Category Archives: Markets and Communities

Business Models, Creative Business, Markets and Communities, Past Events

How can creative businesses be both ethical and profitable?

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The relationship between cultural value and economic value lies at the heart of the creative industries and is crucial to the lives and work of every artist and creative practitioner. The value that creative businesses aim to create is not only financial, but also cultural and social and they are often motivated by strong ethics. This has a significant effect on how they function as businesses.

It is however a complex and varied relationship, much contested and, perhaps, often misunderstood. David Throsby attempted a thorough examination of this relationship in Economics and Culture.[1] It is also central to more recent research carried out by NESTA[2]  and the AHRC [3] .  Such enquiries and analyses have begun to develop a more expansive and richer language and set of concepts for thinking and talking about the connection between cultural and economic value. Our discussion panel ‘How Can Creative Businesses be both Ethical and Profitable?’ (University of Greenwich, 3/5/17) sought to contribute to this ongoing discussion, with a particular focus on social value, understanding the latter to constitute an important form of cultural value.

The three contributors to the panel each occupy a particular position with regard to cultural and economic value:

Sheeza Ahmed Shah is the co-founder of The Up Effect, a crowd funding platform for social enterprises. Before they accept a business onto their platform, The Up Effect staff scrutinize its business and social impact plans to determine whether they are mutually supportive and add up to a coherent package. They are looking for businesses with a clear social purpose, which also have a viable and scaleable revenue model. Sheeza is clear that social impact is only achievable and sustainable to the extent that a company can make money and grow.

Seva Phillips manages NESTA’s Arts Impact Fund, which supports cultural organisations in developing their social aims and making sure that the cultural value that they create has social impact. Seva stressed that, to be successful in this endeavour, organisations need to be clear about motivation – why they want to achieve a social impact in the first place, outcomes – what exactly the change is that they want to achieve, and accountability – how they will evaluate whether they have achieved these outcomes.

Florence Magee is Head of Artist Development at SPACE and Programme Manager of the London Creative Network. Her role is to help individual content creators, such as artists, photographers and crafts people, to strengthen the sustainability and increase the capacity of their businesses. The majority of people she works with do not currently make a living from their creative practice alone, but sustain it financially through income from other work. Sustainability and growth in this context mean helping people to maintain their arts practice and to develop its profile, but not necessarily to derive their main income from it.

Our panel thus represented a broad spectrum with regard to the aims, objectives and context of cultural production with a social purpose and it became clear that certain aspects of business and creative production mean different things in different contexts. While Sheeza’s platform helps companies to grow in terms of scaleability and expanding their size and customer reach, for the individual cultural content makers that Florence works with, growth does not so much mean expanding the size of the company (many of her clients are sole traders) as increasing the cultural value of their work – in terms of their profile, the venues in which they exhibit, the publications in which they publish and so on. This increase in cultural value, she points out, is what will increase financial value. Furthermore, while the companies who crowd fund on The Up Effect explicitly define themselves as social enterprises, most of the practitioners who Florence works with would not categorise their practice as having a social purpose, despite the fact that ethics and politics may deeply motivate their work and how they approach it. Their values may be embodied and expressed in their work but they would not generally produce a specific plan for the social impact of their work. Social value is likely to be implicit rather than explicit.

At the same time, Seva pointed out, ethics is becoming something that consumers and audiences want to buy into. Ecological sustainability, fair trade and employment practices and social activism have the potential to translate into financial value and to be advantageous to a company in the marketplace. Large corporations are as aware of this as are social purpose startups. This is why Bank of America Merrill Lynch are investors in NESTA’s Social Impact Fund.

Both Seva and Sheeza stressed that social enterprise is in fact becoming a crowded market and it is vital that part of the social impact that a social purpose company achieves is to tell its story effectively and to make this story a central part of its brand. At the same time, this story needs to genuinely reflect the core mission of the company, not be simply a marketing strategy. This is not easy to get right and is something that large corporations often get wrong in social media campaigns, as Colette Henry recounted in a previous Creative Conversation. There are, in general, some obvious pitfalls inherent in the monetization of social value and care must be taken to get the balance right.

Another issue that arose in discussion was the lack of equitable reward structures to encourage the development, sharing and exploitation of original and innovative ideas. Creativity and innovation are buzzwords in contemporary culture, not only in the creative arts, but in government and across all business sectors. However, it is often the case that, while artists and other innovators generate cultural and social value through new ideas and practices, the financial value is realized by other agencies, which have the resources to scale up and monetise these ideas. Sometimes this may be the result of a fruitful and equitable partnership, but, as ideas are not in themselves protectable intellectual property, this is often not the case.

