Now that I'm actively looking for it, it's astonishing how pervasive the messaging paradigm is of engagement is.
I use the term 'engagement' when I could say something close like 'marketing,' but really I mean something bigger than just marketing. I'll articulate this with a couple of examples below.
The messaging paradigm is the notion that in order to engage someone effectively, you need to deliver them a message. This is quite a direct strategy.
If you've been following long enough you know that I use the word 'direct' rather pejoratively, meaning something like the following:
"Humans often employ 'direct' strategies, because we're limited creatures with a remarkably small capacity for comprehending causality in an incredibly complex world. So we almost always employ only the strategies we can understand and from which we can get immediate feedback in forms that are tangible to humans - often overlooking the fact that Reality doesn't care what makes sense to humans."
You know one flavor of this direct, messaging paradigm as 'advertising,' and chances are you think advertising is rather silly - or much of it, at very least. In a phrase, the model is: develop a message, then put that message in front as many people as possible.
Over the decades that model has made some leaps, to be sure - smart media strategy has genuinely aimed to put those messages in the right places, and planner strategy has genuinely aimed to get the sentiment of those messages correct and in front of the right people.
Though at the core of the model still rests the "message."
Douglas Rushkoff, author of "Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age," has the following to say about Occupy Wall Street. I think it's a fitting description of why the messaging paradigm of engagement is larger than just marketing:
...a Fox News reporter appears flummoxed in this outtake from "On the Record," in which the respondent refuses to explain how he wants the protests to "end." Transcending the shallow partisan politics of the moment, the protester explains "As far as seeing it end, I wouldn't like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue."
To be fair, the reason why some mainstream news journalists and many of the audiences they serve see the Occupy Wall Street protests as incoherent is because the press and the public are themselves. It is difficult to comprehend a 21st century movement from the perspective of the 20th century politics, media, and economics in which we are still steeped.
In fact, we are witnessing America's first true Internet-era movement, which -- unlike civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign -- does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals and understand itself as having a particular endpoint.
...unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc.
...It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.
This last metaphor is apt because on the internet 'engagement' does not come directly, by way of 'message.' 'Engagement' is an indirect and emergent property, manifest only in the pattern captured by a series of experiences. This notion has been beautifully articulated in places like Method's whitepaper Brands As Patterns and Alex Wipperfurth's book Brand Hijack: Marketing Without Marketing.
And now that I'm looking for patterns and experiences, I'm truly astonished at how pervasive the messaging paradigm is.
That astonishment comes not just when I have conversations with people about Occupy Wall Street and they say "you know, I'm in marketing - and if there's one thing I know it's that you've got to have a message."
It's also when I see the pieces of interesting hybrid experience patterns like this simple game meant to be played with a mobile on top of a printed magazine - and the instinctual editorial reaction is: "Can’t guarantee it will deliver the message about Sonera being the fastest network…"
There are loads of interesting experinces I'm seeing develop, and I'm not so sure that sending a message is the point.
Uniqlo for example has emerged as one of those marketing darlings; everything they do, the brand world eats it up. Take a look at this archive of all their experience projects. There's not a lot of messages... but there's something there that catches your attention….And it's hard to articulate what it is…. but it gets people genuinely excited...
That's the point. That is what I mean by 'engagement.'
