Hugh McLeod is a genius. After an exchange with Doc Searls that I disagreed with, Hugh shares a seemingly disconnected thought that is so spot on the whole message thing, it’s scary.

What is an Object of Sociability [OoS, or “Ooze” for short]? “Ooze” is simply something that allows you to engage with another person. It could be anything. It could a party. It could be a bottle of wine. It could be a hyperlink. It could be a social gesture. It could be social currency. It could be doodling a cartoon on the back of a business card at a bar and giving it to the cute barmaid. You tell me….

Funny, but this ties in to a conversation I had with Juri about two years ago at a London geek dinner. We were talking about the switch in marketing away from “The Message”, towards something that one has no control over i.e. The Ooze.

The metaphor I used at the time was “wave vs particle”. At the subatomic level, things are interchangably waves or particles, depending on what instruments you are using to observe them [somebody far more scientific than me, please correct me if I’m wrong]. It might look like a wave one day, a particle the next.

A traditional marketing “message” acts like a wave. In the future, I believe marketing messages will behave more like particles [that is, if they want to succeed]. A wave stays connected to its source, a particle does not. Once the particle leaves you, it is no longer yours. You no longer control it, anymore than a dandelion spore controls the wind.

An excellent metaphor. The traditional view of a message, as a wave, suggests centralized control and the ability to modulate it at any time. Particle messages, however, live a life of their own. Once released into the wild, the source doesn’t have much more to do, except perchance to spew additional particles in hopes of redirecting attention, correcting, or augmenting prior messages.

You might call this the “bathroom deodorizor” method of message management.

You see, the human nose responds to particles in the air, unlike the eyes and ears which respond to waves. So, when you have the unfortunate experience of smelling something you don’t like, a common response is to spray a deodorizer which overpowers the unpleasant smell with more favorably smelling particles. Ahhh… much better.

Isn’t this a lot like what happens with catastrophically bad PR nightmares? When a company gets into a public crisis, it smells bad, as countless negative message particles flow into the public nostril.

Companies fixated on the wave model have been known to simply put out a press release denying the stink. Think Intel and the 1994 Pentium floating point bug. Treating messages as waves fails to address the real problem, leaving the public to stew in its own smelly frustration. In Intel’s case, they not only let the aroma waft around on its own, they left the source of the bad smell out there on the living room carpet!

More progressive companies acknowledge the problem and engage the world to fix it. They remove the source (when possible) and put out credible response particles on a massive scale, overpowering and ameliorating the stench of the offense. Think about Johnson & Johnson’s response to the  1982 Tylenol Cyanide Poisoning.

The particle view of messages makes sense in our post-mass-media world where communications are dominated by one-to-one exchanges rather than broadcast blasts from centralized sources.

Particles demonstrate four critical aspects of messages:

1. Once a message is in the medium, the source relinquishes control.
2. It doesn’t necessarily matter what causes a message. If its out there, it affects the environment.
3. The only way to mitigate an unwanted message in the environment is to seed new, credible replacement messages with such potency and saturation that it displaces the previous. (Preferably, one does this without offending the environment.)
4. It pays to shape your messages effectively. Make them smell good. Make them believable and understandable. Make them effective tools at helping your organization. Because once they are out there, they are out of your hands.

Number 4 is the real point of my post about the Demand for Messages.

People need messages to discern opportunities, make good choices, and take action. Modern communicators should craft messages that make the most of the particle model and stand on their own, sufficiently clear and valuable so that users understand, appreciate and propagate them.

The particle-virus addendum:

When users spontaneously propagate messages on their own, message-particles act more like viruses, which makes them even more powerful. They still act like particles, just more effective in saturating the environment. It also makes them more outside the control of the originator, just like good Ooze.

Thanks, Hugh.

Have a great New Year’s everyone! See you in 2007.

Doc Searls and Hugh McLeod apparently agree that There is No Demand for Messages.

But that’s not really true. There is huge demand for clarity and understanding. And you only get that through messages.

Doc says:

Let’s face it: there are only two kinds of advertising demanded by their consumers: yellow pages and classifieds. It’s not coincidental that they’re both ugly. Beauty isn’t a value when the only purpose is to answer the simple demand for useful information.

This assumes individuals know what they want. Yet, people often don’t know what they want and the yellow pages and classifieds are often incapable of breaking through that disconnect.

Does anyone remember 1994? Where in the yellow pages did you find a good web design firm? (I know, I had to try to tell the phone company which category our firm belonged.) And if you don’t know about the special promotion this weekend at your favorite store, you may never visit the store, even though you definitely would if only you knew about it.

People want to know about unique opportunities. Consider the Thresher phenomenon in the UK, by way of Hugh. 40% off. Limited time only. It was not only a huge sales success, it became a news phenomenon.

Seriously, people wanted that message. And it wasn’t classifieds or yellow pages.

Also, people want to know about their options. We can’t look in the classifieds for something when we we don’t realize there might be something there that fits our needs.

