Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Tara Hunt Presenting Pinko Marketing at Mesh06

Say what you will of the outcomes of various communist revolutions, at least they had great marketing.

In some distant past lives as a designer, I’ll admit too that I have been drawn to these same motifs as well, the bold lines, sharp colors and explosive iconography can make for some remarkable graphic design. And maybe with the right historical sensitivity and/or a firm grip on the ironyometer, you can pull this off. But I don’t think you can pull it off whilst earnestly [gasp] citing Marx at length, as Tara Hunt (Miss rogue) does in her first post for Pinko marketing. That reference was since (sortof) retracted, but the imagery remains. Sure, she looked kinda sharp up there, but simultaneously there were a lot of us bums squirming slightly awkwardly in our seats.

And here is the real irony. Truth be told, social media != communism as it has ever been practiced. Social media is all about subverting and breaking down inefficiencies where they occur in centralized, top-down organization. And yet we all know how communism turned out. If anything, the unfettered empowerment individual voice, the ability of the community (read: market) to organically and meritocratically select for the best ideas and have them win out in the end – starts to sound a lot like, er, serious right-wing stuff. Libertarian Marketing anyone?

As the dust settles, what’s been the reaction to Tara’s Mesh performance throughout the local blogodome?

Joey explodes. Calling Pinko a cool idea with a bad name he starts off, rather entertainly, by relating Pinko to an axis of evil (and not the one you’re thinking of). I couldn’t agree more. It was Joey’s post that inspired this one, and look, we almost have the same picture.

Jevon yawns. If we can distil Pinko to saying it’s all about using social media to enhance communication building trust, credibility and wisdom within the crowd; then my friend Jevon has been ahead of that curve for a long time.

Others loved Tara’s keynote. See, for instance the comments here on this blogpost. Calling her “the diva of web2.0”. Now there’s a moniker.

No one I’ve seen so far is criticizing Tara’s actual ideas (she’s built her theory on sound foundations after all) aside from the quibble that she tends towards a slightly false absolutism. Clearly, though it is a good one, marketing is not the only application for social technology, nor is social marketing the only answer for selling goods in the future. etc.

Now Tara herself is a charming woman should you have the chance to meet her. So through the trials of self-inflicted controversy, does Tara Hunt deserve our well considered sympathy or antipathy?

Well consider this: By adopting such divisive and discomfiting branding (and it’s all a meta-controversy no less with almost no connection to the validity of the underlying ideas) Tara is generating a high level of attention on her, her ideas and somewhere down the line her employer Riya. Now how is that for a cunning marketing plan?

[edited 05/22/06]

So Rick Segal stood up at Mesh today, went on the record to say he is ready and willing to sponsor a “businesscamp” if someone will organize the thing. He’ll bring his VC colleagues, lawyers and seed capital, for an event of some kind, for a week say, if we’ll bring entrepreneurs willing learn and willing pitch their ideas. This offer had me sitting suddenly upright in my seat.

For some time I’ve been messing with the ideas around organizing a next generation slamcamp, one that’s extended in format and one that gets down to building on some ideas or even seed funds them. (see 8 Ideas for the future of Barcamp). Guinine VC participation could be just the catalyst to get this idea off the ground. Or so I was thinking.

But David Crow (btw congrats on your “new job” I think with innovation commons and 3rd spaces you’ll be enabling amazing things but i digress) Boris Mann were less sanguine. “ya of course he’d say that, but why do we need VC?” Boris wen’t further “this session should have been called “Do the VC need Web 2.0 Companies?” not the other way around.

They have a point. As Bob Young [redhat, lulu founder] would say “is hard enough to start a company without having to drag a VC along with you”. And the economics have changed. If you collaborate with the community, if you leverage open source ideas, if you market is connected and if you use zero-dollar marketing you can now create remarkable organization/company/software with what would it seemed just a few years ago like absurdly low capital requirements. cool. who needs greedy vc?

It is a wonderful thing that you can launch certain sorts of enterprise now with only (say) 500k or 50k… or 5k.

37 signals was a great, and discussed, example of a successful “web2.0” company bootstraped without any need for VC. barcamp itself is a great example of a phenomenal, global-scale organization operating with essentially no budget whatsoever.

It’s this combination of community and technology that has enabled a fast-growing set of opportunities with low, ever-lower capital requirements. and this is what everybody is talking about (and don’t get me wrong, legitimately so)

But this is not the only set of possible opportunities.

Will you tell me there are no legitimate opportunities also, even, enabled by community and technology that also just happen to be massively capital-intensive?

Maybe we are not thinking big enough. Maybe this is the problem, the difference, between the big leagues of the VC and the barcamp community. I belive that we in the community sometimes exibit a bias not to think [really] big.

So, if you have a great, monetizable “web2.0” idea but that’s going to take 5 million or 50 or 500… I want to hear about it.

Now this “think bigger” idea sees me, for one, already heading to the whiteboard. Oh, and I’m thinking hard about businesscamp…

Mesh notes so far:

At a conference it not about the speakers so much as the conversations. some good moments today…

Talking to Nick Moraitis today of takingitglobal.org about the “future” of local media/newspapers. I made a point about an increasing number of people not being from anywhere specifically local anymore. Nick (of australia, usa, uk, canada etc.) agreed and commented on the irony of how he doesn’t care at all about the local sections of the toronto star and yet still reads the online newsletter of his old high school. This led me to say what we don’t need so much any more is geographically local media so much as autobiographically local media. So anyway yes, this suddenly is the title of the new book (or is it business plan?) than Nick and I are writing. what do you think?

David Crow‘s wiki panel was a wonderful example of wiki-style colaboration in action. With a lot of smart people in the audience both asking good questions and weighing in on the answers.

Finally towards the end of the evening I was enjoying a good debate with myself and Jian Ghomeshi vs Tara Hunt (of horsepigcow fame) on the future of the content industry. We all agreed that (the rise of the indie labels in music being the example) that the internet has done a wonderful job in terms of flattening the curve and enabling more good content to become viable in spite of the historic best efforts of the major labels to constrain distribution to the wasteland of established radio formats and top40. Where we differed though was on the prospects of “the big guys” in the future. Taking an (i’d argue somewhat endist) cue from Hugh that those organizations that don’t “get” it in terms of social media are doomed to extinction. Jian wasn’t so sure, and I agreed. There will be new winners emerging for sure, but lets not write off the powers of established scope/scale economies, real world distribution, brand recognition and installed base to soon. I for one worry that the battle for the future of content is still touch and go. yes there are encouraging signs lately, but lets us not also forget that Vista is on it’s way with signed drivers and that xbox360 (and not to mention PS3) are on their way with powerful media aggregation built in and even more powerful DRM all locked down to a (very) closed system. Nor has WIPO gone away yet or the trade pressure from the U.S. We’re not out of the woods yet.

Anyway this should all make for some more interesting discussions tomorrow. meanwhile goodnight…

ps you can catch my live(ish) photo stream of the conference here