be nice to manage and contain in one situation might be much better left in its feral state in another. I know that the instinct in companies is to want to manage their environment: that’s what they do. But there are also phenomenon that are best left alone. Or, hey how’s this, PARTS or ASPECTS of the phenomenon that are best left alone.

So that raises an interesting question. What’s a good mix of Domesticated to Wild Community for a company to have? Two parts to One? Depends on types of company, brand, consumption, community, I’d say. Depends on the company’s goal. Depends on the history. But I do think we need to think more subtly about Communities and company’s and organization’s relationships with them. These categories are important, and they’re constantly evolving. And it’s our job to think about them, understand them, and figure out what to do.

Posted in Netnography, Technology, Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Communities and Tribes | 2 Comments »

September 12, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

It’s been a bit of a media feeding frenzy lately in the entertainment and business pages. For starters, let’s talk Britney. Britney Spears appeared last night on the MTV Video Music Awards in a performance that is being ripped into by the media. CNN.com made perhaps some of the cruelest cuts of all in their story, which I quote here:

“As in most train wrecks, it was hard to focus on just one thing as the Britney Spears disaster unfolded. There was just so much that went wrong. Out-of-synch lip-synching. Lethargic movements that seemed choreographed by a dance instructor for a nursing home. The paunch in place of Spears’ once-taut belly. At times she just stopped singing altogether, as if even she knew nothing could save her performance. Designed to drum up excitement for her upcoming album, Spears’ kickoff to the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday night became another example of how far she has fallen.”

Beyond that, on page after page of Internet assessment, and gossipy TV show after TV show, stories asked if Britney is Washed Up? and, apparently even worse, “Is Britney Fat?”

Everyone, apparently, loves a train wreck. And it is this aspect of media, which acts delightedly to knock heroes from their perches, that I believe traditional media and media reception theories don’t account for very well. In many of the blog comments I read today, fans stood up for Britney, seeing her as a victim of needless media cruelty (and maybe I just like to side with the underdog but count me among those). But the media keeps on ripping. Britney was idolized as a near-child star, a Golden Girl. Now that she’s a mother of two and getting older, and a little bigger, the media seems to have turned on her like a rabid raccoon. “The paunch in place of Spears’ once-taut belly.” Whoah. That’s definitely hitting below the belt.

In a related story, I actually feel a little bit sorry for poor old Mattel–but only a little bit. The embattled and venerable toy company is really taking it on the chin with its toy recalls for lead paint and tiny magnets that little kids can swallow. Mattel is a brilliant company but like all manufacturers of physical toys they are fighting a difficult battle to keep kids attention and get their “share of playtime” among a generation that loves videogames and screentime.

Mattel has been brilliant in building the Barbie franchise that every academic loves to hate. They have done interesting retro things with the Fisher-Price brand of late, releasing a series of classic toys that appeal to nostalgic boomers and Gen Xers as they have their kids. They also recognized the immense value in the American Girls brand and have done a masterful job of managing that franchise.

But these three waves so far of recalls, August 1, August 14, and September 5, have really begun to put pressure on the company and the stock. Robert Eckert, the company’s chairman and chief executive warned at a press conference last month that there may be more toy recalls. He said that the company was stepping up its investigations into its Chinese factories. He released a statement last Tuesday saying that:

“As a result of our ongoing investigation, we discovered additional affected products. Consequently, several subcontractors are no longer manufacturing Mattel toys.”

It’s interesting the spin that the story has received, with Mattel being linked with its (usually hidden behind the scenes) Chinese factories. This reminds me a bit of the way Nike came out and blamed its subcontractors during the sweatshop furor of the late 1990s. And Mattel’s share price has been, according to the financial reports, “surprisingly resilient.” That’s amazing, given the incredible amount of press that this story has received and the sheer scale of the recalls. Why hasn’t it been more affected?

I think that the media needs to ask more questions about the Chinese-finger-pointing spin the story has received. Senate hearings are going to help a lot with that, and thank goodness for a US Government that isn’t afraid to put its corporations on the stand. Where are the lessons learned? Or isn’t this just business as usual, and look-at-you, you’re the one who just got caught?

Britney and Mattel: two flavors of train wreck. The media seems to love to report on them. But the media makes money either way. Mattel is going to have to advertise even more to regain the faith and trust of their consumers. So they’ll need bigger media spends. And if they crash and burn, that’s a big story too, and the media reports on it, and sells advertising while they’re doing so. Bad news is good news.

And even on the financial and entertainment pages, baby, if it bleeds, it leads.

Posted in Entertainment Marketing, Marketing News & Insights | No Comments »

September 9, 2007 by Robert Kozinets.

And here’s the conclusion to that great Gender Debate, also featured on Henry Jenkins highly recommended blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan. Hope you enjoy it.