Some Conclusions and Further Questions

As expected, the wide ranging discussion threw up more questions than it answered. Social impact has clearly become a central focus for discussions about the relationship between cultural and economic value. At its most basic level, this is because evidence of social impact has become something that customers will pay for, making it an easily identifiable and measurable signifier of the correlation between economic and cultural value. This is largely a positive development. Adam Arvidsson has written about the way that businesses may become more and more dependent on ‘productive consumer publics’ for their value in the marketplace, giving such publics the power to ‘set the values that are attributed to consumer brands.’ [4]

However, if ‘economic impact, often defined more narrowly than conventionally understood by economists, has become the principal way for proponents of arts and culture to argue its economic importance,’ [5] so too the application of too narrow a definition of social impact and/or an overemphasis on its monetisation or cost effectiveness (an important consideration with regard to the introduction of the Public Services Social Value Act) would be unhelpful. This would have the effect of straitjacketing, rather than developing and encouraging creative and social practice.

At the same time, the prevalence of discussion around community interest, social purpose and social impact could and should encourage creative practitioners and businesses to think more about how relevant this might be to what they do. Many creative practitioners and companies may not immediately think of themselves in these terms, but, on reflection, might find that they do operate according to strong ethics and are creating social value or have the potential to do so. Building this more explicitly into their strategy could help their business and the local and wider communities of which they are part.

Questions that seem particularly pertinent to explore further, with regard to how creative enterprises might practically develop their cultural, social and financial value, include:

    • Cultural content producers tend to channel creativity and develop original ideas at the level of content, while pursuing traditional business models for their sector, e.g seeking public funding, focusing on increasing the cultural value of their work through existing institutional frameworks. Should they perhaps also be focusing on developing original and creative approaches to their business model itself? If so, what might these be?
    • What more equitable reward structures might be developed to encourage the development, sharing and exploitation of original and innovative ideas? How might artists and other creative practitioners develop forms of expression for early stage ideas and creative practices that give them a status as cultural assets with a definable and tradable value?
    • Crowd funding is an example of how digital technologies can be used to catalyze and motivate users to come together to form a customer base that is simultaneously a community. What other ways might there be to achieve a scalable convergence of market place and community ? For example, a multitude of online hosting platforms exist – for websites, video, audio, designs, online stores etc. – to facilitate marketing and distribution of creative work. To what extent are these helping creatives to create viable businesses? Where are the opportunities for increasing cultural and social impact and profit? How might such approaches perhaps address the two questions above?

[1] Throsby, D, Economics and Culture, C.U.P 2001

[2] Bakhshi, H, Measuring Cultural Value, NESTA 2012

[3] Crossick, G & Kaszynska, P, Understanding The Value of Arts and Culture, AHRC 2016

[4] Arvidsson, A, ephemera: theory & politics in organization, Volume 13(2): 367-391, 2013

[5] Crossick, G & Kaszynska, P, Understanding The Value of Arts and Culture, AHRC 2016

 

Digitising Academic Publishing, Local In A Digital World, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing

An Introduction to Two New Mini-Projects.

Local in a Digital Age

What does it mean to be local in a digital age?

This research sets out to examine confluences between the types of communication and exchange networks and constructions of personal & community identity that are enabled & encouraged by digital technology, on the one hand, and physical proximity and location on the other.

Its particular context is the creative industries, taking Greenwich as the overall case study, and, within Greenwich, five more specific case studies, relating to different creative sectors.

Principal Research Questions:

What significance do creative practitioners / businesses / customers / audiences ascribe to their location in Greenwich?

What is the role of face to face interaction (between creative producers and customers/audiences, other practitioners, members of the wider community etc.) in creative arts and events? What significance (personal, social, economic, logistical etc.) do they ascribe to this interaction?

How do creative practitioners / businesses / audiences use digital technology to produce, promote and participate in creative arts and events? What significance (personal, social, economic, logistical etc.) do they ascribe to this technology?

As part of this research we are conducting a short questionnaire. If you are local to the Greenwich Borough and have a couple of spare minutes,  please feel free to tell us your opinion.

Click here: https://goo.gl/forms/jeQkJdAKLJRK3Ac33.

Digitising Academic Publishing

How has the digital revolution changed academic publishing?

This research aims to examine the changing shape of academic publishing; contrasting new and old academic publishing models and identifying how digital publications have affected the way in which the public, scholars and students access information. The crux of the research is to present the best possible way for academics to disseminate their work to the widest audience.

The work aims to understand the effects of Open Access on academics, publishers and academic institutes. It will include, examine and assess business models used by publishing companies, university libraries/ presses and distributors, and identify how these entities have adjusted in the digital market place.

 Principal Research Questions:

How should an academic publish their work? – Identifying if traditional publishing has become synonymous with reputation and how quality can be maintained within new publishing models.  

What is the future of the academic publishing market? – A look at worldwide programmes to create universal dissemination of knowledge. 

Should an academic self-publish? – How self-publishing has become an integral part of the industry and why it should or shouldn’t be considered for academics.

