Creating Consumer Communication in Online Media A presentation on a research project, Imaginary Organisations 1998-05-11 by Anders Lundkvist

This is just a small documentation to my presentation. It gives you the opportunity to study some of the cases I presented on your known. Remember, as I pointed out several times the techniques, applications and thoughts are developing very fast. Some of the links will soon be outdated. If you want to keep in touch, please send an email  to anders.lundkvist@bat.se

I started out presenting my field of research, where I am trying understand the

• Managing and Organizing of Customer/Consumer Conversation in Online Media.
• Demands a need to to understand the borders and/or the transcendence of  borders, what is beyond the functional organization.
• Implies new organizational roles and functions, as Sys-ops, Wizards, Infomediaries, Cybermediaries

The agenda for todays presentation was perspective on theories of marketing and organization, in combination with Online Media.

If you are interested in what I presented, I strongly recomend that you read the article "Interactive media face artifcial consumers and marketing theory must re-think", http://www.chapmanhall.com/mc/mc0401ind.html, co-written with Richard Gatarski. I also refered heavily to Shelly Turkle and her book "Life on the Screen". 

Problem

The conceptual roles of

• Producers
• Consumers
• Agents (Artificial Consumers)

are changing as production and consumption develop new patterns.

Market Communication originates from a view on communication as directed from the producer to the consumer and use Presuppositions, like

• Producers produce and communicate, consumers receive and consume
• Consumers are human
• Production is separated from Consumption
• Consumer minds are important
• Market places are geographical

Online and Interactive Media bring new opportunities to communication. I also gave you the hint to think of Interactivity not as a characterstic of the media, but rather as an organizational competence, allowing continously conversation within the market.

A few cases illustrated Consumer Conversation:

• My Ski (www.myski.com)
• Megahertz Forum on CompuServe
• Diabetes Forum on CompuServe

If we learned that producers need to learn a lot about Consumer Conversation in Online Media, this process of learning also need an understanding of new artificial actors as Agents in Electronic Commerce.

Agents differ from other software in any of the follwing aspects, they are supposed to be:

• Personal
• Intelligent
• Autonomous
• Proactive

Try some Agents by yourself and try to understand how they will affect the markeplace:

• BargainFinder Agent and LifestyleFinder Agent from Andersen Consulting.
• Firefly, http://www.firefly.com/ is used by Barnes and Noble to help their customers in selecting books.
• MIT Media Lab (Software Agents Group) directs several projects. Prof. Etzione founded together with Daniel Weld from MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab a company called Netbot and an application called Jango - www.jango.com. This technology was recently sold to Excite.

New patterns of consumption and distribution

New applications

• MPEG 3 - Vad ser ni i tidningarna?
• Real Audio - Ekot casts "live" over the Internet. Try nyhetsuppläsare...
• Liqud Audio - New music stores on the Net.
• QuickTime - developed by Apple and used in many applications.
• Or new music in new packages - listen to BetaLounge.

New middlemen in customer communication

• Microsoft Carpoint, 12 000 visitors a day, 500 purchases/ weekdays, 2000 purchases weekends, local dealers.
• Auto-by-tel is another imaginator and interface to the market.
• Amazon.com is linking publishers, re-sellers, customers and authors in a value creating process, using Online Media.

Who is organizing customer communication?

• I used SEBanken and their Internet site to demonstrate some of the problems of managing consumer conversation. The question is of course how you can learn from your customers.

And finally, Virtual Worlds and Avatars are supplementing other artificial actors

• Fujitsu created Worlds Away available on the Net and Compuserve, populated with avatars, graphical representations of humans.
• Look at the things being developed by www.cyberlife.co.uk.

Final Discussion

• Production separated from Consumption?
• Conversation is different than Communication
• Agent Behavior is different than human ditto
• Multiple identities emerge
• Contemporary Marketing Theory lags behind 

The human touch

• What happens when you outsource your fingertips?