We live in a sea of information from friends and media, from which we pick and choose how we might go about filling our needs. Often it feels like information overload. In order to understand our options, we need clarity. We need to be able to discern how specific offers fit into our world, how they create value, and how we can take advantage of them. Only with that clarity can we actually perceive choices, and only from those choices can we take action.

Here’s an example of a failure to communicate, one that is one of my favorite modern branding catastrophes: Tivo, that lovable little device that has reconnected so many people with their addiction to passive entertainment.

I bought my brother and sister-in-law a Tivo for Christmas last year and they didn’t bother to install it for four months. Four months! They had heard about it. Didn’t get it. Didn’t think it would be worth the hassle. Eventually they got around to it.

And now they love it. TV was always a constructive part of their household, with a pro-active stance regarding what & when to watch and a social practice of watching as a family. Tivo made all of that easier, more fluid, and more accessible. In put them in control of when and how they were going to watch TV and it made their life richer.

But before they had the product working, they had no idea.

They never would’ve gone to the yellow pages or the classifieds. They never would’ve gone to Circuit City to buy it. Unfortunately for Tivo, none of the Tivo’s communications managed to deliver a clear, understandable, and memorable message about the true value of the product. If it had, they would’ve bought one long ago.

So, back to Hugh’s original question:

As traditional, Madison-Avenue-style advertising gets more expensive and less relevant by the day, as the traditional mainstream media advertising business model gets continues to nosedive, where is all the client’s business going to move to, as it seeks out greener pastures?

The business is going to move to conversation agents who help them talk with people clearly and credibly about products and services that meet real needs.

Most companies invest far too much in execution when what they first need to do is figure out strategy. Once you understand what your message needs to convey, and who you want to reach, then and only then can you execute–creative concepts and delivery channels–in a way that reliably delivers the right message to the right people.

As media changes, society and markets change, and the execution tactics necessarily change. But the need for a clear message remains.

How do you create value in my life?

That’s the message people demand.

Firms that help companies converse about creating real value in people’s lives will do just fine serving clients in the post-mass-media, post-Madison-Avenue world.

In a conversation about the potential market lock-in of Google at Abe Burmeister’s blog, Dave Chiu introduced me to a great presentation Seth Godin made to Google early in 2006, explaining that it was marketing, and not technology, that made Google the market leader. I couldn’t agree more, even though most of my technology friends will swear it was all about the quality of PageRank.

Tests show that when Yahoo! & Google results are formatted identically, users can’t tell the difference. And yet, Google matters to people. They matter in a deeply personal way. They have created a powerhouse brand because better technology gave them an opportunity to market to the masses and that marketing worked.

Seth puts this in his framework of remarkable stories. His bestselling books The Purple Cow and All Marketers are Liars discuss this in much greater detail, with lots of anecdotes, examples, and advice on how to improve marketing through remarkable stories. Good stuff.

What he doesn’t talk about is how you create the right stories to tell. He misses that point in his books as well. But that’s ok. Stories are powerful marketing tools. That’s an important enough message by itself. In the presentation he also does a great job pointing out the anticipatory and experiential value of a brand–that value people get just because they buy the brand, independent of the actual value of the product. The driver for this type of value is story, especially when the brand connects with people’s identity in profound ways.

He then goes on to outline his view of Fashion/Permission marketing that is uniquely enabled by the Internet as a one-to-one disintermediated medium. He exhorts Google to create a permission tool that gets users to invite Google into a deeper relationship, one that gives Google more context and more details about what users are really looking for. In other words, leveraging the brand to enhance the technology by meeting users needs in a more meaningful way, which of course will only enhance the brand further. Great stuff. Note to Google: possible areas for development: VRM and Complex Search.

It is worth watching, if only to see the advice one of the hottest minds in marketing gives to the most influention Internet company on the planet.

Curiously, Seth missed the opportunity to explain to Google that their haphazard development strategy is steering them, inexorably, away from the branding that made them the market leader: the promise of making the Internet simple.

Seth Godin has an excellent post that sums up exactly why marketing and branding is still so crucial in our post-mass-media marketplace:

You’re busy trying to sell a service or a product or an idea to lazy people in a hurry.

Lazy, as in not willing to do the work to create long term benefits. Lazy as in not willing to read the instructions, follow the manual, do all the steps, invest the time in the research. Lazy as in willing to buy the first choice that’s ‘good enough’ as opposed to finding the best choice. These are people who will spend five minutes to find a parking space one minute closer to the mall.

And in a hurry.

In a hurry because they jump to conclusions, don’t read to the end, and most of all, most of the time, search for a shortcut.

In other words, you’ve only got a microsecond to converse with people before they move on. If you aren’t spot-on with a compelling presentation that they value in their world, on their terms, *click*, next page.

Being spot on, making that microsecond count, and delivering a product, a message, and an experience that connects with what that individual really needs… that’s marketing. That’s branding. You don’t have time for one-on-one sales. If you miss the moment, people move on to the next item on the list. And you certainly don’t have time for tech-heavy feature-itis. People want to know “What’s in it for me, right now?”

