Fuzzy Content

Dimitri and I are attending the NetSquared Conference at the end of May. We’re publishing some ideas here after we work them up over there. We need to bounce our ideas around a good bit more as we refine our presentation. So feel free to comment and join our fray by commenting below.

Embrace the Fray

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Trust My Audience!”

To us, embracing the fray means to stop worrying so much about what people are doing and saying and worry more about what we are doing and saying as an organization. Embracing the fray is acknowledging that the fray exists and welcoming it as an important part of this thing we call an economy. (Forget about the future of the ‘net. It is already here.)

It is basically awareness that YASNS is always looming, and we should be happy about that. Typically getting to this point means joining or at least lurking around some typical sites:

• Xanga
• Facebook
• Flickr
• Frappr
• Newsvine

Tap Into the Fray

Tapping into the fray means getting ready to jump in the pool. Tying the string on your swim suit, checking the water temperature and PH levels and slathering on the sunscreen. Tapping into the fray means you have some work ahead of you. Right now we’re thinking along these lines.

Your Objective

• Strategic management of and coordinated use of disparate sites to create a suite of open communication tools for your staff AND advocates.
• This provides transparency. Transparency leads to credibility. Credibility equals authenticity. Authenticity is gold when it comes to brands, marketing and online identities.

Illuminate and Support These Goals

• Identify who and what the organization is and what its objectives are then distill those down to keywords and tags that will resonate with key audiences.
• Support these keywords and tags by living up to them as your audience defines them.

A Couple Possible Tactics

• Create a personae of the organization including the favorite movies, music and books of key staff and advocates.
• Build or expand a keyword campaign and supplement (or replace) that with a coordinated tagging campaign.

Going Gonzo!

This is more than jumping on the latest net-based bandwagon. There’s more going on this time around than IPO’s. And the point is bigger than flipping a company site to Google or Yahoo!

The Teeming Web is happening right now. The words “Teeming Web” are actually irrelevant except to those who are on the outside. If you’re on the inside, you’re just a person. You’re not participating in some large movement or improving the lot of mankind on the Internet. You’re just doing what you feel like doing. You’re doing what you know works.

That’s the way it is with Millennials. They are not “using social networking tools.” They are hooking up online. We need to catch up to them. But once we do, we must be very careful to not try too hard. Authenticity is the key. Our audience will tune out if we’re doing more than sharing or communicating.

We need to participate in order to understand. This is the true essence of what Hunter S. Thompson called “gonzo.” Like HST, we need to be fearless, but we need to act with purpose. Fearlessness without purpose is uninteresting to readers and calamitous to organizations. Going gonzo means baring it all, being ready to play by someone else’s rules and accepting the consequences when you misstep.

Misguided rationalization of the next over-hyped Internet boom? We don’t think so. What do you think?