Let’s up the debate around rural WOM

I’m a country girl born and bred, so Russell Davies’s article in the December issue of Wired on the future of the countryside really hit a nerve. The majority of the world’s population now live in cities, and as Davies puts it, “city-thinking is core to the aesthetic bundle of the futurist classes”. Visions of our utopian and dystopian social futures all too often ignore the world outside metropolitan bounds.

Whenever I return to the frozen fields of Oxfordshire over Christmas, I see it as a chance to escape my wired London life, trying to live unmediated and unnarrated for a few days, blog- and Twitter- free (well, not quite. Good habits die hard). However, I’m well aware that this sort of anti-tech romanticisation of the counties is the preserve of those who no longer live there full time. For people like my sister, who runs her own business out of the National Forest, the online social connectivity of the countryside is a big contributor to its current vibrancy and future ability to thrive, and the voices of the people who live there are as important as their tarmac-pounding counterparts.

As Russell points out, the lack of conversation on the topic isn’t due to lack of relevance or innovation, from  agribusiness to individuals:

[I] long for a school of thinking around non-urban computing, because the practical, deployed stuff is so far ahead of the equivalents. It is clear that GPS and locative services, core to lots of urban networking ideas, are more useful outside the city – more beneficial to a hiker than they are to a flaneur. Serious tagging has been happening in the wild for years, albeit the radio-tagging of birds and animals rather than pizzerias for another desperate AR app. Farmers, climbers, gardeners, birdwatchers, rural teens, small-town librarians, parish councillors – all serious and effective users of connective and social technologies. Or look at the emerging generation of technology-enabled anglers: combining quiet contemplation with high-tech fibres, real carbon rods and Underworld tracks on their iPods, blending rural and technical to make streampunk. And there’s a tradition of rural technologies, perfected in the arduous outdoors being co-opted by the city; look at Land Rover, Barbour and Timberland.

Which is great. But we’re well aware how narrowly focused word of mouth strategies can be. When we help the likes of Aussie Haircare, Miele or STA Travel simply engage outside London – in Manchester or Birmingham or Oxford – we get such rich and creative collaborations from people who usually feel brands are painfully capital-centric. And these are still big cities. Without more high-profile conversation and public thinking on the topic, we’re missing a chance to harness the unique qualities of rural living that will give brands closer and more fruitful relationships with their more far-flung customers.

A 2008 study highlighted by The Daily Yonder a few weeks ago shows that rural Americans are increasingly well connected online but tend to have fewer friends, living in closer proximity, than their urban counterparts. This makes them ripe for more intimate, geolocated projects, but also for hooking up whole local communities, not just individuals, through shared passions. And the less protected environment of the countryside, where cerebral life constantly comes into close contact with physical barriers and opportunities – the weather, the landscape, distance and isolation – surely provides a chance to combine conversational on and offline engagement in a particularly sensual and tangible way.

But there’s little recent research, and even less outside the States. And what about the rest of the world? There is some great thinking already happening around rural Asia and Africa – arguably some of the most exciting emerging markets – but it’s ridiculously disproportionate to the commentary still focusing on engaging with the same old suburban ‘mommy bloggers’ or social media mavens tweeting from Shoreditch or East Village.

Let’s up the debate of rural applications of word of mouth, not just rural applications of social technologies. How and why do conversational opportunities and hubs of influence vary in the countryside? How can we use its specific qualities and communities to challenge smug Soho assumptions of what conversational marketing means?

Brought into the world on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 and filed under 1000thoughts, Global.