In a disintermediating world, marketing means discovering and executing on the most effective and efficient ways to deliver real value to people. And it’s no longer about press releases and super bowl commercials. It is about conversations, respect, and integrity.

Over at IT Garage, Doc writes:

In Software by Bounty, Doug Kay says, This is a tangible manifestation of what Doc Searls has described as the demand side taking control, and I think it bodes well for the further formalization of a demand-driven economy of software products.

I think it’s a great example of the death of distance between first sources and final customers, and the emergence of new markets without marketing. As Don Marti puts it, The biggest transformation in software is the erasure of the line between “the business side” and “the technical side”. Everyone needs to know what’s going on in the market. And “on-message” is obsolete — the market already knows the truth… And the truth is that there is plenty of demand for which marketing is no longer the best intermediator between demand and supply.

Hold on, Doc & Don. There are some serious misconceptions here. Sure, erasing the dividing line between business and technology is great. But markets don’t “already know the truth” and understanding the right message to talk about with your market is vital. It’s ridiculous how many bad tech presentations I’ve had to endure…

I know its easy to run with “marketing is bad” material. It’s a favorite of the technology crowd, since technologists often find themselves across drawn battle lines with marketing guys on the other side making ridiculuous demands.

Sure, a lot of marketing is horrific. But the power of good marketing is incredible. Just look at the different between Apple with Jobs and Apple with Sculley, whose marketing debacle with the Newton was firmly grounded in his experience and expertise from Pepsi-Cola. Fact: you can’t market technology like you can soda pop. And lots of marketers don’t understand that, which makes life for technologists a challenge.

Some see Sculley’s failure as an example of why marketing is bad. On the contrary, it is a counterpoint to the value of the brilliant marketing of Steve Jobs, even for technology companies. Perhaps especially for technology companies. And the message holds whether you like Apple or not.

“Markets without marketing” is really just sales. It is nothing new.

Any time you have a market–anywhere numerous transactions occur–good marketing can help a company make better decisions and communicate more clearly. If you just have one-to-one relationships, absent a market of any kind, marketing is irrelevant. And you don’t have a market. That’s just non-markets without marketing. Also nothing new.

But when you do have a market, it pays to try to understand the market as a medium for trends so that you can better predict the future and have more useful and productive conversations with people in that market. If instead, you treat every conversation as a new conversation, without connection to your own history and reputation for creating value, and disconnected from the lessons learned in your previous conversations, you might as well be a neurotically forgetful door-to-door salesman of inimaginative, generic products. Keeps you busy, but it isn’t real effective.

No matter how you reach your customers, markets require clarity of communication. Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of advertising in the world. For it to work, people need to be able to rationally understand your product, emotionally resonate with the value you provide, and have easily repeatable stories that communicate the right message about the right people. In short, you need a good brand. And without understanding the market as an aggregate, you cannot create a viable brand, because doing so creates either something solipsistically suited perfectly to your own internal delusions or designed for just one customer. As soon as you extend into an understand of how your brand can catalyze and energize multiples of people, you are doing marketing.

I am a huge fan of D.B. Holt’s How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. He presents an excellent analysis of how real-world brands established themselves as icons in our culture, including how many of them struggled along the way, with misteps and mistakes that often left them disconnected from people who really cared about their value. But when communications link credible, compelling value with the right audience using stories that resonate with meaning and cultural depth, brands become icons and sales skyrocket. And it doesn’t need anything more complicated than a good conversation to start the ball rolling.

No matter how disintermediated you make the markets, people must make a final decision about buying or not buying. That decision rarely comes down purely to price. People incorporate a wide range of factors when making a purchase and at the end it boils down to whether or not they trust that purchase to create more value in their life than any other option, including buying nothing. That trust is a reflection of the brand and their purchase an expression of faith in that brand.

What I think we all really want are markets without stupid marketers and bad marketing. Now that’s a noble goal, but I don’t expect we’ll see it any time soon. Luckily, we are seeing increasing velocity in the marketplace, and that at least, should help weed out the marketers who can’t keep up.

In the meantime, I’ll throw my support behind removing the dividing line between “the business side” and “the technical side.” Everyone should be part of the marketing conversation. Technologists who don’t understand the market are just as dangerous as marketers who don’t understand the technology!

Adrants today turned me on to a great AdFreak interview with Gene Simmons, the leader of the (former) mega-band KISS:

Interviewing famed KISS bassist Gene Simmons and how he’s taken what was once just a rock brand and turned it into a successful global brand. Alison says there wasn’t much tongue wagging and there was no blood spilled. All in all, a good interview.

A successful global brand, indeed. One that knows how to wag the long tail. KISS was selling lunch boxes long before the Internet, but their records never dominated the charts. They always had a great reputation as a live act and merchandised at every opportunity.

Gene and the guys created an iconic franchise that is not only withstanding the long tail of time, it is extending the into the long tail of just about everything else, from coffee houses, condoms, comic books, even a new fragrance line for both men and women.

Gene closes the clip with :

So when we do KISS comic books for example, there are no guitars. It’s not about guitars. It’s something much bigger.

He’s absolutely right.