Holonic Advertising and Marketing

[Nascent Dynamics ( )]

I just posted a discussion Holonic Interaction that might be summed up into a point of working together to get the most of our interactions by understanding the technology features and developing some smart solutions. Area Light could be a very intelligent network of people. In particular, I hope those who follow some of the advanced activities and content we are developing will really feel inclined o participate at that level. It's going to take a "leap" for a community to learn how to get the most of social networking by working together to serve eachother's interests. It's not necessarily just something you can say you will do.

The technology only goes so far and there are pro's and con's that need user behaviors to fully benefit from. I mention Ning has put a lot of thought into what they have created for us. I comment more on this on our group, The Next Big Ning on my discussion, Pro's and Con's with the Ning Platform. For purposes of this conversation I will just say the potential of this platform is built on some intelligent risk taking in design. There is more empowerment and free will. This can lead to some pretty noticable disorder and dissatisfaction. At the same time, if you pay attention to the underlying possibilities and make constructive use of the opportunities then you can accomplish some things we seem to only be touching the tip of the iceberg on throughout the internet. There's a lot of free technologies out there. The phenomena is changing the game of how people interact personally, professionally, and organizationally. As far as I'm concerned, I'm inclined to influence Area Light to the cutting edge of this.

I'm going to be discussing this extensively. For now I'll just propose a couple of items i intend to cover here. Check out the advertisement we currently have from the Google Ads. I may take those off at some point if my profit model kicks into gear. For4 now though, I like them there. It serves my interests on a lot of levels. If you get a chance, look into these adserver technologies. I was first impressed when I noticed how the ads are targeting the content on particular pages. For instance, I've got a group where I discuss soccer and see soccer ads. Our main page has different ads that suggest social networking resources. It's not an exact science and I think they rely on some algorythms and such. Google's Adsense is a way for sites to make money and I think their is some selectivity -human decision built in at the front end. Page owners can probably also choose certain ads. Advertisers can probably choose target markets/ pages. There also seems to be somewhat of a bidding process to get on the most popular pages or specific pages of choice. Let me throw a ball at you now...

What if we as a community took a proactive interest in the advertisements put on? I mean to say I have the intention of exploring a lot of these advertisements and perhaps organizing some details of my experience looking into them for the benefit of my members. I don't know if that increases the value of our pages if ads are clicked on. Wouldn't you want your ad posted in a community where there is a greater probability of beingt clicked? You can go to a page that has 100K views per month and never get clicked. If you pay 10 bucks to get put on that page, then why not pay that ten bucks for the click? Or, why not pay that 10 bucks for the click and the feedback/ extended promotion?

I'm kind of outside the box and see these ads as a value for now! Now what I want to be able to do is increase the value of this community to potential advertisers. So if I'm successful with this, then i can say definitively we have a great chance of developing a profit model through advertsiements. i'll take it a step further and suggest we want to be selective in who and what is advertised here- thereby serving our members that much better. Wouldn't this require and advanced level of engagement between members, marketers, and site management? This is kind of what I'm getting to with Holonics as a concept of cooperation and autonemy.

Even further, I've got a group concept to see businesses join as amembers and advertise their businesses through networking directly with their markets. It's a bit crazy to suggest that activity is going to be the new differentiator when most businesses will look at you and say they don't have the time! They are used to paying for finished productions- spots. We'll be offering them a new medium and hopefully a more intelligent and satisfied consumer base- for free. If they are any good with their promotional interaction- it's interesting, exciting, passive, and rewarding to those who might look in- then word of mouth will propel their advertisement/ marketing.

Now I'm going to offer this for free, but i want to add I am going to want a special group set aside to promote those businesses who donate to and sponsor Area Light. The Community Sponsor Spotlight is the group I will keep featured for this. It will necessarily require some advanced behaviors from the members in that group because the advertiser could potentially change each day while the shell of the group and it's discussions/ comments/ and member base would remain the same. This is all in the realm of holonics folks...more to follow!

[Nascent Dynamics ( )]

I had a little exercise in mind to revisit this subject. It's not all inclusive of the concept, but a good starting point nonetheless.

I've been paying attention to some of the strategic promotions going on in other sites. There are generally a few classes of operations that come to mind. One is the stand alone attraction of a site people expect should take off with a lot of traffic. People put together a site with some great idea and then hope to attract a lot of traffic and corresponding advertisement revenues. Another class is the site proprietors. Some poeple have some product or service to sell so they use their site as a lead in to the sales process. I've even seen one site try to sell members on getting listed on their main page where the expectation was a lot of attention would be brought to those advertisers. A third class I see is people who are focussing on building relationships with members and using that as part of the public relations for their business.

Now I'm not criticising any or all of these necessarily. I've toyed around with ideas of my own and am no exception to considering these avenues. The hammer hasn't fallen either. These options or some derivitives are still on the table. I just wanted to set a context for the idea I'm going to present next.