How has the digital market redefined conventional publishing tropes? – With the majority of reading conducted on digital devices, how has the market adjusted to maintain consistence and ease of use?

 

Creative Business, Markets and Communities, Past Events

Attending to Social Media: Panel Discussion

This Creative Conversations event, held on 30 November 2016, brought together creatives and professional communicators to discuss how attention works in social media. Our panelists were:

Joanna Walsh (@badaude). Author, editor at 3am Magazine (@3ammagazine), the force behind @read_women and more. Her books include Hotel (2015), Vertigo (2015), Grow a Pair (2015) and Fractals (2013).

Dan Calladine (@dancall). Head of Media Futures, at Carat Global.

Francesco D’Orazio (@abc3d). VP Product & Research at Pulsar (@Pulsar_social), co-founder of the Visual Social Media Lab (@VisSocMedLab).

Colette Henry, Communications Planning Director at Futerra (@futerra), a sustainability-focused creative communications agency.

Steve Cross (@steve_x). Comedian, consultant, trainer, Wellcome Engagement Fellow, honorary fellow in Science and Technology Studies at UCL (@stsucl). Creator of @BrightClubLDN and @ScienceShowoff.

Chair: Gauti Sigthorsson (@conceptbin). Principal Lecturer in Media & Communications, CPDA, University of Greenwich.

“People are the most interesting thing on the internet.”

The chair welcomed the guests and panelists to Greenwich.

Content is endless on the internet, but people’s attention is finite. How do we generate attention in social media? Can you have too much attention? The wrong kind of attention? What do you do with it when you capture people’s attention?

Ultimately these questions are about interaction rather than content. Anyone can put some text, sounds and images out there, but getting a reaction is a different proposition. This evening is about people, because people are the most interesting thing on the internet.

“The labour of accounting for yourself”

Joanna Walsh, the first panelist of the evening, remarked on the relationship between authors and readers over social media, and related it to the popularity of auto-fiction, the blurring of fiction and autobiography by the writers. This puts the figure of the author in the spotlight. Michel Foucault, in his essay “What is an Author?”, defined the author as a function that emerged with the printing press and mass-literacy. This new production and distribution of print gave rise to a demand from the state for someone to be accountable for what was written.

Auto-fiction presents the author as a persona, blurring fiction and autobiography, as in the work of Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?), and earlier in Truman Capote’s work, starting with his first novel (Other Voices, Other Rooms) featuring a cover image of the author himself, beautiful and mysterious, a photo which became Capote’s “avatar”. Walsh noted also that both Heti and Capote work at an intimate level. Both these books are about the part love played in their lives. Heti’s work, in particular, reminds us that disclosure is a performance. The moralism of authenticity demands truthful self-disclosure, which can be seen in the social media compulsion to and reward of self-disclosure.

This translates to labour. “The labour of accounting for yourself” in writing. Walsh distinguishes between writers’ output (written work published) and promotion online, while noting that this boundary is becoming ever more blurred.

“Social media is the domain of the shapeshifter”

The next speaker, Dan Calladine, is Head of Future Media at Carat Global. His career at the agency predates most online media (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter), so he’s seen the rise of the “digital native” alongside the new online media that now dominate.

A key teme for Calladine was how quickly novelty becomes ordinary online. He pointed out that the “like” button is only around 5 years old. Sharing, liking, replying – these are behaviours that are fairly recent. [ref. Without their Permission, book]

Anyone can create stuff online. Fake news (and Facebook’s stated inability to differentiate between them and real news) are an example of the proliferation of content like this. In that, they are related to fan sites, which have created mini-celebs in their own right, and social media celebrities like vloggers.

Social media is the domain of the shapeshifter. Personas are different between platforms (i.e., my Twitter persona has a different voice and content than on Facebook, Instagram, etc.). And sometimes we find those differences out by breaking the implicit rules of those platforms. For example, Dan Calladine’s profile picture on LinkedIn, a picture of a kitten, looks pretty unusual for that platform.

Speculating on trends, Calladine noted that Facebook’s “live video” feature is now being heavily pushed. In a few years we’ll wonder what these platforms looked like without that feature.

Some other emerging trends:

VR (FB bought Oculus Rift and its OS), virtual, augmented reality technologies for being “together” over media in a different way from what we now have.

Commerce will become more social, especially with people becoming more comfortable with sharing their shopping and purchase experiences online.

FB and TV (Twitter and TV), closer links between social media and what used to be called television.

Automation and bots will be seen a lot more in interfaces of all kinds, so that chat messaging serves as an interface for services we’ve had to dea with by text until now. With Siri and now Echo, it is becoming usual to speak with digital systems and to get a response.

“Dark social” (email, Snapchat) is also growing more important.

“All of this is about relevance.”

Following this, Francesco D’Orazio stuck to the topic of marketing, audiences and how his company, Pulsar, aims to be nothing less than an oracle for what people tink, using social data.

