This links posting from Adriana contains the following: (my emphasis)

How About Free? The Price Point That Is Turning Industries on Their Heads – Knowledge@Wharton
good if inconclusive article. annoyingly, still talk of ‘consumers’ addicted to free content. Oh boy, ‘consumers’ who also produce and distribute ain’t consumers no more. media industry can’t accept that though. better would be looking into [the] ‘because of’ model – making money ‘because of’ something, not ‘with’ something. That means rewiring business models across the board, which is harder than blaming ‘consumers’ and the interwebs.

The whole thing is right, but the mid-section speaks directly to a issue I am currently addressing – ‘consumers’ who also produce and distribute ain’t consumers no more.

If you run an organisation which exists to produce video content on behalf of an organisation, when a bunch of “video-bloggers” come along you might view them as neophytes who are moving over to the “producer” half of the producer/consumer divide, and who must be brought into line with the controls you have put in place (branding, style, production value) – for otherwise they might present a business risk. You might even try rebranding these video bloggers as “Employee-Generated Video Content Producers” in order to bring them into line and your bailiwick.[1]

Alas, applying control is a mistake because when you move from a hierarchical structure (where “producers” dominate “consumers”) to a graph structure (where all nodes are equal) – then centralised control-structures naturally evaporate and are replaced by open standards to which folk / nodes / the community adhere.[2]

A wise organisation then stops trying to protect its old ways and means, instead expanding into a new role as an enabling function – as suggested above – justifying their growth / continued existence “because of” the way they enable video bloggers to blog better, as a gardener might foster natural growth rather than (as before) a farmer who plants regimented rows of identical corn after ploughing the entire field.

You have to do it that way because video-bloggers are likely not your employees, will walk away if you boss them around – and thus another green shoot dies.

These (again) are all recycling of what Adriana’s been writing about for the past few years; but it’s just interesting to experience it so precisely, and in miniature.

My hope is that the video-bloggers will stand up for the name of “video blogging”, eschew thought of themselves as “content providers”, and get stuck into creating “good stuff” to share.

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[1] I am now the #1 Google hit for Employee-Generated Video – ironic that I believe it a damnable, patronising phrase.
[2] Think DNS. Nothing stops you setting up your own root-servers, but you don’t…