Developing an Open Source mind
By Molly FlattA couple of interesting books getting some press this week –Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, and Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do? – serve as a reminder of just how important an open source, collaborative, mashup mindset is to Generation 2.0, and how absolutely it underpins the spread of creatively engaged word of mouth.
To quote Jarvis in this morning’s Media Guardian,
“Google provides a platform and a network that enables others to succeed – and when they succeed, so does Google. That is a millennium apart from the centralised, controlling ways of business past.”
He goes on to cite beta testing as a great example of how a brand can turn the fear of offering an imperfect product on its head, by letting consumers into the design process at an incomplete stage:
“unthinkable under old rules and expectations”.
There’s certainly been a bit of beta backlash by now – we’re fed up with half-arsed offerings pleading special status – but the psychology holds true.
Ways of fostering brand loyalty and engagement have transformed from the days of the Mad Men – we don’t want a reassuring Big Daddy any more, we want to feel we’re running the show. But open source agoraphobia is extremely common amongst brands. Faced with the seeming chaos and irreverence of word of mouth and social media, their instinct is usually to try and find ever more cunning and self-protective ways to maintain control. Seeing vulnerability as a virtue is very difficult when you consider marketing as a tool for projecting a flawless façade to the world.
This doesn’t mean that brands abandon all control; the trick is to facilitate positive and creative open source sharing and collaboration in a spirit of progress and playfulness. But when user generated content is predicted to make up 70% of online material by 2010, the only thing they can’t do is pretend this behaviour is something they can or should suppress or ignore.