The key idea for D’Orazio is relevance. This is what is at stake in all monitoring of publicily visible social media. : Discovering audiences, trends, planning insights (targeting), measurement, category mapping, brand health.

Marketers want attention (lat. attendere, “waiting” in Italian). Attention and waiting.

D’Orazio raised the question of incentives for falsity, of content that is aimed purely at capturing attention long enough to persuade people to click on a headline and to share it. What’s the “need” for fake news?

Topicality: Affinities of audiences.
Expression: Language of the audience.
Value: What is of value to the audience, and what values does the content correspond to or serve.
Timeliness: Moments.
Targeting: Communities.
Engagement: Performance of content, what works.

All of this is about relevance – whatever is on social media has to resonate with people in order to be read, viewed, shared…

“Attention is an exchange”

Colette Henry, communications planner at Futerra, opened with a fundamental question on our topic: Why is attention important?

As infants we need attention for our survival. We have a basic human need to “grab” or “take” attention. But it also serves an essential filtering function – we pay attention by deciding what not to pay attention to.

Attention is an exchange, and if you work with social media, you must respect this exchange of attention. And be willing to let go of it: Control of attention is like a spotlight. Social media enables whoever (not just those who pay) to take up the spotlight.

Ignore this at your peril when it comes to communications strategy. Henry shared some examples of how slippery the controls are over who gets to direct the spotlight of attention, even in well-resourced campaigns. Nestle’s “positive cup” campaign, opened up a lot of discussion on social media, with people reacting to the campaign by asking about the recycling and waste generated by the use of aluminium pods. Similarly, Beyonce’s “Who runs the world?” for a large clothing retailer provoked a reaction focusing on sweatshop labour, asking how the clothes were made and at what human cost.

Brands are not able to control attention, people will take note of whatever they like. A brand cannot “own” the attention spotlight.

Henry pointed out that good practice examples of socia media campaigns shows that brands can successfully give up ownership of the campaign itself, generating positive attention and engagement. For Henry, it is essential for social media communications to “recognise that you don’t own it,” and be prepared for others taking it in directions you didn’t foresee at the planning stage.

“Puncture your own filter bubble”

And finally, on the principle that you should never put anyone in front of an audience after a professional comedian, Steve Cross concluded the panel presentations.

He opened by explaining how to make outrage marketing work for you – the Daily Mail model of science communication and comedy. One key point he impressed ont he audience: Fake “facts” get you lots of followers and retweets.

Also, do your best to puncture your own filter bubble. Are you a science communicator? Why not retweet status updates from kids who don’t like science, and complain about having to do it at school? Result: “Boring people” who take things literally unfollowed Steve’s account in droves.

Cross took us on a whirlwind tour of his events (Science Showoff, Books Showoff), and his Twitter feeds. He tweets in a number of guises, adopting a variety of personas and voices, including tweeting as a naked mole rat.

Concluding with a pro tip, Cross advised anyone wanting to build a following on social media: Get a very good camera. Photos get a lot of likes and shares. Take good pictures of people who perform at your events, they’ll make them their profile pictures, share them, etc.

“Pay attention to get attention”

Some shared themes emerged among the panelists in their remarks. One is that if you want to generate attention on social media and sustain it for longer than the few seconds it takes to find the like-button, you need to find something that people care about. To do that, be open to surprising, random-seeming topics (naked mole rats, anyone?) and pay attention to what comes back to you from what you put out initially, because things change along the way.

The panel concluded with a discussion on the many ways in which social media demands of its users that we construct personas through which to perform our presence. It doesn’t mean that these personas are inauthentic (on the contrary), but rather that they are part of what Erving Goffman called the “presentation of self in everyday life”. This presentation is now enabled in a new way by social media which allow us to perform not merely to our intimates and those we meet in person, but to a dispersed, decentered audience.

Another theme that emerged in discussions was the blurred distinction between true and false, fact and fake – fake news being the obvious example of how social media not only enables but rewards behaviours which generate attention, sensation and entertainment. Is this emblematic of our “post-truth” moment in politics, as well, in which unsubstantiated claims can swing elections?

“We live not in the age of news but in the age of fiction” (Joanna Walsh)

For Creative Conversations, many thanks to our panelists, and to Alex Craft, marketing and events coordinator for CPDA.

Creative Business, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing

How does an Audience become a Community?

Our recent panel on ‘Building Reader Communities’ discussed how and why it is important to think about engaging reader communities.

Our starting premise was that writers, publishers and other creative producers need to engage with their audiences in new ways.

While publishers’ main relationship used to be with the retailers who sold their products, digital technologies now facilitate a much more direct engagement with their audience. This is a great opportunity, but it is also a challenge. Marketing departments are expected to be experts in social media and in building communities and there is an increased pressure on writers to have these skills too.

