Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you’re listening to Community Powered, a live series of podcasts from South By Southwest. And I’m here with Henry Jenkins, who’s lovely in purple today. Henry is the director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and of course a favorite person at South By Southwest of many, speaks here a lot. Welcome Henry.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins: Happy to be here.

Susan Bratton: It’s great to meet you finally in person, and a fan of course. So we’re talking about the intersection of brand and community, and what I’d like to know is do you have any advice for brands that want or are considering creating community, what would you tell them?

Henry Jenkins: Well I think there are two pieces of advice. The first is that you probably want to think about courting communities rather than creating communities. That is, I think the idea, most brands are not able to create a community by their, on their own, but what they can do is really study the communities of use that are out there, connect with other communities that are already deeply invested in whatever the field is they’re involved with, understand those interests, and engage with them. So the idea of creating a community around toilet tissue brands or around insurance companies is probably not the way to think. You know certainly, I am a Crispy Cream enthusiast, and so certainly I could imagine a Crispy Cream community for me, but… But I think most products are just not that into you. The second is to get over this idea of going viral, which is sort of treated as a mystified process, a magical process. When people talk about going viral, simultaneously they’re acting as if they still were in control of the communication process, they made it go viral, and as if there was no agency on the side of the consumer. Reality is that we don’t, media doesn’t travel through infection. Media travels by people consciously spreading messages to likeminded people, taking back to their community, talking about the things that matter to them, embedding the brand in their everyday conversations. And that’s what we talk about now is a move to spread ability as a new way of thinking about what, how social media works in relation to brand.  So, so people often say spreadability sounds like peanut butter. Well, if you think about peanut butter, the properties of the peanut butter determine how well it spreads. So whether it’s crunchy or smooth, it travels differently. But so does the act of the person who picks up the knife and spreads it on the bread. So we want to recognize the property of the brand, the property of the communication channel, but also the properties of the communities, the agencies and interests of the people who are passing that content along. So I think as long as you treat it as a mystical process of going viral, you don’t actually look at the other side of the fence, why are consumers interested in taking your brand and spreading it through their social network? What’s in it for them? What are their stakes? What are their interests?

Susan Bratton: So a follow-on to that would be if someone’s just getting started in social media, a brand manager or someone involved in community at a brand, what advice would you give that person just starting out? It’s a really wide world, this whole social media world.

Henry Jenkins: Well you need to figure out what the core communities are that your brand is likely to be inserted into. And you have to figure…

Susan Bratton: How do you figure that out Henry?

Henry Jenkins: Well you’re, I mean, you have to figure out what your product is, what’s its use patterns, who are the people who are using it. The great thing about the web is there’s probably a active visible community around any activity interest that you can think of. And you have to immerse yourself in that community and really get to know how they’re, how they’re, what they’re doing. It’s a kind of layman’s ethnographic project, that is just as an anthropologist comes to understand a community, you’ve got to know who these people are and why they care about you. And until you know that, I don’t think you can actively effectively communicate with them.

Susan Bratton: Are there other things beside Googling, places that you can go to find your communities?

Henry Jenkins: I mean, I think, you know, that’s an interesting question. I mean, right now, the best way is to use a variety of search tools; so search Twitter, search the blogosphere, search Google, search every engine that brings you to sites where conversations are taking place. Listen to podcasts that are tied to the products that you’re involved with. Read the blogs, go to Live Journal, go to, you know, all of the other social network sites, and you will find activity and discussions spontaneously occurring. You don’t need to bring people into your studio and run a focus group now. What you need to do is recognize how this product is used and talked about in the field and engage with the people, engage with your consumers on that level. But you also are going to need to figure out what’s your value at it, why should they listen to you? What’s your point of entry into this conversation? So when I talk to companies they often are saying, “We’re worried about losing control over our brand message.” Well the reality is you lost control a long time ago. That your consumers can take your brand and do with it more or less what they want, and you might stop some of them with cease and desist letters, but you’re not going to stop all of them and you’d be an idiot to sue your consumers. But what you can do is get into the game, and by getting into the game I mean you create a value for that community, you give them something that’s a resource that allows them to talk to each other about the brand that matter, brands that matter to them. You give them things that they can take back to them, and wherever the communities they’re involved with and continue the conversation. And sometimes you can become an active part of that, but just as importantly you give the resources that communication takes place around…

Susan Bratton: Become the facilitator, the platform, if not the integrator.

