Good Air: Lessons From We Media Buenos Aires
Our first We Media regional summit was a spectacular success last week in Buenos Aires. More than 250 people packed the auditorium at the stunning MALBA museum for contemporary art (we hoped to see 150). But success wasn’t simply a matter of numbers. The conversations at We Media Buenos Aires refreshed my thinking about how the planet will be transformed through media produced by everyone.
The summit also tested and validated the value of regional We Media events and chapters. We’re eager to conduct others where local interest and local sponsorship is strong. If you’re interested in organizing a We Media event, regional conference or group in your city, contact me through the We Media Community.
In Buenos Aires we stayed true to our curious selves and attracted an intriguing mix of participants from a variety of industries with a variety of experiences and interests. We bubbled and blended into a rich soup of conversation and connections. Executives from MySpace, LinkedIn, Google, DailyMe, BBDO, Ogilvy, Bloomberg, Clarin and many other companies mixed it up with journalists, bloggers, activists and corporate marketers. The interest in the idea of We Media was encouraging. The hunger for cultural innovation and business opportunities expressed through media produced by everyone was inspiring.
In Buenos Aires, most of the conference discussions and Twitter back channel was in Spanish, as was the live blogging within the We Media Community. John Bell from Ogilvy PR wrote two summaries in English (here and here). We’re working on posting presentations to the participant networking group within the We Media Community.
Here are some of my key take-aways:
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Everyone is We Media. Corporate social media is no joke.
Lenovo’s Esteban Panzeri talked about his company’s Olympics blogging site, which aggregated first-person reporting from 100 athletes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Was this marketing, journalism or branded blog hosting? Yes, yes and yes. The old labels don’t matter – the result was an engaging, unique, creative, informative and personal media experience. It just happened to be brought to you, curated and packaged by a company that wants you to attach those same emotions to its computer products. Traditional journalists may sleep well thinking that athletes, independent bloggers and wanna-be journalists lack the corporate mojo to compete with the quality and production values of “real” media companies. They’re wrong, of course, and WAY wrong when the production and marketing is backed by the resources of the world’s biggest consumer brands, like Lenovo. Apply This: We Media isn’t just about the rise and influence of independent voices. It’s about the rise and influence of everyone’s voices – even those sponsored by Lenovo.
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Youth & Social Media: Not So Simple.
Ah youth. Media and marketers love them, study them and crave their blessings, and the conventional wisdom seems to be that if you can figure out how to lock young people into your own private MySpace then you too can rule, er, inform, the world forever. We hear differently when we dig just a little. The teens, college students and young adults we know don’t gush about the net or their phones, they just use them, often not that well. Behaviors vary, media experiences are intensely personal, and I saw this in Argentina just like I’ve seen it in the U.S., Europe and Asia. Young people are not, by definition, programmers, vloggers or Twitterholics. Theirs is a physical world – and really, anyone who has forgotten the physical aspects of being young really deserves a refresher course. A group of young and influential bloggers from Argentina revealed in Buenos Aires a mix of attitudes about how, why and where technology fits into their lives – and about the difference between digital and real friendships.
Milton Vieyra, author of Que La Pases Lindo!, a popular Argentinian blog, described himself as something of a twenty-something slacker. His life revolves around the net – and his friends. He’s online and reading from his computer or blogging much of the day. But then virtual gives way to real. He heads out for late nights with friends. Then he wakes up around 11 am the next day to start the cycle again. Call him homo bloggerensis.
Jorge Gobbi, a blogger and Spanish language editor for the international blog aggregator Global Voices, talked about how the Global Voices community fights censorship and imprisonment of bloggers around the world, and about efforts to bring new voices from the developing world into the blogosphere. But the most famous blogger in the house, Argentina’s Cumbio, talked about parties and kissing. Cumbio, a household name in Buenos Aires akin to Paris Hilton in the U.S., is a perfect snapshot of influence and celebrity in the We Media culture. Or maybe it’s anti-celebrity and she’s the anti-Paris Hilton. Cumbio is a 17-year-old photo blogger – a “flogger” who posts snapshots to Fotolog, the most popular photo sharing site in Argentina. She spends remarkably little time hooked to the net. But she’s famous for organizing parties that draw thousands of people. She also points people to “kissing spots” around Buenos Aires, and she distinguishes between genuine friends and thousands of others who may look at her online snapshots, or call themselves friends online but who are really just names on a screen. You could say Cumbio is famous for doing nothing. She isn’t a musician, athlete or movie star. Her photos aren’t exactly brilliant. She’s simply famous – an androgenous, bi-sexual teen media personality who prefers the label flogger over all others. She channels and can’t help but amplify the harmonics of the net. She’s a natural-born performance artist. The connected culture is her canvas. The product is physical – human experience, human contact, human interaction. The net, for her, is not so much about being digital or celebrating anything digital. It’s about parties, kisses and pictures. Facebook? Forget it. She doesn’t get it and can’t figure out how to turn on its Spanish version, which launched earlier this year.
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Glocalism
While behaviors and technical infrastructure vary from place to place, local business intelligence and strategies reflect global insight. Digital markets and networks in Argentina are just a couple of years behind leaders in Europe, Asia and the U.S. I saw the Blackberry Bold in action – a new model that has yet to go on sale in the U.S. (Yes, it’s slick). Businesses there, including newspaper publishers, telecom providers and marketing agencies, benefit from trial and errors elsewhere. Argentina’s leading newspapers, Clarin and La Nacion, seek to avoid mistakes made by U.S. and European newspaper publishers; mobile carrier Telecom wonders about the future of video on mobile phones, knowing well that mobile TV has not taken off in the U.S. and Europe; and Ogilvy, Lenovo and other digital marketers use networked global teams to design and manage state-of-the-art social media strategies for clients anywhere.
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Perpetual Beta
This is John Bell’s idea, terminology and the title of his closing talk at We Media Buenos Aires. In the digital, connected culture, experimentation and reinvention are continuous, inevitable and essential. I add: The idea is familiar and old territory for consumer electronics manufacturers – they live and die by product lifecycles. That means when they plan the launch of a product, they also plan its demise and what will take its place. That’s a tough concept for media and communications companies – their products aren’t designed to die, change or evolve. But they do.
The definitive blueprint for how our global, connected culture will inform and improve itself through media remains elusive. But my travels, observations and conversations with creative people like those who joined us in Buenos Aires convince me that we’re in the earliest stages of life-altering changes. The outcome – for communities, for companies, for culture and for the planet as a whole – remains painfully uncertain. There’s still lots of work ahead, lots of trial and error – and lot’s of room for investment, invention and creation by smart people and organizations using media to change the world.
