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A Marketing Lesson from Game of Thrones

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The most important lesson of Game of Thrones this year? No, not that incest is okay if you have buns of steel, although for the record, IMO the Jon/Dany incest angle is far less interesting than the power dynamics their blood relationship causes. The real lesson is what Ed Martin discusses in his piece “Game of Thrones” Transcended Technology in Season 7: people WILL engage with entertainment in real time.

His article focuses on the storytelling, which was excellent and pushed just about every emotional button the audience has, but only hints at what I think is the stronger force at work: the community.

People wanted to watch together. To discuss, to rant, to scream, to ooh and aah, together. No one wanted to spoil, or be spoiled, so the best solution was to watch together. At the same time. On Twitter and in private discussion groups and at home and anywhere else humans congregate, really and virtually.

The power of the shared experience. That is the most important lesson.

And for extra credit, note that GoT feeds its community very well. Behind the scenes videos released after the episodes that extend the experience. The steady drumbeat of press tours and convention appearances combined with the general likability of the show stars. And yes, merchandise.

To summarize:

  1. Create amazing content that engages the community and encourages a desire, a demand for the shared experience
  2. Feed the community well: news, merchandise, opportunities to engage with the brand
  3. Build excitement for the real time experience, harnessing the power of the community to do so. HBO promotion could only go so far. We the viewers built the flames even higher. Fan speculation. Fan art. Fanfic. GoT discussion groups.

It starts with the content, but the secret ingredient is the community.

Photo: publicity still from Episode 7, courtesy HBO

My Social Media and Marketing Mathom Room

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In the universe of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit and LOTR: “Anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom. Their dwellings were apt to become rather crowded with mathoms, and many of the presents that passed from hand to hand were of that sort." (Tolkien, cited on World Wide Words)

Going forward, when I have a small collection of various bits that don’t quite merit a full post of their own, but which I am not quite willing to throw away, I will be posting them to my social media and marketing mathom room. 

Associated Press takes on the fair use standard – The blogosphere was abuzz earlier this week with the news of takedown notices sent by AP to parody web site The Drudge Retort citing copyright infringement. While it seemed to back down (and yet not) from the hard line stance, the AP party line seems to be that verbatim quotations from AP stories on blogs is not fair use, whereas paraphrasing and linking is. This is a complex issue, and won’t be resolved in the court of blogger opinion. It will take the inevitable lawsuit. In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about fair use and implications for bloggers, check out EFF’s legal guide for bloggers (hat tip Kami Huyse for the reminder).

In my opinion, AP is paying attention to the wrong problem. Instead of worrying about the potential lost licensing revenue from bloggers using AP content under fair use, it should be thinking about how to reinvent itself in a new media landscape. In the simplest terms, AP is a news aggregator. It has a lot more competition now than it did a few years ago, and establishing a perimeter defense just doesn’t seem like the smart move.

Some will advance the quality argument — a professional organization like AP adds value to the story that cannot be duplicated by Internet sources or citizen journalists. Buffalo chips. Sure, AP has some stellar reporters who write great stories. But the agency is less and less needed to serve this intermediary role when the media, whether social or mainstream, can more easily go to the source.

Which is why I agree with Michael Arrington, Jeff Jarvis and others who suggest bloggers stop using AP stories as source material. Go to the original source. If you must use the AP information, and really, you shouldn’t need to, paraphrase and link, don’t quote. Unless you want to be the test case in a lawsuit, this is the safer course. And perhaps AP will realize that it should have been more careful in what it wished for.

Link exchange requests: PR’s Amateur Hour – Last week, I advised to never ever ask for a link exchange from a blogger. If you didn’t believe me then, believe my friend and mom blogger Julie Marsh. She writes this week that link exchange requests are worse than PR spam.

Ranking systems– As regular readers know, I think ranking systems are inherently flawed in that they are created by human beings with biases. As long as we know and acknowledge the limitations, they are not that harmful. If we forget that these structures were created by people with a point of view and are generally anything BUT objective, we end up attaching far more importance to them than they deserve. Robert French has a nice analysis of the Ad Age Power 150 that touches on some of these points.

That’s it for this edition of my mathom room.

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Blogging Heroes

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Earlier this week, I ran across a new book called Blogging Heroes.

And no disrespect to any of the bloggers profiled or the author,  I am appalled at the title of the book.

In fact, disgusted.

What appalls me? The use of the term hero.

The book profiles 30 high-profile bloggers. Whether we need yet another book profiling a few top-ranked bloggers, I’ll leave to the market to decide.

But the bloggers profiled aren’t heroes. Blogging PEOPLE, in the sense of the gossip magazine, or Blogging Superstars? Sure. Those are already trivial terms and seem eminently suitable for this "literary" work.

But to call them heroes trivializes the term.

And that really offends me.

The folks profiled in the book have done a great job building and promoting their blogs. That makes them interesting, and perhaps good, examples. But they aren’t heroes.

Blogging heroes are people like Susan Niebur of Toddler Planet who has used her own diagnosis of inflammatory breast cancer, a very rare form of breast cancer that is not diagnosed from a lump in the breast, to spread the word about IBC. To the point of giving up her anonymity in the process. That’s a hero.

 

And not just Susan. Many, many people use their blogs to chronicle their battles against life-threatening and fatal diseases. To help others. Stricken with the disease or simply trying to support someone who is. They are heroes.

Milbloggers. Young men and women thrust into a war not of their making, but determined to serve their country. I don’t necessarily share their politics, but I have no doubt that bloggers like Chuck, who blogs at From my position on the way and who was seriously injured in Iraq last year protecting a fellow soldier, or Jean-Paul, now in his second tour as a Guardsman, are a lot closer to a hero than some business blogger.

Parents, lovers, partners, friends, children, siblings. There are examples all over the blogosphere of  people sharing their sadness at the loss of the loved one. And chronicling the process of healing. Sure, sharing their own pain may be in small measure cathartic, but to do it so publicly? That’s heroic.

And we haven’t even touched on the political. Dissidents in politically oppressive regimes who use the blogsphere to spread the word. At great personal risk. Native reporters in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan who continue to dig for news, at great personal risk. Sometimes death. These are heroes.

Everyday, people put their hearts, souls and beliefs online. And not for link rank. For love. For a cause. That’s heroic. Because it just might help someone else. Whether it is someone the person knows, or someone she’s never met… it doesn’t matter.

So, count me offended at a book called Blogging Heroes. Because somehow, no matter how highly ranked, how popular, how famous…

They aren’t heroes.

At least not mine.

[Bonus Link: Scott Baradell is equally unimpressed.]

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