In my last post “Life | Work: understanding service ecology”, I left you hanging in an attempt to break up my thinking in digestible chunks. To recap: Though it may seem unrelated, my readings on design thinking have helped me shape this idea of an ecological approach to digital communication, especially when I came across Live|Work’s approach to service design. So here we go:
The core of an ecological approach to digital communication is to think of your content or message as a living service, something that people use — not just receive — and that is sustainable. Forget about ’selling’ and focus on how people can USE your message and WHERE they can use it. This means two things:
(1) Service, don’t sell. In traditional marketing we normally develop content with a specific goal, e.g. drive awareness, sales, donations, etc. In a typical strategic process we define the target audience, a hook, channels and conduct a campaign to drive to that goal. But if you think of your content as service, meaning how people use your message (sharing it, transforming it, commenting on it, playing with it, learning with it, having fun with it, etc.) then you need to create a series of assets and tools enable USE. Or as we like to say in this web 2.0 era: engage people.
(2) It’s alive! Content [as a service] can develop in many digital environments (e.g. websites, Facebook, twitter, other SNS, smart phones, blogs, etc) when you plant content as service in these environments and make them interconnected and interdependent you are forming a digital communication ecosystem. An ecosystem is a living organism that is sustainable. It is constant transformation: it grows, changes, dies and regenerates itself. Therefore, developing a digital communication ecosystem is not like developing a finalized packaged product like a brochure that gets sent out there and you’re done. To keep your digital communication ecosystem alive you have to nurture it and ensure you make it sustainable — something that in traditional marketing we either don’t do at all, or allocate very little resources to do (most of the resources are used in planning, development and deployment).
Ecosystems can be built in large or small scale. You can establish a communication ecosystem for a particular initiative or for your entire business. The point is that for any communication effort (branding, marketing, advocacy, PR) to succeed in today’s world, you need to put effort in defining an interconnected system for people to USE. And if you want people to use it, the system needs to work well; it needs to be easy to use, it’s needs to be flexible, open and clear.
As a final note, [borrowed from Negroponte's Being Digital book] the digital world (anything that contains bits: the Internet with its many nodes, mobile media, music, movies, etc.) is inevitably connected to the world of atoms (our physical world).
A) because people are made of atoms (duh!)
and
B) because we experience the digital through physical devices made of atoms.
Which is why we ALWAYS need to consider how (and where) people interact with digital communication ecosystems in the physical world.
Ok, so maybe a year+ of researching, discussing and writing about digital media revolution has warped my brain; while none of these concepts are new, it is one more interpretation of social media and its impact to marketing and branding. I would love some feedback:
What do you think of the term ‘digital communication ecosystem’? What are the points that you connected with and what do you find unclear?
We love to hear your views.