An interesting story was posted on PSFK this morning. It reads:

Is it Time to Kill Markd?

We launched Marktd, our ‘marketing news by marketers for marketers’ site, about a year ago. It’s built on a Digg like system where stories get voted on and the popular ones rise to the top.

The site now has 4,200 user submitted links on all aspects of marketing and advertising. And traffic is ok. But we’re thinking about killing it because:

* In the real world, people don’t seem to be compelled by the status of being top ‘Digger’. Maybe it’s something about already having perceived real world status.

* It’s not useful enough.

Would love to hear your thoughts on what we should do - in the comments section.

The comments coming in are telling. One reader states “I totally agree…your popular stories box will filter most of the more interesting reads. I find myself contributing more (content) to marktd than reading it.”

This is a telling sign. Perhaps it’s because we’re too busy, too important, too proprietary in our thinking or a combination thereof, but marketers and advertisers are not taking advantage of marktd and adding diggs, thus collaborating.

This lack of traffic on a marketing-related, web-based resources reminds me of something Russell Davies started promoting in January of this year. Whereas PSFK started a digg-like marketing tool, Davies started a wiki-like marketing tool called Plannersphere. He challenged his large reader base - mostly planners and ad folks - to build out a wiki devoted to all that is planning. The intro to Plannersphere reads:

We can make it into whatever we want.

I’m thinking we should try and make it a decent resource for planners and brand-thinkers around the world.

Instructions for wiki building are below. Let’s see if there’s any wisdom in this crowd.

Not much wisdom has been pouring in since the site was launched. A few people dumped some readily available resources in bucketed categories like “planning blogs” and “planning awards”, but come on…if one is searching for substance on the discipline of planning, the awards category should be the last place you look. After a cursory search of terms like “consumer generated media” and “WOMM” I came up short. Nothing. This lead me to brashly conclude that there ain’t much here I can’t get on Wikipedia.

Whereas PSFK is considering taking down their site for both financial and logistical reasons (they don’t want to keep working on something that garners little interest), Davies doesn’t seem to mind the stagnant nature of Plannersphere. It’s just sitting there, flat, reminding me that search resources can be a tricky thing to get right.

I’m going to refer to these collaborative tools as warm porridge.

Why warm porridge? Well, I consider Marktd and Plannersphere to be somewhere between something that is big and cold and something that is little and hot.

Digg and Wikipedia are big and cold - and that’s not a bad thing. They have mass appeal and their impact on numerous secular organizations and interest groups is hard to calculate. They are not intended to build communities as much as they are meant to bridge information divides. Collaboration is annonymous. Moreover, they have reached critical mass and will be self-sustaining for years to come. Everyone uses them, regardless of their affiliations. Again, big and cold. Wonderful. At least when I jump in I feel something…

On the other end of the porridge spectrum is the small and hot. My favorite example is Run London that has worked to unite the runners of only one town and have them collaborate to build a network of the best runs through the city. Other examples are smart, local newspapers like Austin’s very own American Statesman. This paper realized it needed to be cold or hot - to hell with warm. Or would hell make warm hot?

Moving on, knowing they were not going to compete against Google News and NYT in the cold category, the AAS opted instead for hot, local news. Their website is continuously updated with all that is hyperlocal, and they have grown their online readership as a result.

Marketers should take note of their own lack of interest. We are a rather fragmented group. Sure, we get together and rub elbows at conferences and award shows (for a list please refer to Plannersphere) but otherwise we keep to ourselves. It’s a dog eat dog business, and collaboration is largely among our coworkers. Hell, we don’t even speak to the other agencies under the same umbrella/parent company; we may be competing against them one day. If PSFK and Davies had recognized this early on, they may have never built their tools for fear of warm porridge.

How does this apply to our clients is the next logical question. Can a brand build a collaborative tool with the objective of becoming cold? Probably not, unless that brand has tremendous reach (or value). The question then is how does a brand drill down its objectives so that they are little and hot?

I would give you examples of how I’m working on this very issue with my clients, but then I would have broken the cardinal rule of advertising and marketing - we don’t collaborate.