Your consumers' opinions matter more than yours

Frank, who teaches at NYU in New York and consults in cyberspace to companies like MSM and Amazon, etc, started with a slick and detailed description of how he turned a hobby into a business, starting from his freelance days (read: unemployed), becoming an internet guru (read: loser - his words)... It all started with a film clip spliced together for his 17th birthday invite on: 'How To Dance Properly ' featuring himself, well, dancing, badly. He sent it to 17 friends, who sent it on, and on and on... resulting in over a million people visiting Frank's website a day within a few weeks at the time.

"I had instilled what makes an internet site popular: dance like an idiot and don't sell anything!"

He sees his site, www.zefrank.com as collaboration with the audience ... he gets lots of emails! "Those of us who mix things in the online media space don't get a chance to interact with our audience. So he has created all kinds of online games and participatory visitor tasks, like the seven word novel. Examples include: Toilet paper fashion; When office supplies attack - visuals; Haikus for a newly neutered dog - over 10 000 have been received to date; and a sing-along with the singing frog... you have to experience it.

That's all about his hobby, from which he still claims he makes no money. What he actually does to make money, apart from being American - a full time job - is consider how technology is impacting creative development.

How do we teach the new generation who are more creative?

The generation coming up are doing incredible things with technology, but they don't consider themselves creatives, so how are we going to teach them? asked Frank.

"It is difficult to make things for a mass market, there is a high entry cost. So what happens when the entry cost drops to zero? Just think about how distribution has changed? The tools we work with have changed the way design, culture, technology work together."

Consider the following:
1. ACCELERATION - actual tools and the way we input have changed.
2. PLATFORMS are shifting, so what are we designing for? Blogs are different from newspapers; cell phones are not little TVs. "When TV first started, they would read newspapers on the news; the first films filmed a stage play... we are doing the same thing with current technology."
3. CONTENT: How we think about content has changed. Take the plots from soapies and TV shows which are far more convoluted that in the past.
4. CONSUMERS have changed too. One of the real fundamental shifts, says Frank, is that consumers make their own decisions... that started with the Renaissance. "People are calling the Internet the new Renaissance. People are coding their own ideas and substantiating them at a greater rate than every before. People have favorite fonts. The consumer is much more sophisticated. They watch reality shows and know they're being fucked with and they love it..." People are now mishing and mashing their own content. An encyclopedia written by the people - Wikipedia - who would have imagined it, asks Frank?
5. AUTHORSHIP SOCIETY: People spend whole afternoons writing to each other online, on email, in blogs, adding information - this Frank says is the beginning of an authorship society - participation and activity is the new currency.

Act 2: In Which We Loose Control

Frank emphasizes that consumers are now defining what works for them - not the other way round, whether you are a designer, advertiser or marketer. The consumer does not want to know what you think, they want you to know what they think and how they want your products!

A key element is: "IF YOU DON'T TALK TO YOUR AUDIENCE, THEY WILL TALK BEHIND YOUR BACK! The famous Kryptonite lock debacle is now internet legend: the schoolboy who picked his Kryptonite bicycle lock with a Bic pen and then posted the clip in his blog showing how he did it - which was then posted around the world, driving the company almost to bankruptcy before they responded with a recall of the lock. Frank emphasized the value of having conversive mechanisms in place with your consumer upfront.

The fallacy of the bell curve - the bell curve belongs in old marketing lexicon, says Frank. "We look at our audience as having some kind of a normative behavior we can target. The bell curve doesn't work at all any longer, throw it out. When we design, we are cutting off a massive amount of users, i.e., more than half of Amazon book sales come outside of its top book lists. The new idea of design has to do with facilitating a whole new range of hyper users."

Most important to designers: