Online Marketing Theory: A Look at Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson's Ideas

Online Marketing:
Clay Shirky
by Monique Sherrett

monique@boxcarmarketing.com
You should follow me on twitter @boxcarmarketing

What is online marketing?

• Conversation

• Collaboration

• Community
twitter: @boxcarmarketing

Clay Shirky
writer, consultant and teacher on the social &
economic eﬀects of internet technologies


It’s not the tools,
it’s how we use them


Our Behaviour Is Diﬀerent
Today Than It Was Yesterday


There are 4 Revolutions in
Social History

• The introduction of the printing press
(changes reading and writing)

• The telegraph and the telephone
(changes communication)

• Recorded media
(changes music, records, radio)

• The harnessing of broadcast media
(changes how we view images + sound)


We Are Now Living Through a 5th Revolution:
The internet revolution


Key Points
This revolution is a combination of the 4 previous
revolutions.

• Printing Press: The web brings us Movable
Type, Wordpress, ExpressionEngine, Blogspot
and many other digital printing presses that
allow anyone to become a publisher.

• Phone: VOIP, voice over internet protocal,
allows for companies like Skype to bring us
telephone and teleconferencing.

• Recorded Media: MP3s, RealPlayer and others
brought us streaming audio, podcasts and
peer-to-peer file exchange.

• Broadcast Media: And the web is images,
video, text and sound. monique@boxcarmarketing.com

Freedom of the Press, Freedom of
Speech & Freedom of Assembly

1. Sharing

2. Conversation

3. Collaboration

4. Collective Action


1. Sharing
• Think of delicious.com and other social bookmarking
tools like StumbleUpon, Google Bookmarks

• Social bookmarking is an example of how we do
something for ourselves that benefits the group.

• By social bookmarking, we have an easy way to see
our bookmarked webpages from any computer. If we
make the list publicly available, then we help others
filter for good content based on the wisdom of the
crowd. i.e., if more people bookmarked this article vs.
that article, then I’ll check out this one first.

• Tagging allows us to see the commonalities, which
means tagging becomes a platform for organization.

2. Conversation
• Example HDR photos: Totally lovely, diﬃcult to
produce. In the real world, it used to take 7 years for
a technique like that to move into the hands of the
masses. With tools like Flickr for online photo
sharing, it now takes 3 months.

• Online, groups get better together.

• Comment fields, like tags, are a platform for
organization. Threaded conversations are
communication and sharing.

Photo credit: http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/953669278/sizes/s/in/photostream/ twitter: @boxcarmarketing

3. Collaboration

• Shirky uses the example of Aeqisub,
which is a group dedicated to
captioning Japanese anime and
bringing it to the US.

• Another example of collaboration is
Wikipedia, where there are 175
diﬀerent language groups working
to add, refine and update wikipedia.
In some cases, Wikipedia is the only
encyclopedia in that language.

• Both are examples of individuals
synching with the group.
Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeeperez/2453225976/sizes/m/in/photostream/ twitter: @boxcarmarketing

4. Collective Action

• The hardest to get going. Creating a movement.

• Collective Action is where the fate of the group as a
whole is more important than that of individuals.

• Protesters leverage attention online to aﬀect social
change, political change.

• Same with Bloggers. We are experiencing an era where
people like to produce and share as much as they
consume (if not more).

• Kiva.org or the Zombie Walk would be good examples.


Shirky points out that in
highly democratic
environments, new tools are
used for entertainment.
Whereas in low democratic
environments, new tools are
a potent element used for
collective action.

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/wigwam/1460462925/sizes/l/in/photostream/
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/irisheyes/5417964426/sizes/o/in/photostream/


The Culture of the Web


Practice

Source: Darren Barefoot monique@boxcarmarketing.com
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/dbarefoot/1814873464/sizes/o/in/photostream/ twitter: @boxcarmarketing

Points to Remember
• Revolutions happen, and will continue to happen

• The tools don’t change the game, our behaviour
changes the game

• Understanding behaviour (or the motivating
factors) of why people do certain things is more
important than understanding how the tool works

• Conversation, collaboration and community are the
fundamentals of online marketing


Did you watch the
Shirky video?

The Long Tail
Chris Anderson


The Theory of the Long Tail

• With the web, the cost of reaching customers has
fallen dramatically.

• More choice in the market signiﬁcantly changes
consumption patterns.


• We’ve moved from consuming a small number of
hits and bestsellers to a large number of niche
products.

• Example: Amazon and iTunes

• Source: http://www.novelr.com/2008/02/08/the-long-tail-and-online-fiction-how-to-get-
read

The Cost of Reaching Consumers Has
Dropped because of 3 Factors:

• Democratization of the tools for production

• Democratization of distribution

• The ability to connect supply with demand


Democratization:
Tools of Production

• Personal computers, the internet and cheap
technology have given the majority of people
access to tools of production:

• Blogging software like WordPress is free.

• Video and music production software is cheap
- iMovie and GarageBand come pre-installed
on macs.

• Production costs are no longer a major barrier to
entry.


Democratization of Distribution

• With the web, anyone can distribute – there are
no geographical limits and no costs of physical
shelf space or warehousing.


The Ability to Connect
Supply With Demand

• In the past, we found products through mass
media (TV, radio, newspapers and magazines).

• We are in a period of transition, where we now
also ﬁnding products by searching online and
reading peer reviews.

• The web allows us to ﬁnd niche goods that are
tailored to our personal tastes and areas of
interest.


What the Long Tail Means
for Marketing

• The examples of Amazon and iTunes shows us that customers have
more and more products to choose from.

• Just 25 years ago there were, GUESS HOW MANY

• Running shoe styles

• Over-the-counter pain relievers

• Soft drink brands

• Types of milk

• Choices on a McDonald's menu


What the Long Tail Means
for Marketing

• As marketers, we need to find ways to stand out. But how?

• The media landscape has changed. It’s more fragmented. There are
more tv channels, more radio channels, more magazines, more news
sources … This means that as marketers we can’t depend on “mass
media” because it’s not reaching the same “mass audience”.

• Audience attention is fragmented.


• There are 2 ways to think about the Long Tail.

• What it tell us about the market
(number of products, choice architecture)

• What it tells us about marketing
(mass market vs. niche markets)

• Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory urges publishers to forget hit-
making and instead to take advantage of the near-zero cost of digital
distribution to try and make money from selling small numbers of a
lot of diﬀerent titles.


With the Long Tail, Publishers
Should Be Asking Themselves:
• How do I take my book or magazine content and
sell it in all diﬀerent channels?

• If I can’t sell exactly the same thing oﬄine as
online, because we’ve trained people to think
that things online are free, then what can I get
them to pay for?

• Or, how do I just communicate to my audience in
all the places where they are, rather than forcing
them to come to my channel, my newspaper, my
website?


What’s Fascinating about Google,
Amazon, Netflix, iTunes
• Their business model is the clue to how customers behave in
markets of inﬁnite choice.

• Those companies are at the head because they’ve build business
models based on availability, trusted sources, filtering,
searchability and discovery. Those players have the attention
because they’re using technology that responds to what users want
to do.

• People no longer only buy what’s available. They buy what they
want. And if they can’t find exactly what they want right away, there’s
the internet—someone, somewhere is oﬀering exactly what they
want.


Next Steps
Readings

• Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine, "The
Cluetrain Manifesto," http://www.cluetrain.com/ Just the 95 Theses!
• Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Open Brand


Online Marketing Theory: A Look at Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson's Ideas

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