How an Open-Source Marketing Lab works
OMI stands for “Open Source Marketing Lab”. I’d like to explain today what that means, and give you an example of what it’s like to work with one.
If you run an OMI, it means you follow a specific protocol1 that makes your work auditable. This standard of transparency will allow for proper regulation in a way we’ve never, ever, had before in our society.
Of course “the bad guys”, the ones that need regulating, will simply choose not to follow this protocol. Some may adopt the label and pretend to be transparent to gain your trust. This is fine. Holding the label doesn’t mean “I am trustworthy”, it means “you can test me in costly ways”. It’s almost an invitation to attack. It will damage your reputation & generate a LOT of noise for you if you are NOT setup to be easily auditable. If you are, it will generate a lot of positive attention for you.
It is a self regulating label.
When I pitched this to a friend he said
it sounds like your thing is “OSINT as marketing”
and I was like, yeah, that’s exactly it! OSINT is “open source intelligence”, Bellingcat is a example. I’ve also described this as “risky marketing”. It’s risky because when you ask an OMI to market something, they do so by opening an information channel into your company/product. Their job is to make it easier for people to find truth about your company. What truth that surfaces is not something they control.
It’s more like: “this company claims their product is good for XYZ - is it? Can anyone who tried it report back please?”
An OMI does not say “we audited this, they are good, trust us!”
An OMI says, “if you want to audit this company, here’s how you can do it”. If you read this, go try and do it, and are unable to do so, then this OMI is either corrupt, or incompetent.
There is no central regulating authority that stamps “true OMI” and “fake OMI”. The protocol is such that you as a consumer can check for yourself.
If you don’t know how to tell whether they are lying, then you should find someone that you trust who is capable of doing the audit, and have them teach you.
I want to emphasize the most important part of this post is the “doubling up” of the mechanisms: the thing that brings you positive attention is ITSELF the same thing that also brings in negative attention if your thing is bad.
It is one action you take that either gives you good attention, or useful feedback.
The popularization of such techniques will shift the landscape because consumers will ask, “hey your company looks potentially really good, can we run this protocol so that more people know about it?”
Companies that are getting a lot of negative attention but are “innocent” can perform this to gain trust. Companies that refuse to do it “out” themselves as having something to hide, or just not being ready for that level of transparency. That’s fine. This protocol isn’t meant to punish anyone. It’s meant to simply give an option to those who are doing good a way to demonstrate that they are doing good.
August 2024, I wrote a short half fiction / half non fiction story about what the world might look like if we started applying this protocol, see: “The first ad with positive externalities”
I have been flirting with the idea of calling this the “hippocratic oath” of social engineering, or a “geneva convention” of narrative warfare.
I think when I explain this people get stuck on "but how do you know if it is ACTUALLY auditable vs it's just pretending it is" and my answer is: you have to know when you are being lied to for you to be able to perform this audit! If you can't, then there's no point attempting to make sense of anything, and you probably shouldn't be reading the news! How do you know if they're not lying!!!
Just ask, "if this were true, how would I know?" -> there is always an answer to that. Take that answer, now ask the company to surface that information. If they are good faith, they surface it. If they are not, they don't. That's it.
The trick is in asking questions that are REASONABLE and simple for a good faith actor to answer. Transparency can be a weapon to destroy good people & companies. You want a level of transparency that surfaces the good, if it's real, and doesn't punish unduly.
I’m a big fan of open source everything. I came across baremetrics and “/open” pages that some open startups had years ago and it opened my mind to the possibilities beyond OSS and OSINT.
It all started in early 2010s when Ze Frank would involve dozens of hood subscribers to create interesting creative projects. I think harnessing the power of the crowd goes beyond crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. Social capital can be alchemizes into every other foot of capital. It is fundamentally the foundational form of capital (in a human centric social world)
I came across roadmap.sh around 2023 and immediately imagined a marketing (product and/or growth) version
Your OMI idea feels like a natural progression in that direction. From build/learn in public to “every company is a media company,” all signs point towards a direction where transparency and antiprivacy are the new norm.
I can see the naive angle where incumbents will have the resources to beat this new test like every other that’s come before, but OSS seems to have a robust credibility moat, but one that is sustained by layers and generations of global open auditors that we trust are doing what we expect them to do.
I don’t have anything actionable or specific to add here, just thought I’d express what’s on my mind reading this.
Only actionable thing would be: i am and have been interested in this area of things for a while and look forward to collaborate soon.