These days, this simple goal and strategy approach is no longer so effortless and the term ‘consumer’ is not as relevant anymore. Instead, consumers have become users and the distinction between users and producers is fading. Users become ‘productive users’, resulting in what we call: ‘produsage’.
Produsage is the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement (produsage.org). Here all participants become users and producers of informa
tion and knowledge in the many-to-many communications media. A good example of a site on which this happens is Digg.
A first consequence of this constant content creation is selection and evaluation. This means that it helps producers, marketers and advertisement companies by informing them about (the qualities) of their products.
Another consequence is that the users help advertising companies by forming groups, which are way easier to target.
And the last consequence is that there emerge attractive profiling communities for advertisers, forming marketing niches (Van Dijck – Nieborg – Manifesto’s).
Of this phenomenon, I could give you an ever-long list of examples, however I picked out the most obvious ones, which we all can relate to.
The first one is Facebook; we all have seen the advertisements on the right hand side of profiles, giving us information on products, which should be relevant to us (however, it doesn’t always work out that way…). There we can find a ‘like-button’, which - if you click on it - ads a person to the amount of likes and also ads a topic in your ‘interests’ list. This is a good example of helping the marketers out: all they have to do is make a facebook page, advertise it, and cross their fingers, hoping people are going to like it. If they do, they are helping you spread the word, for free!
Another way of helping the marketers out is just by posting a comment, a picture, a video… on your own or someone else’s wall, adding free advertisement.
The same goes for Twitter, in posting a tweet about some product. Whether it is positive or negative, it is giving attention to the product, spreading the name. Moreover, if the comments are exclusively positive, people will become suspicious. It is better to have a negative comment once in a while to make the comments more credible.
The world famous Wikipedia is also an excellent way in which users (or better, ‘produsers’) add value to a product, here by collective intelligence. A good example is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca-Cola where you can find information about the products, the history, criticisms and campaigns.
Furthermore, Amazon provides us with a good example of produsage: the users add information to a book in the form of reviews, which other people can read. According to the amount of views and the ratings of the review, this book will get higher rankings in the search results of other users, making certain books more and more popular.
Youtube is another great example of produsage in action. People post videos containing products, referring to products or even about products. A famous example of this is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM where people show what great effects you can achieve mixing Coca-Cola with Mentos, indirectly advertising both products.
A last example of how produsage helps the marketers out, we can find in search engines like Google. Every query you make gets remembered in the form of metadata. This way search engines can find out which websites are relevant and good and which are not. According to the amount of clicks, the websites will score higher in the rankings when someone types in the same keyword. In this way every person’s pattern of searching changes the outcome of searches of other people.
Produsage, as talked about above, has many advantages. However, we must not forget that there are also disadvantages attached to the phenomenon. People can give you free advertisement, but can also talk negative about your product. The advantage is that there is room for discussion and even though it’s negative attention, it is still attention. However, it can have disastrous effects too, as seen last year with Kit Kat. More information on the messages being posted on social network sites about Kit Kat you can find on http://infegy.com/buzzstudy/nestle-kit-kat-palm-oil-facebook-what-happened/ and on http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/nestle-kit-kat-palm-oil-crisis-greenpeace-uses-facebook-youtube-2595022.html.
A final remark on produsage, which we need to remember, is that it is all done for free. People add content on the Internet and advertisers, marketers and search engines like Google make money out of them. Furthermore, it is mostly the white-collar intellectuals who add content, the people who are not so rich and are bored behind their computer at work. This means that the information we get is mostly coming from the same segment of people, which implies that the Internet is not as democratic as it seems to be.
VanDijck and Nieborg, Wikinomiks and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos.
Produsage.org
http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm
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