Community Created Content and Building Product Brands...

[Kevin]

Community-Created Content

The Artifice group of sites is 'all about' community-created content. It's the central essence of DesignCommunity and Archiplanet. It's a vital part of GreatBuildings, and a significant part of our most professionally-targeted site, ArchitectureWeek, with architects presenting in their own voice, reader Postcards published frequently, and every article linked to this space for discussion, reaction, and expansion.

Our end-user tool site PetitionOnline is provided for grassroots democracy, do-it-yourself redress for causes initially botched, overlooked, or avoided by the established powers. Grown through the promotions of the petition creators themselves, PetitionOnline today hosts tens of thousands of active petitions, each created by a passionate advocate somewhere in cyberspace.

Even the DesignWorkshop® software is about what you can make and contribute - an approachable application tool putting vivid, live 3D, feature-based architectural solid modeling into the hands of just about anyone, priced for access, and with over a million copies of the free Lite version distributed.

The majority of the six million monthly unique visitors to Artifice sites are coming for user and community-created content - all that great stuff you have contributed - and we know it. We're in this together, from the collective blog of the Architecture Forum, to the rising sea levels around our warming planet.

Real Brand Value

At the same time - while great things can be, and are, created by independent local practitioners using only local materials and manual methods - most of design and building for most of us involves many industrial products.

Some of these critical industrial products have the nature of commodity materials, like standard cement for concrete, or general ASTM-36 type structural steel.

Many of the products we specify in building construction are very carefully selected for both style and function. With these products, we often rely on specific products from specific manufacturers for the quality and design we require.

Those brand manufacturers still provide the economic foundation for much of the architecture/engineering/construction media, through brand advertising that also serves to update professionals on available products.

New B2B Ecology

I see a richer ecology emerging in the building industry, where business-to-business (B to B, or b2b) brand advertisers support focused layers of professionally-written and edited material with concentrated value, like ArchitectureWeek, while users, supported by innovative publishers, collaborate together on an enormous diversity of material covering topics with personalized viewpoint, depth, and immediacy.

Here's a column at MediaPost.com that settles down after some introductory material to work on how user-created content and brands can work together. Like most media prognostication, it's pitched more at the "consumer space" than our b2b realms for design and building professionals, so some translation may be called for. That said, you might find it rather thought-provoking.

Mythbuster: Speak To The Brand
by Saneel Radia, vice president/group director of Play, a division of Publicis Groupe's Denuo
http://publications.mediapost.com/index ... t_type=100