Branding, Broadcast & My Global Neighbourhoods Concept

No, I'm not announcing the restart of the book, not right now at least. This is a continuation of my previous post regarding Jeremiah and an afterthought of a still earlier post linking to Shel Holtz.

But, there's a lot of conversation going on this morning about the role of brands and broadcasting in social media. I've posted a couple of times about it today and they are both related to both the vision  and one of the problems of the Global Neighbourhoods book.

The essential concept of Global Neighborhoods was that not only is geography becoming less important, so are Internet sites. The fact that Facebook has 50 million members or that YouTube has a 125 downloads for every NY Times sold is becoming less relevant as well.

Instead, we are forming our own topical groups. They are smaller than online communities, merely neighborhoods of people who share common interests and bop from Flickr to Twitter, from blogs to videos top real world social gatherings. The people who contribute the most to these groups are the most influential. Members of these global neighbourhoods shape what other members buy, watch, visit and listen to.  They may even shape how we vote and think.

When I wrote the book outline, I estimated that the largest of these global neighborhoods would be no bigger than 150, a number I derived directly from Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point--a book you should still all read. But, technology has allowed that number to get larger. Perhaps 500 "friends can actually communicate with each other.  But most neighborhoods are much smaller perhaps less than 15 members.

The Global Neighborhood is small and intimate and personal. By it's very nature, mass marketing and branding efforts cannot work in them. Such efforts are not personal. Mass merchants build awareness through intrusion not collaboration.

We are moving from mass markets to millions of micro markets. And how one conducts "mass micro marketing" into  these global neighborhoods is a problem that is just starting to find answers. Dell's Ricardo Guerrero uses Twitter to offer close out deals to people who wish to follow him.  My friends at Eepybird make extremely creative branding  videos that get posted on  YouTube and that is also extremely human and cool in my opinion. I'm trying to get Boorah a small client to see Twitter to give advice on where to eat in your neighborhood, but we are just screwing around right now.

These are all just baby steps into the issue of branding and social media, product marketing and social media, advertising and social media. They may work or fail and the rest of us will learn from the experience.