James Bond Watches Blog

For better than a decade of utilizing the Internet now, it’s been my contention that the ultimate issue was never access to nor amount of information.

We’ve been literally drowning in information since long before the world wide web went mainstream.

Long before Al Ries and Jack Trout observed this as a problem in their 1981 work, Positioning.

The real issue is and has always been about accountability.

Which is the best answer to your question? What’s the best source? And with that, why?

Some time back, in the days of Prodigy and CompuServe, I guess, someone came up with the fanciful notion of participants using “handles” in lieu of their real names. Cute. Maybe even appropriate, in that way that leisure suits were considered appropriate — in their time.

From there it became the norm on forums of all sorts. Official and independent. And since professional journalists (or, at a minimum, stockholders and executive managers responsible for directing professional journalism) so little understood the difference in value proposition between message and medium, it’s no wonder so many of them have followed like lemmings.

Catastrophically abandoning responsible and valuable letters-to-the-editor policies that required signatures, with verification. Desperately grasping for continued relevance, these former ink-on-paper types fell for the premise that sheer volume equated to value.

Credibility be damned.

Ironically, Facebook emerged as a signature game-changer in establishing an online culture where one is penalized for being anything but what one is. Imagine that!

It’s been interesting to watch how this has played out in the world of James Bond watches, with an unprecedented degree of acceleration in 2011.

First with the publication of Carte Blanche, then with the Skyfall news conference, the sort of chatter seen on the Internet forums when Pierce Brosnan played James Bond just isn’t there. Not on the Bond sites, nor the watch sites. Sure, some of the same personalities have returned (as they always will, sans other meaningful social outlets in the real world to indulge them); and some of the more desperate, er, I mean, dedicated moderators are out there trying to prime the pump — with attempts at creative conversation starters. And, in a few sad cases, cynical snipes.

At the same time, the real discussions — by which I mean substantive and credible — are more significantly taking place on:

• Broad social media, such as Twitter and Facebook; and,
• Via niche channels, such as the official 007.com and JamesBondWatchesBlog.com

You’ve gotta attribute a lot of declining forums’ failures to financial frustrations. Even the ones touting themselves as “the world’s most” something or other forums can’t figure out how to monetize their content in any sort of meaningful way. Nor have they been able, for the most part, to cash out through lock, stock, and barrel sale to movie studio x, or watchmaker y.

Get rich quick schemes, as I’ve covered here off and on over the years (e.g., the unlicensed Casino Royale shirt and knock-off Goldfinger Rolex Submariner scams) yielded little more than solidifying their brand reputations as unfavorable and places to be avoided.

As I told the late Chuck Maddox in an early morning phone call some five years ago, wristwatch and James Bond forums even then were rapidly reducing to guess-of-the-hour outlets. That was when, in the case of the 45.5mm Omega Seamster Planet Ocean on rubber strap being discussed, someone inevitably would be able to point back and claim, “I knew it all along!”

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while, I reminded Mr Maddox.

This has been exacerbated by lowest-common-denominator moderation. Posting via pseudonym may have been subject to some accountability when Pierce Brosnan was James Bond when invested, mature oversight had foothold.

But what moderation there is today appears more dedicated to self-serving personal brand creation on the part of the individual moderator. Who gets off the best zinger? like an old episode of The Sony & Cher Show. Thus, they miss the fundamentals that are destroying all they really have: Assured credibility.

For example, just this past weekend, a Google search landed me on a watch forum thread ostensibly responsive to a question I had about original Rolex 6538 Submariner specifications. Not just any watch forum, mind you, but one of those “world’s most” places that I mentioned above. And not a new thread, either, but, rather, one that had ripened over the course of more than a year, pulling all sorts of responses — and praise — from forum regulars.

The thing I’d noticed, however (apparently missed all this time by moderators and site owner), was that the initiating post by bozo-six (not his real name) had only participated twelve times. And always with a link to a site with all sorts of “great information” he’d claimed to have found.

I clicked on the link to that site — as I’d have thought any responsible moderator would have done.

That site is still there, still being updated. It’s a site that sells replicas, fakes, homages, knock-offs, and pick-your-euphamism low-life wares. Thus, “the world’s most” wristwatch-whatever forum is advertising channel #1 for fakes, replicas, and copyright-infringing paraphernalia.

Any surprise that Christie’s or Rolex isn’t out to buy ‘em up at top dollar? Or that Omega isn’t buying banner-advertising there?

Almost a year ago now, Harvard Business Review online provided great help for this discussion in delineating “Pillars of the New Influence.” The summary as it relates not just to James Bond watch news and details, but to information most broadly, can be found in what author David Armano calls “Trust.”

Ultimately trust is tied to influence. The reason we trust our friends, even if they lack expertise or credibility, or the ability to scale their influence, is because we trust that they are looking out for our interests and also because we know them….

He goes on to note that the nature of social media is that trust can be manifest by association of the person we do not know with someone we do know: Trust by voucher.

Nicely, I think that the “James Bond” brand will serve as metaphor in playing this out next year. We’ll see which sources thrive, while others founder on the Internet. Real time. We’ll see questions such as the one we’ve been covering here most recently, re The Lazenby-Bond 6238 Rolex Chronograph whereabouts, to pick a specific example, come to closure.

Personally, I’m looking forward to the test.