So how to go about it? Here are five key points that came out of the discussion:

1) Perhaps one thing that needs to be taken more into account is that communities usually take time to build. As Co-Director of Greenwich Book Festival, Auriol Bishop anticipates it will take three years to establish a community around the festival. In order to set it up, she and her co-directors, Patricia Nicol and Alex Pheby, drew on the communities of which they were already part. They all belong to the world of publishing. Auriol is Creative Director of Hodder & Stoughton, Alex is a writer and Patricia is a journalist. However they all also belong to the local community and so, while Auriol knew Alex through her publishing contacts, she met Patricia through the school playground network. With Alex also leading the Creative Writing degree programme at the University of Greenwich, the trio were able to bring into play a powerful nexus of local and industry support.

Sci-fi author, Kate Russell, and Alexis Kennedy, Creative Director of Failbetter Games, both recounted similar experiences of drawing on existing communities to build new ones. As a tech journalist and broadcaster, Kate had a large twitter following and Failbetter Games had a loyal community around their game Fallen London. They were both able to launch new projects with the help of crowd funding from these existing communities. In fact Kate’s project was a novel set in the world of the videogame Elite, a community of which she was herself a member. New communities then built around these new projects.

For many writers, publishers and other creative producers, thinking imaginatively about how to draw on existing networks and playing the long game is the best, most realistic approach to building a community.

2) Communities require not only time, but energy, to build and maintain. Meike Ziervogel, Founder of Peirene Press, testified to the fact that it is possible to build a community from scratch, with minimum reliance on existing networks. As a publisher of foreign language books in translation, which are traditionally difficult to sell, she knew she had to establish a strong brand, rather than rely on selling individual titles. Therefore, although Peirene titles are available for sale individually, the subscription model is very important to Peirene, as it facilitates much stronger reader loyalty. In order to attract subscribers, Meike focused on getting out into public spaces – setting up pop up stores at places like supermarkets and farmers’ markets. She also produced a newsletter, which she handed out at the entrance to the tube. The strategy paid off and Peirene still runs about 80 pop up stores a year to attract new subscribers. Meike sees face to face contact as very important, not only to build but to maintain a community. She runs a literary salon from her own house. Since the house can only fit 50 people, the salons tend to sell out very quickly. But for Meike the fact that the salon is in her house epitomizes the nature of a reading community – which is ‘the private and the public sphere colliding’. A community is something more intimate than a public. A community is something that you choose to participate in and belong to.

3) This brings us to our next point, which is that communities are interactive, dynamic and autonomous. Kate pointed out that communities need consistent and regular input, but it is equally important to offer people ways to participate and contribute themselves. Members of a community will not only buy books and attend events, they will crowd fund projects, spread the word and bring in new members. They will provide feedback and give you new ideas. Dedicated communities want this kind of involvement. They interact intensively with each other, discussing experiences, sharing strategies, organizing their own related events and thus deepening and expanding the experience of the game for each other. Publishers work closely with book groups, because they know how powerful and proactive they are in engaging readers with books.

However, communities also have a life far beyond this original engagement. Community members become friends. Sometimes they even get married. When your community is important to its members, it becomes part of their lives and they own it as much as you do. Communities are therefore also unpredictable. They will not always give you the feedback you want or expect and they may not always do things you want them to do. As Kate Russell points out, communities need to be managed. Yet, if communities are powerful and proactive, they will never be fully controllable.

4) Nevertheless, communities are a valuable business asset. Both Meike and Alexis were clear about the fact that their businesses depend on their communities. Alexis recounted vividly how his business struggled to survive financially on their original interactive fiction Fallen London. In a final effort to make the business work, he and his partners launched a crowd funding campaign to produce a videogame, Sunless Sea, which is set in the world of Fallen London. They found the Fallen London community keen not only to fund but to promote the game. Failbetter Games’ business model relies on this community. They operate a freemium model, in which people who participate for free in Fallen London pay for additional content and spin off experiences, such as Sunless Sea. Sunless Sea has also reached a whole new audience and expanded the community. The ability to beta test prototypes through the community is also highly valuable to the company.

For Meike too, it is this loyalty felt by the community to something bigger than a single work, in her case the Peirene brand, which holds the key to her business.

5) At the same time, communities depend on trust and mutual respect. When your community is your business asset, you obviously value it highly. But how do you maintain the balance between the values of the community and the values of the market? As Auriol pointed out, this is sometimes less of a conundrum for small businesses, like Failbetter Games and Peirene Press, or for writers like Kate, who are likely to share the values of their community and engage with them in a very direct way. Although many people who work within mainstream publishing are also passionate about what they do, it may be harder for a large publishing business to get the balance right. As Kate stressed, being authentic is vital to building a successful community. When communities build around a story world, a brand or an individual, it is because people feel it is something they can connect to, which is genuine and which has its own unique identity and integrity.

