Today, the line between “audience” and “entertainment” continues to blur. Audiences are changing both the entertainment content and the entertainment business.

In terms of shaping content, there are three main digital audience types: Transformers, Catalysts and Creators.

Transformers take premium entertainment properties, for example the show Heros, or the game Halo, and riff on them, producing everything from new storylines built on old clips, to full-length scripts to new gameplay with old characters.

Catalysts are people who love to comment. They will raise hell online if they see something they don’t like in their favorite show or game, They’re also the first to champion whatever they think is great– telling their Facebook friends and the forums exactly why they were entertained and coaxing others to come along for the ride. Catalysts are also great interpreters, translating confusing plotlines from shows like Lost for the benefit of casual viewers— helping the show writers who rely on digital fanatics to provide the depth and context missing from primetime episodes.

Finally, Creators are amateur producers who finance, develop, produce, and broadcast original user generated content—everything from digital anime to casual games, to Youtube videos to audio podcasts. When it comes to User Generated Content, creator audiences are changing the relationship between producers and viewers; production quality has lowered the bar for even on-air productions; and broadband distribution channels like YouTube have lowered the barrier to entry for everybody. Just ask Obama Girl, who appears in BarelyPolitical’s “I Got a Crush … On Obama”.

Yahoo has said that 89% of its video audience just views the content; 10% of the audience remixes the content; and 1% of the audience actually creates new content.

By the way, clever Transformers, Catalysts and Creators are all finding ways to monetize their digital content – through models as simple as Google AdSense – so should you! When the CW network failed to deliver final episodes online of its show Gossip Girl, after streaming the series all season, fans were first baffled, then outraged. And while the network was painfully absent from online discussions, fans were educating fans in online economics and proposing some great online revenue models.

Update:  Sam Ford, prominent blogger on fan culture and soon-to-be graduate of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium, similarly lists five categories of fan behaviour, another great framework for thinking about fans.

It turns out that people become addicted to cult brands for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults like the Moonies. And that companies cultivate unshakable allegiance through the same basic techniques as those used by, say, Hare Krishna.

Asks The Culting of Brands: Does this make these companies unethical? Or have they simply found a way to attract and retain customer evangelists through the power of brand messages that say, “being part of my brand is being part of something special.” We all know these brands: Apple, Harley Davidson, Prada. Of course, it helps that their products are good, but is their marketing even better?

Ignoring the all-too-obvious link between Tom Cruise and Scientology, how can entertainment and digital brands capitalize on this approach? How can you use cult-building to your advantage?

Piggyback on existing fan communities:

• Ebay is a cult that latched onto preexisting communities of collectors, co-opting the collectors wherever they congregated

Lurk and listen:

• Lost producers used the web as an online audience focus group and took storylines in new directions and to new levels of complexity because of fan support

Launch and let go:

• Second Life lets users create their own economies and democracies, rewarding both fans and shareholders

Absorb: Absorb competitive ideas into your own organization; co-opt the best ideas out there and make them your own — or just go whole hog and buy the company:

• Youtube is a better Google Video

Cult yourself: Launch your own cult; establish a separate entity with its own theology and devoted followers and invest in it so that it steals share from newcomers:

• American Idol and its franchises
• Facebook triumphs over Friendster

Let the cult find you: Release something that you are passionate about and revel in the results; like-minded people are out there:

• Yahoo Groups and face-blindness

Love bomb: Overwhelmingly celebrate individuals who engage with your productions; give them their 15-minutes of fame:

• Zimmer Twins and on-air UGC

It turns out that all of these approaches are practiced by the best cults. I believe that the accessibility of the Internet makes cult-building that much easier.

• The doors are always open
• The participation is global
• The search engines promote you, and
• The shared passions multiply

Of course, if you don’t want to be your cult’s guru, no worries. Fans will happily anoint one of their own.

But markets are much more than numbers – they represent demographics, psychographics, communities and fans.

Check out Henry Jenkins’ current posts about his China travels for a great read. Lead Investigator at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium and author of Convergence Culture and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture – Jenkins has been compared to Marshall McLuhan, and is a FanTrust inspiration.

Jenkins’ post on the differences between teenaged digital media audiences in China and North America hits home: a digital entertainment strategy for China must go beyond simple translation and subtitling.

Some points:

·     Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).

·          Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that “The Internet helps me make friends.”

·     Chinese youth have been very active in helping to translate Western media content into Chinese but have been much slower to embrace participatory culture (or User Generated Content) such as mash-ups and fan fiction.

Jenkins will be a keynote, along with Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival in Austin Texas, running March 7-11, 2008 – three great headliners! The Canadian Interactive Alliance is looking for companies interested in attending this year’s SXSW Interactive. For more information, visit the Canadian Interactive Alliance website.