Brands Not Microchunks

Mark Pincus has a rebuttal to my Future Of Media posts.

He says my focus on microchunks and syndication is "too much web 2.0-laide".

Mark makes a bunch of great points, but I don't think his views and mine are mutually exclusive.

As Rob Hof points out in his post on the subject, brands like "memeorandum, Digg, and no doubt many others to come" are being built out of microchuncks that are syndicated.

If you want to build a next gen media company, I think you'e got to do both my plan and Mark's at the same time.

Comments

[Jackson]

Web 2.0-laide? What the? Is that like Kool-Aide? Farm Aid?

[Nicholas]

"you've got to do both Mark's plan and mine at the same time": exactly.

great media brands do lots of things simultaneously: they create content, filter content, and aggregate content.

and yes, now they ought to microchunk it, too: some of it, some of the time -- but not necessarily all of it, all of the time.

[Brian Phipps]

You make a good point about syndication and brands. It's important to understand, though, that to be successful a brand must syndicate more than just its name, or a fabricated aura. A brand must syndicate value customers can use. This happens on two levels: between a company and its customers, and (more critically) between customers themselves, with the brand serving as creative catalyst. Web 2.0 (or whatever we want to call it) will play a decisive role in this process. It will change the very landscape of brands.