(* Source: Kumegirl *)

Kumegirl says...

Several years ago a lot of pundits were discussing generation C. Jake Pearce wrote in idealog in 2006;

“Trendwatching.com says it’s C for ‘content’, meaning Gen C are defined by their production of original material. The bloggers at Digital Hive say it’s all about ‘creativity’—that Gen C want to become co-creators of their world (“Don’t just sell me a car—involve me in designing it”). Tomi Ahonen, a Swedish telco consultant and author, has another definition: C is for ‘community’. He says young consumers walk around with “a gang in their pocket”, continually txting, phoning and pxting their friends and families. “No decision is now made as individual, everything is done in community. Tom Eslinger, Saatchi & Saatchi’s worldwide interactive creative director, says it’s all the above but is also C for ‘channel’. “You can have all the digital devices and creative skills you like, but opening a channel to reach millions of customers and fans marks out Generation C.”” Whatever people thought that C stood for ( the generation that had to deal with climate change, or generation cash) - there was an acknowledged shift.

How that shift has panned out has been best expressed by Nick Gadsby of the blog Dark London in a cluetrain related post

“It seems that rather than businesses becoming more like consumers, consumers were becoming more like businesses. Thanks to the communicative and distributive tools of the internet anybody could advertise themselves and lots of people did. This trend has only accelerated – players of online games form hierarchical top-down organisations, techies develop apps in their spare time, ebay and amazon encourage people to become virtual stores. Even the less commercially minded will cumulatively spend hours updating profiles and uploading photos. If the sprawling chaos of the Myspace profile was the infomercial, Twitter is the streamlined 30 second ad where detail is less important than impact. ”

This is the dynamic that now lies behind what is being referred to as The 4 C’s. Here the 4 c’s include converation, collaboration, crowdsourcing, co-creation, or here or here content, context, continuity and connectivity. Either way, c words are current in web 2.0 discussions.

The final comment from Dark London, “I think when businesses start aiming to be the experts again that then they will be ready to have a real conversation with consumers about what they are doing and what they should be doing because they’ll have an opinion and the confidence to debate its worth.”