Incubators of creativity

TechCrunch has an insightful article about using the “excitement of social networking/sharing sites” to market real world objects. The post [Use case: How companies can use photosharing correctly] clearly is talking about marketing things (cameras, in this case) and not necessarily services or media (music, baseball, etc…)

“Nikon looked through Flickr, picked out a few great photographers, and sent them D80s, which is a really nice DSLR. They then used the photos they shot in a few advertisements…

This kind of thing makes everyone happy: Flickr gets some recognition as a incubator of talent, Nikon gets some good will, and cool photographers get nice cameras.”

Using the word incubator to frame the context of user generated content environments is particularly insightful. Identifing these sites as viable creative environments necessitates that what is being created has value in both the virtual worlds that is providing the context and material of invention, and in the real world, where it is diffused through diverse new and old media. With the almost daily announcements of marketing initiatives and advertising campaigns springing up in synthetic worlds like Second Life, seeing them from this perspective helps to demystify what is going on beneath the surface and beyond the chit-chat, and characterizes these sites by the creative mass that is truly energizing them.