* * * *

Techspressive Tools

Francesca Coppa: The two other gendered concerns I have are about technology and affect: technology in that it seems to me that there’s a cliché of “men are techie” and women are not, but media fandom in general and vidding in particular go against that: fannish women have always been particularly drawn from the sciences, and vidding was pioneered by women who (by definition) knew how to program a VCR. So the history of vidding is important for exploding some of those stereotypes. However, these technical, filmmaking women didn’t make ironic, distanced parodies; they tended to make emotionally invested music videos, and that’s an affective choice with problematically gendered legal implications. Mocking male distance is explicitly protected by the Constitution, where female identification/emotional investment is not as explicitly protected, although it is certainly transformative. Even in these debates on HJ’s journal, we see a kind of gentle mocking of slash, or trying to come up with “wild” examples, (say, Geoffrey Long’s “a piece of fanfic I might post to my blog tonight featuring Scarlett making out with Darth Vader“); my own experience in fandom actually tells me not to prejudge such a story: the writer might have a reason for writing that. The story might be great: imagine how it might comment on gender and race.

Robert Kozinets: This idea reminds me again of recent developments in my own field, which draws a lot of inspiration from cultural theory and cultural theorists. Regarding technology, I’ve just completed an article on the ideologies that guide technology consumption. It’s a deep tracking of the historical discourses that inform current narratives in the mass media and in consumer’s own speech acts (and their practices/performances with technology). Some of the historical forms are quite familiar, such as the Technological Utopian ideology that associates technology use with progress, or the ideology that associate technology consumption with efficiency, productivity, and economic gains. But I also find a more hidden ideology, one that I think has come to the fore more recently. I call that one the “Techspressive” discourse, and it is about using technology in ways that are playful and self-expressive. Thinking back to when this ideology was really breaking into mass consciousness, in the 1990s, there were a number of female artists and authors who were pushing the boundaries of new digital technologies in very interesting ways, and others who were theorizing these developments. I’m thinking of the top of my head of Laurie Anderson, Pat Cadigan, Donna Haraway, and Kathryn Hayles, but there are many other examples. As groups that have had to function in inventive and underground ways, women have been at the forefront of appropriating new technologies and deploying them in new ways. I think that the positioning of vidding in this wider historical trend is right on target. No question about that.

Francesca Coppa: Oh, I love that word: techspressive! Yes, I think that’s right; and in fact, you know, I wonder if women’s tendency to adopt these technologies early is at all connected to the fact that women have always had a more mediated relationship to public space than men: we were not historically allowed to have an “authentic” or fully “expressive” relationship to public space. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that women were ignored in the first wave of subculture studies because they weren’t visible on the streets the way teddy boys, mods, or rockers were; they were home in their rooms listening to Beatles records on the turntable and spinning fantasies to each other on the telephone. I wrote my first fanfiction longhand and sent it out via snail mail. Now we have irc and AIM and jabber and Skype; we have mailing lists and Livejournal; we make elaborate fannish banners and css design schemes for our webpages; we’ve got wikis and searchable fanfiction archives and iMeem pages for our vids. But we’re not technological or anything.

The Fan Boy Reconsidered
Robert Kozinets: No, of course not. Some of my favorite women are cyborgs. I’ll let you guess the details..;-). The other idea I wanted to raise has to do with maleness. My colleagues Doug Holt and Craig Thompson recently published an interesting article on the ideology of male consumption. Their findings were compelling to me. They found that contemporary American males had to negotiate between two idealized types of masculinity. The first was the solid-but-kinda-boring “breadwinner” model, the guys who is a good provider, solid friend, good husband, and so on. But in order to be attractive and interesting, men also felt a need to tack into a “rebel” model, who was a risk-taker, a hero, an achiever. Doug and Craig called the synthetic model, where men moved between both models of masculinity without ever settling too far into one, a “man-of-action hero model.” Studying fan culture as I do, I’m not sure exactly where fannish expression fits into such a model. Men today work under constraints that are historically new, constraints and expectations that their dads didn’t have (I certainly don’t remember any pressure on my dad to moisturize and exfoliate). Being emotionally invested in texts and characters (particularly male characters) can be genuinely problematic for male fans. I’ve written a bit about the stigmatic side of fannish consumption before. So what have we got now? A social world where traditional maleness is somewhat stigmatized, where softy sensitive maleness is certainly stigmatized, and where fannish investments are stigmatized. What’s a poor fanboy to do?

Francesca Coppa: My first thought when I noticed the rise of fanboy culture was, “oh, you guys are getting alienated from the means of production, too?”

Robert Kozinets: Oh yeah.

Francesca Coppa: When I teach mass culture, I like to use Richard Ohmann’s definition, part of which of which is “produced at a distance by strangers.” And while we have unparalleled closeness to TPTB, I think that at the same time, the gulf between producers and consumers has never been wider, and that there’s a real underlying hostility to the idea of consumers becoming producers, and thinking like producers.

Robert Kozinets: I see that in action all the time. Despite all the talk about Web2.0, there is genuine misunderstanding, real fear, and as you say, genuine hostility to these ideas of suddenly “active” consumers.