Henry Jenkins: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. You are a very, oh gosh, very big blogger, you spend a lot of time writing, you’ve authored nine books. What in social media has taken your fancy now? Is blogging still your main thing, or what are you watching? What are you in love with?

Henry Jenkins: I mean, I still love blogging…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Henry Jenkins: I think for me, I’m a marathon runner, not a sprinter. So for me the blog is a better medium than Twitter. I’m just starting to use Twitter. I’m trying it out, but I’m not sure I have the conciseness to be the ideal Twitterer…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, you said you like to write a lot ‘cause it’s too hard to write a little.

Henry Jenkins: Exactly. And so, but also as an academic, what I’m trying to do is bring a variety of communities together that I’ve found are interested in the questions I work on and to facilitate new kinds of conversations. So for me my blog is an experiment in how academic ideas can travel in the culture. But as an academic I need enough time to develop an argument. You know, something Nom Chaunski said was that if you’re trying to challenge established wisdom, it takes more words than if you’re trying to reaffirm it, that he says its hard to put revolutionary messages into sound bites. And I think at this point I’m trying to shake up the existing paradimes by which we’ve thought about them consumers and their relations to producers, and that requires a little more language than Twitter facilitates. Right now what I see with Twitter is Twitter is an attention mechanism. So people, like the bees doing their dance and saying, “Honey’s over here”, this is an interesting place to look. It’s not a great tool for analysis. And so I’m interested in, I get a lot of ideas every week that I can’t write about, so I expect to use Twitter to say, “Here’s an article you should pay attention to.” But to use the blog to have in depth conversations with key thinkers to lay out my analysis of current trends, to sort of develop my ideas in a more systematic way.

Susan Bratton: Well that makes a lot of sense to me. I like the combination of things. I’m interested in reading it, whether it’s 140 characters or 1400 characters, or 14,000 I suppose in your books. Last question for you Henry. I haven’t read your latest book. Can you tell me, tell us all about it just a bit.

Henry Jenkins: Well Convergence Culture is the most recent book. We just put it out on paperback. And Convergence Culture really is exploring, it’s sort of picking us out of a world where we think about convergence in technological terms, which magical black box will all the media flow through. And instead it’s describing a world where every story, every idea, every image travels across every available media channel shaped by decisions made in teenagers bedrooms as much as by decisions made in corporate boardrooms, shaped by the desire of consumers that have the media they want and where they want it, when they want it, how they want it, and they’re willing to take it there illegally if it’s not available legally. And the desires of companies to maximize touch points with consumers. Those two things work together to insure a world, which is profoundly transmedian, and a world where the orients is increasingly participating in shaping the flow and content of the media that touches their lives.

Susan Bratton: So is, is it more of a possible future projection or is it a look at what you really believe is actually happening now in a different context?

Henry Jenkins: A little of both. What I do is walk through of contemporary media franchises, Survivor, American Idol, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Matrix, and now Barack Obama in the book, to try to lay out how they used media and what can we learn from studying these successes that points in future directions media changes take, and so I’m, I’m both looking very systematically at specific practices and experiences around media, but extracting from that to speculate about the directions our culture is moving.

Susan Bratton: Well I’ll be reading that to prepare for our interview on Dishy Mix. We’ll be doing that some time soon, right?

Henry Jenkins: Looking forward to it.

Susan Bratton: Me too. Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Thank you so much for being with us today on Community Powered.

Henry Jenkins: Happy to do it.

Susan Bratton: Alright. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and you can look forward to more great interviews like this one with Henry. Thank you so much.