By Teresa A. Martin
Back in the ancient days of the late twentieth century, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote a book called the One to One Future. It talked about the end of mass marketing and of the role that relationships would play in the new marketplace. They went on to build their consultancy, write more books, and create a brand around themselves.
I read the book and remember still the way it changed my thinking about the relationships between information and us. It started with the notion that the traditional way of sharing information was one-to-many. For example the Nabisco ad was one message from one voice received by many individuals. This book predicted that the future of marketing lay in the one-to-one relationship where each individual felt as if he or she had a personal relationship with a company and that by developing a plan for relationship marketing a company was preparing itself to compete in the emerging, disintermediated marketplace.
I don’t think the duo pictured just how far and fast our relationship to information was going to change – and how marketing was just one tiny piece of the wholesale shift in those interactions. Nor how strong the one-to-many model would still remain in the mix.
The events of the past week with YouTube and Google got me thinking about this again. YouTube isn’t really revolutionary; it’s just an evolution of the rise of the many-to-many model that the Web made possible. It’s video information, instead of textual information or photographic information. The dollars have people buzzing, but that’s the not the real story.
The real story is made of many facets. Of blogs. Of wikis. Of My Space. Of podcasting. Of Vlogs. Of the open source movement, even. The real story is that because the Web removed the barrier of time and geography and provided a conduit for many forms of media, it created a vast babble of voices: the world of the many-to-many.
Before the web browser was a standard fixture in our lives, the barriers to sharing our thoughts and our creations with the world were many. Publishing was a formidable and expensive act. To make your packaged information accessible to many took a lot of knowledge, skill, and cash.
In many ways, the world ran on the one-to-many model of information because that’s all that the infrastructure could allow for economically. The publisher needed deep pockets and knowledge.
The Web changed all that. As Peppers and Rogers said, the shifts in technology enabled one-to-one outreach. A message could be customized and delivered specially to you and you respond specifically to it. Technology made this both possible both from a practical logistical standpoint and an economic one.
But it did something even more dramatic. It made the many-to-many relationship possible and that is the dynamic that is changing our world.
That’s at the heart of social networking, at the heart of blogging, at the heart of YouTube. We can all talk to each other in endless combinations. The cost, technology, and skill barrier to publishing text, pictures, sound, and video are falling fast. It’s exciting. It’s empowering. It’s creative.
And it’s also filled with a lot of dreck and noise.
Which is where we again return to the one-to-many model, and how that has stronger legs than many might have guessed.
One of the popular creators in YouTube is ... Showtime. As in the cable channel. It’s finding the many-to-many spaces to be a great place to create an alternative means of showcasing its work.
Within MySpace are company spaces. Do you think Mr. Murdoch bought MySpace for News Corp. because he liked reading Zara’s blog? (Well, maybe we shouldn’t ask that question!) But the shareholders who profit from News Corp.’s Fox TV sure like to promote shows like Justice there, mingling in the many-to-many milieu to market its one-to-many professionally produced product.
Humans like to make a mark. We have some inherent need to create, to show we exist, to show we are here. The act of creation is a good one and it’s wonderful to have it enabled by technology. We want the many-to-many world. We want the social networks. We’re going to create them despite ourselves.
But the ability to create something that truly appeals to many isn’t universal. Read a few blogs and you start to remember why editors are good. Watch a few self-made videos and you start to think that production skills might actually be a learned skill. Pretty soon it becomes clear that as much as we create many-to-many links, we like to consume one-to-many content too. And that one-to-many model is part of what creates our shared cultural context.
We are at a very interesting point in social history. For the first time, we really do have the ability to operate, create, and consume in all three modes: one to many, many to many, and one to one. YouTube is just this week’s story. Don’t you wonder what we’ll be creating next?
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