To hear more from our panel watch video clips here

You may also be interested in our next ‘New Space of Publishing’ panel on ‘The Writer as Catalyst and Collaborator’

Business Models, Markets and Communities, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

How to Build Communities – Speaker highlights

If you missed our Building Reader Communities Panel on 2nd March 2016, or want to revisit the discussion, wise words and valuable insights from our speakers can be found below. (You can also read a short report on the key insights we took from the event here)

Sci-Fi author Kate Russell shares her experience of community building and gives her 5 rules for building a digital presence

‘It takes 3 years to establish a community’:  Auriol Bishop, Creative Director of Hodder & Stoughton, and writer Alex Pheby discuss their experiences in publishing and as co-directors of the Greenwich Book Festival.

‘Community is a tangible business asset’: Alexis Kennedy, Creative Director of Failbetter Games.

‘Reading communities are the public & the private sphere colliding’ Meike Ziervogel on building a community around Peirene Press.

Panel discussion on building communities in publishing, interactive fiction and games

Business Models, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Why do reader/user communities build?

We used to call them ‘the audience’ but now they don’t behave as we expect audiences to. They’re active, they’re vocal, and they’re engaged. They have multiple options and channels, voices and media.   They want do everything and have a say in everything on  their terms. And many of them don’t want to pay for it by following the traditional publishing business models.

We are all the audience for something. We live in exciting times as an audience, we are being courted and sought after with suitors from all forms of media. We are encouraged to enter and explore created worlds through multiple entry points. Using American TV show Fringe as a case study Mélanie Bourdaa discussed how audiences engage across multiple media  to follow story arcs in ‘Following the Pattern’: The Creation of an Encyclopaedic Universe with Transmedia Storytelling.’ A key, and very influential strategy and theory she suggests  is Henry Jenkins’ Transmedia Storytelling . It allows us to engage with a writer/designer’s vision on multiple levels, as much or as little as we want. The key thing here is that we can choose to become really involved, going beyond the ordinary level of engagement for an audience.

It is not all about the audience, these are equally exciting times for writers and creators. You can imagine your story in people’s social media, in games, in books and on the TV.  A story can have an active following, conversations happening in real time, apps can help access it and live experiences can draw in a completely other group of people or enhance the feeling of belonging that a community has.

Authors can choose how they want to share their book experience with their audience; they can choose to have their characters tweet, such as Goran Racic tweeting as his hero Thomas Loud from his book ‘Loud Evolution.’ Not stopping there he has created a whole district in Minecraft where visitors can explore his world. Little by little the book world that we enjoy enters into our real world, to come with us to the office, the gym or while we wait in a Tesco Metro queue.

But at what point does this audience become a community? A dedicated group of people that are interested enough not just to buy the story in its multiple forms but to spend the  time to influence the plot on many of these digital platforms, following the success that gaming has enjoyed where players can influence or even change the storylines within certain parameters . Let’s face it, those of us that are old enough to remember them loved those old multi-branching adventure books where you could make decisions and those choices took you to different pages of the book.

The main problem that authors, designers and marketers face with all of this participation is money – where does all the money come from to create these great experiences. Audiences want so much for free now. The kickstarter model has proved a great launch pad for creative projects. The backers are the people that actually want the creative product and so are happy to fund it. The audience becomes the backers becomes the community.

I enjoyed Naomi Alderman’s, Rebecca Levene’s and  Adrian Hon’s Zombie Run! in this way, an audio adventure while you get fit. I like the idea,  backed it through kickstarter and then became part of a community of runners, though not the fastest of runners I am a happy runner  enjoying a story and getting a little fitter along the way. Intriguing a potential audience sufficiently that it then becomes a community and is prepared to pay for it is a hard model to follow and necessitates creating work with no guarantee of return. This is only one of business model out there that author/ designers/ filmmakers and publishers are using.

Fallen London with its steampunk aesthetic is equally captivating, a browser-based game in which every choice you make changes the storyline. It is free to play but the business model choice to keep it that way means it is delivered in little chunks. However, the community that Failbetter builds through this sharing will potentially go on to buy Sunless Sea, or The Night Circus or buy pure narrative premium content such as The Gift.

For the upcoming Creative Conversations panel on March 2nd , the next part of our Creative Conversations New Space of Publishing series, we start to tease out this very subject. ‘Building Reader Communities’ will question what distinguishes a community from an audience, and if writers and publishers need to build such communities and what they could gain from doing so.  We also want to unpick what the implications are for the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship when the business model changes and the community is so much more in control of the creative product.

Our panellists will include: Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival; Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press; Alexis Kennedy, CEO of in interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games; and a commissioned video featuring Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’, a sci-fi novel based in the Elite Game World.

It promises to be an interesting evening of discussion and places can be reserved through Eventbrite.