Francesca Coppa: Because the American economy is dependent on consumption, and the mass media seems willing to actually exert force in order to get us to keep consuming at whatever rate they deem appropriate: I mean, I have twice in the last week heard the word “stealing” used to describe a failure to look at ads: once, vis a vis Tivo, and once, vis a vis “adblocker” software. And behind that word, stealing, is the criminalization of the act of keeping our minds ad-free, and behind that criminalization is force. In some economic sense, are we all feminized now?

Robert Kozinets: Bingo. Why are you peasants sleeping when you could be drinking Red Bull, watching TV, and shopping? Get to work!

Francesca Coppa: Absolutely, but to paraphrase Orwell, maybe some of us are more feminized than others. But I do think we’re all of us suffering from a culture that has professionalized, commercialized, and turned spectatorial all the kinds of fun we used to make for ourselves: not just storytelling (written and theatrical) and painting, but sports, singing, and even poker.

Robert Kozinets: Now you’re starting to sound like a Consumer Culture Theorist. Seriously, there’s a whole literature on this coming from the Frankfurt School and descending in crooked lineal lines into consumer behavior theories. My work on Burning Man and among consumer activists chronicles how people feel that their current culture isolates them and tries to render them passive. Movements like culture jamming, doofing and other post-raves, and the rise of major TAZ-like gatherings like the Burning Man project going on this week and the Rainbow Family gatherings all share in this ideological opposition to capitalist culture commercializing our stories and myths, and a sense that they need to be “brought home” again to the people.

Wikimedia and Archontic Literature

Francesca Coppa: I just finished reading your “Inno-tribes: Star Trek as Wikimedia,” [in the new Consumer Tribes book] and I really love it; I think this is going to be a really, really useful piece for explaining fannish issues to big media. I especially like your concept of “Wikimedia” (media content that has gone open source and begun spawning new content as a kind of ever-expanding collaborative text), which is similar to Derridean “archontic” literature (I myself use “supplement” to describe the same concept vis a vis theatre in my essay “ “Media Fanfiction as Theatrical Performance”). I think that it’s important to emphasize the connection between Wikimedia and other forms of archontic culture; theatre in particular has been a useful model for me to think about what you’ve called brand “invigoration strategies” and what I’d call a theatrical production *g*. In fact, you nearly quote Alan Sinfield’s essay on Shakespeare and cultural materialism in Cultural Politics-Queer Reading; Sinfield says that Shakespeare is relevant to precisely the degree to which he’s interfered with by directors; leave Shakespeare alone and he dies, and Shakespeare is arguably the most successful brand in history.

Robert Kozinets: What a great, and classical, example. Absolutely. For me, the Bible, the Talmud, and exegesis in general have always been important working models, and the way Shakespeare’s texts are sacralized in our culture is another powerful example. It seems like whenever people invest themselves in text and continue working with it, developing it, making it current and specific and situating it, then we have strong texts, meaningful texts. But somehow this never does seem to sink in at the level of the textual producer. It’s funny, because it’s the same in religion. Don’t tamper with the text. We’ll control the text. We’ll control the interpretation. And then, there it is again at the level of brand management. The exact same tension. We’ll control the brand meanings. Don’t you tamper with them. But without the “tampering” the meaning fades out and dies. Damn those The Powers That Be (and you know who you are!)

Francesca Coppa: Vis a vis the gender argument I’m making, I would say that fandom has produced strategies that have allowed women to consume otherwise terrible (and sexist) mass media stories; we have done TPTB’s work and made this stuff interesting to ourselves (to TPTB’s financial advantage; I promise you, I would never have bought Stargate Atlantis action figures otherwise.) Let me give you links to two recent vids by Luminosity, one of our brightest vidding stars: one is a Supernatural vid called Women’s Work (made in collaboration with Sisabet); the other is called Vogue and is a vid made about Frank Miller’s 300. I don’t think you’ll have any trouble seeing these two vids as critiques of the source material. In the first, Luminosity reminds us that, to enjoy Supernatural (and its charismatic and sexy male leads) each week, we have to ignore the plot’s dependence on suffering or murdered women; in the second, Luminosity punctures the violence of 300 by defiantly aestheticizing both the battlefield and the men on it. She conflates the battlefield and the dance floor, subjecting the men to a female and queer gaze and setting Madonna up as this world’s reigning pagan goddess. Luminosity’s epigraph for this gender bait and switch? “Bite me, Frank Miller.” Together, you might think of these vids as: “This is how mass media looks to us without fandom” and “This is your television on fandom.”

Robert Kozinets: This is great stuff. Thanks for sharing all of this, and for the conversation. As a member of multiple minorities and multiple tribes, expression and representation are all-important to me as well. They matter a lot, and I hope they matter to all thinking people.

Francesca Coppa: Thank you, Robert; like so many fannish activities, this has been both productive and a pleasure.

Posted in Fandom, Entertainment Marketing, Communities and Tribes | No Comments »