Let's say someone asks me what product and vendor I would like to see advertised here. I might say I like Oakley. From there, we might look at contacting Oakley to see if they would be interested in representing themselves and their products here. Now I'm not just suggesting the use of banner ads either. I'd like to see a representative of the company here interacting with the community and setting themselves up to interact in person with their potential market. To get that level of involvement from a business, I think you'd have to be offering more than any of the above classes of strategy I had mentioned. What could we offer as a collective group of consumers? What could we offer as a collective group of peer member networkers? What could we offer as a collective group of other businesses- some of whom might be able to distribute the products- others who might actually be in direct competition?

If we could organize ourselves in such a way as to make it attractive enough for a company to join our network, then maybe we would find ourselves teaming up to outreach, meet, greet, and support them as part of a turnkey solution. At the organizational level, we are starting to touch on the idea of this social network as an intelligent modern enterprise. At the professional level, we are starting to allude to the idea of people showing what they can do by putting some of their skilled time and effort into initiatives here. On a personal level we would be breaking some new ground I think in asking who we would want represented here and then taking the steps to deliver that event as a service to the individual member level.

Obviously, a world of questions and obstacles comes up that would probably need to be addressed before anything like this happens. My point is without the cooperation of the community, any conventional strategy is essentially a non-point anyway. However, the potential of intelligent self-organizaing markets is a possibility that could rewrite the terms of engagement and, even though it may be a hard methodical challenge to overcome, I do believe those problems can be solved realistically.

Now I know i'm not a very good writer and I'm probably not doing my own idea justice here for you. That's where we might call upon the talents of professionals who might be better at that sort of thing. Presenting the concept of collaborative promotion/ marketing/ advertising to a company is a whole other level that might require some advanced skills from highly experienced professionals. I just intuit it can be done. On the conceptual level, I feel I can at least get the main points across for others to work on.

At the end of the day, though, we need to be able to show some merits to the deal. That is, if we invite a vendor in, then we should at least be able to deliver some purchasing activity to them that excites them about the system. So we might need to organize the demand in advance and come to some forms of agreement to direct our purchases to that retailer/ vendor if they do join. This is possible too in my mind. Think about products- even name brand- that you already buy anyway. If you reach out as a consumer market to them, then they don't have to spend as much packaging, advertising, and distributing their products. From that marginal savings and alongside the technology we're using, they should be able to cut us some breaks in terms of cost while delivering with far superior service than we could even expect.

Now if we are really sharp, we're going to be exploring companies that are already incorporating community aspects to what they do as well as technology platforms. It's easy to disqualify a conventional opportunity we might suggest when they could say, "We're already doing that. Go to our site." However, if we are representing a self-organizing demand with all the support to make it happen AND we are also adjusting ourselves to adapt and integrate with the investments they've already built in-then why not?

Go ahead and take a look at my example in Oakley. For one, just the appearance of the site alignes to their site. Check out their community with videos pertaining to sports culture and so on. We're already opening to sport related subjects here. Check out how you can customize your own pair of sunglasses. That customization is an aspect of modern business I'm personally specializing in- so you can see it emerging as a theme for how i social network here. What I really love is their methodology to start with what they want to make, and in some cases inventing the technologies to make that happen where they don't exist to make it happen- rather than limitting themselves to what is available as a determinant to what they can make. That's right along the lines of what I'm proposing in social networking behavior.

More to follow.

[Nascent Dynamics ( )]

Just a quick thought on this today. There is obviously a cooperative marketing and networking concept some businesses use. Check out our recent video/ group Euro Cafe in Chico. Here you see a business that networks with organizations, small businesses, and even art communities. Sure this is one level of holonic marketing. However, it's not the end of the story.

Take into consideration what major internet platforms like Microsoft present. They offer a lot for free and take it upon themselves to be or refer to everything someone might want to find when they are online. The one stop shop concept adds equity to their own advertisement means. If you can claim a market share of online traffic- and these people all go through you on their way to whatever, then businesses may find it appropriate to team up with them and copromote or advertise through them. That's not the end of the story either. Everybody latelky seems to be talking about adsense or link sharing. It's nothing new and there is more that can be done.

In Area Light, we are creating a market community that includes both businesses and consumers on an interactive and equal level. Personal users can support the site by being involved which obviously makes it more attractive for businesses. Businesses can do their part to make this community great for basic users. There is a big issue we make a point of in not upselling. So the conventional forms of selling/ advertisement shouldn't really apply here. Let's say you sell coffee. If you help promote Area Light, then people who are already your customers can get something new and beneficial to them beyond you. If you promote it outside your business, then people might join for the casual benefit. Nice to know they learned it from you, you won't be pushing your business on them, and you may even open up to markets you have yet to find- who might otherwise not normally be interested in coffee at first glance.

So plenty more to follow on this project. We're also talking about the idea of customers requesting association with vendors/providers/ products/ and services of choice. So as an end-user, in order to get what I want, the way I want, it serves my interests to promote the community in the various ways it can be done to that end.

[Nascent Dynamics ( )]

I recently posted a discussion on the Holonic Manufacturing Systems forum titled "What?!" that talks about a simulation between markets and producers (brought up in a neighboring Lean forum. I'll just post the link for now to the group, but plan on discussing it here later when I have time. http://finance. groups.yahoo. com/group/ holonics/