Featured image Winter Kaleidoscope by Dr-Wolf0014 on Deviant Art

Markets and Communities, Past Events, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

Building Reader Communities 2nd March

Writers and publishers have always needed readers, but is that enough any more? Does future success depend on building reader communities?

Our next New Space of Publishing Panel explores this question, with the help of:

ALEX PHEBY-2

Auriol Bishop & Alex Pheby, co‐directors of Greenwich Book Festival 

As co-directors of Greenwich Book Festival, Auriol and Alex worked with fellow director Patricia Nicol to launch Greenwich Book Festival in May 2015, with the theme of discovery. Strands included history, politics and music (memoirs from Viv Albertine and Tracey Thorn), as well as fiction highlights, such as Jessie Burton, South London author of international bestseller The Miniaturist. The festival also featured a strong focus on childrens’ books, with workshops and other participatory events, and a showcase of new writing from the University of Greenwich’s creative writing students. In addition to their festival experience, Alex and Auriol bring their individual professional experiences to the topic of building reader communities. As Creative Director at Hodder & Stoughton, Auriol is responsible for creative strategy, consumer campaigns, positioning and packaging across Hodder’s publishing output. Alex is himself a novelist and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich.

www.alexpheby.co.uk
twitter: @alexpheby

 

MeikeZiervogel_portrait3_rb

Meike Ziervogel, novelist and founder of Peirene Press. 

Meike has a background as a journalist, working for Reuters in London and Agence France Presse in Paris and is the author of three novels, Magda, Clara’s Daughter and Kauthar. Meike founded boutique publishing house Peirene Press in 2008, to bring contemporary, award winning European literature in translation to English language readers. Peirene Press specializes in novellas and short novels ‘that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD’ and offers its readers an annual subscription option, as well as individual titles for sale. Peirene Press also produces a newspaper and hosts regular events, including literary salons and coffee mornings. Meike will be sharing her particular approach to building the writer-reader and publisher-reader relationship.

www.meikeziervogel.com
Facebook: @PeirenePress
twitter: @MeikeZiervogel

Alexis

Alexis Kennedy, CEO of interactive fiction studio Failbetter Games

Alexis Kennedy is creative director of Failbetter Games, best known for their interactive fiction game Fallen London, which has a large and loyal community. The expansive community and world of Fallen London provided a strong foundation from which to launch the videogame Sunless Sea and was key to its critical and commercial success. Alexis will discuss the relationship between story and community and how it is essential to Failbetter Games’ business model.

http://twitter.com/failbettergames

KateRussell

Kate Russell, tech reporter and author of sci-fi novel ‘Elite: Mostly Harmless’.

Kate is currently writing her second book with her online community, enabled by TWITCH streaming and linking to the Elite: Dangerous games platform (the fourth release of the original Elite video game, which was a British video game phenomenon in the 1980s). Kate’s knowledge of how to build a community and work with social media is encapsulated in her book Working the Cloud. She will be bringing these insights to the panel via a specially commissioned video.

Our panel will be discussing questions such as what distinguishes a community from an audience? and why might writers and publishers need to build such communities? We will also consider the implications for the writer‐reader and publisher‐reader relationship

Join us to explore these and other questions  on the 2nd of March. The evening will begin with welcome drinks at 6pm in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery Project Space which is based within the Stockwell Street Building. The panel will follow at 6.30pm.

The Stockwell Street Building is located at 10 Stockwell Street, Greenwich, London, SE10 9BD

 

Video of this panel event is available here

creativity, Markets and Communities, Past Events, Research, Uncategorised

What #MakingLondon Made

This blogpost is the final reflection on the event Making London, held on the 18th July 2015 at the University of Greenwich (see #MAKINGLONDON – A First Person Account for full breakdown of the day).

The desire to run a design-led community engagement event like #MakingLondon was ignited by our Creative Professions & Digital Arts department settling into our new home in Stockwell Street, Greenwich. As we became habituated to our new setting and began enjoying the high tech equipment and creative environment, I couldn’t help but reflect on the vintage market place that, on weekends, used to take over this small piece of industrial land with its haphazard collection of furniture, books, clothes and traders. By reflecting on this I began to question what this shiny new RIBA nominated building does to the community here in Greenwich; does it offer new opportunities, collaborations and cultural activities, or is this just what we would like to see reflected in our possession of this space? Are we giving something to the community or displacing it through continued building and development? Through the series of Creative Conversations events we have begun to challenge ourselves, and allow ourselves to be challenged by others, to map out the impact and constellation of networks that have been shifted, altered and re-formed through our occupation of Stockwell Street.

From personal experience we also began to question ‘what does it mean to belong to such an amorphic city as London?’ and ‘whether this alters our sense of belonging and our ability to form connections with those around us?’

mapping

Fig 1: Our original Making London brainstorm considering everything from agile belonging to Pop-ups.

