Peter Kim, marketing analyst at Forrester had a great post over at Being Peter Kim (love your blog’s name, Pete) on the 3 Ps of Social Publishing following discussions around the blogosphere on the use of micro-blogging (see here and here). Pete suggested using a model around personas to think about participation and content publishing – personal, public and professional.
Although I like the concept, I think that the successful platforms will enable the merger of all three personas in an age of bandwidth constrains and fleeting and fragmenting attention.
Blogging is the perfect example of this convergence of all three personas, allowing for example individuals to express their personal views, sometimes on professional corporate blogging platforms and leveraging social media to reach a public critical mass. Microblogging on platforms such as Twitter pushes the convergence even further by allowing your public person to express what you are doing personally at any point of the day.
Social networks are another great example and I think that Facebook’s success draws from this convergence. If I take my personal experience, where else could I have a convergence of my current personal status, my discussions with my cousin, my “befriending” of a co-worker, my application exchange with a blogging acquaintance and my wall to wall interaction with a total stranger??? Peter Blackshaw had a great post on meaningful relationships in social networks, but who is truly your friend when all 3 personas converge?
Videocasts are a third arena where the convergence is prevalent. My BBF Karl Long did a video of people waiting in line for the new iPhone and posted it on YouTube. He also posted it on his personal blog and since he works for Nokia, used the opportunity to tout the advantages of the iPhone rival Nokia’s N95. Where do Karl’s 3 personas start and stop in this case? What about Nathalie Portman lifecasting?
So what does it mean for marketing?
- Brands can no longer rely solely on public personas to carefully, control and communicate your message. Customers will expect personal and professional personas to become expressions of the brand, from corporate blogs to word of mouth.
- Privacy and profile management will become even more critical. As people expose more and more information online (Take Facebook as an example: relationships, DOB, political preferences, etc), they will also expect that brands allow them to more carefully select what they chose to or not to share.
- Successful marketers will develop products that accelerate this convergence – for example, personal photo content mashed up in a professional children’s book and mass published for your friends & family.
What do you think? Are we going towards a convergence or a specialization of platforms?
Technorati tags: Hewlett Packard, hp, Eric Kintz, marketing, Twitter, facebook, Youtube
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