To consider this we have begun by looking outwards to see whether design could have an impact on the way that London is currently being shaped, and to question the relationship forming between building developments, financial markets, local communities and the creative industries. It became a trajectory that sought to give people a voice and space to reflect on and construct new perspectives on their own personal London-based issues. By bringing together a collection of diverse people from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines; from game developers to political activists, from ages 20 to 65, our aim was to use design methods and workshops that would allow them to creatively rethink their relationship to London. These activities, writing and thoughts were spatialised within an oversized map of London. Attendees were invited to inscribe their most powerful memories of living in London, what they value about London in its current incarnation and the growing issues of living in a city that has become filtered through it being a financial hub.

MapLRg

The map data could be divided into four main themes; these are London in Flux, London Debates, Londoners on the Go and London Pride (further analysis of these can be found in the Making London report).

For the full information:

Read the report on our Making London Workshop

Watch footage of Making London, including interviews with participants (5 Minutes)

Markets and Communities, Research, Uncategorised

What does it mean to be “local” in a digital culture?

One of our key themes for Creative Conversations this year is the role of the University in the creative ecology of Greenwich. This brings together key strands in our work: The relation between markets and communities, and how new forms of content, new business models and digital technologies connect in practice. We look to our local community for examples of how this works in practice, and for collaborators.

At our Open House event earlier in the year, we put out an open call for comments on how those present might like to connect or interact with the University. With the aid of some post-its and a whiteboard, we asked those present to suggest how they might want to do that.

Around half the comments were about training, with respondents expressing an interest in the University offering learning opportunities to learn media skills, basic web design and content management, and ways of keeping up with new developments and technologies.

film-design

Another important theme in the comments was an interest in collaboration with University staff, and in mentoring students, and taking on interns/placement students for projects.

Finally, networking emerged as an important topic. Participants mentioned meetups, links with industry, and a sense that the University can offer a social hub for local businesses and organisations.

Chart-themes

We on the Creative Conversations team are very grateful to those who participated, and their input has certainly informed our programme of activities and events for this coming year.

creativity, Markets and Communities, The New Space of Publishing, Uncategorised

The hyper-connected audience

It feels as though Henry Jenkins observations on the potential for participatory, collaborative and convergent media has never been truer. The entertainment properties I find interesting have a life beyond any narrowly defined medium, in fact reaching out into the other media to develop a story gives the work nuance and richness and, of course, further emotional investment from me.

‘In the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms’

Anyone wishing to create or publish anything now has an eye to other media as an outlet. Naturally, as Jenkins suggests, this has led to not just telling stories through a transmedia experience, but to marketing these brands as worlds to be explored. The Blair Witch Project did this, famously, extremely effectively.

The mainstream media industries were always aware that new audiences could be developed by reaching out to them in a comic book for example after a film success.  The decision to develop and fund entirely new  content in order to grow an audience and keep them engaged is relatively recent marketing decision; showing that consumer behaviour analysis and an attempt to understand the deeper motivations behind consumer decision making is being taken more seriously. Jenkins terms this ‘affective economics’.

Ubisoft , no small industry player, released Watch_Dogs, an open world action game, in 2013. The protaganist that we were to identify with was Aiden Pearce, a vigilante who spent his time hacking into the city’s Central Operating System (CTOS). To market this game BETC Paris created Watch Dogs WeareData experiential website revealing a 3D interactive map in which we could explore the cities of London, Paris and Berlin the website through the visualisation of publicly available data, reading people’s live tweets, watching the metro go from station to station, looking through instagram posts. A person could lose themselves for hours in this ground-breaking piece of content that was arguably more interesting than the game it was marketing. And you could join in, adding your own data to this live stream.

More recently Faber & Faber published Capital, by John Lanchester, a story of post-crash London. To market this book Storythings created Pepys Road which  tells the story of the ten years leading up to the world described by Lanchester. Over the course of ten days, they send emails asking questions about your attitudes to various public policies and send you ten new mini-stories written by John Lanchester. These stories reveal a period of public sector cuts and economic upheaval in which we become a part. James Bridle‘s data illustrations position your data within the rest of the accessible live data. Storythings have created ways to tell mini-stories about the decisions both you and the rest of their audience make.

Both marketing activities make use of our own digital shadow, created by our hyper-connected lives, to situate us within these created worlds, these branded worlds. This however doesn’t feel intrusive rather it feels intuitive, captivating and above all interesting. For me the most interesting thing about big data is when it contextualizes our small data, our personal data. We relate to stories and brands when they feel like they have a place in our lives. More and more we are asked to imagine ourselves in these branded worlds, it is a forward-thinking marketing approach, but how much easier is it to do so when we see how we are connected to these worlds and others in them? And how interesting it is when our data is seen through a different lens, one in which we are adventurers, or spies or hackers, or inhabitants of Capital. Media convergence and accessible data streams allow us to inhabit these other worlds easily and convincingly.

We are ourselves and not at the same moment. perfect.