In the Networked World, as the costs of producing media and other forms of intellectual property dwindle, and your blog about your dog has the potential to reach as many people as Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times, the big business opportunities for brands and entrepreneurs are not so much in the creation of content, but in creating and owning context. In other words, you can have the swellest piece of content — a great product, an incredible film, a breakthrough technology — but if no one can find you or your content does not connect in a meaningful way with your audience, your tree will fall in the forest and will not make a sound. In the Networked World, context is king. Context makes the falling tree mean something to the forest, gives it its sound, its flavor, its grain, its significance.Creating context has, in fact, become a whole new occupation, one that didn’t exist three years ago: the Pollinator. Pollinators are experts (or fast-becoming that way) in cobbling together social networks and communities of interest that connect brands with their audiences. Pollinators are skilled listeners, and know how to turn ’suggestions from the audience’ into productive brand behaviors. They understand a brand as a fluid experience for the customer, an experience that requires continual nurturing to evolve. Pollinators design the context in which these experiences can transpire. They are professional contextualizers.

YouTube and Google are the highest-profile examples of brands that create and own context. They do not create content or experiences, but give content a home and make useful experiences possible. Everywhere you turn these days, you see brands shifting their focus from static content to the fluid context that keeps their narrative lively and engaging.

Here are three other companies who are in the business of creating context:

Mochila is an application with widgets that let owners of content connect with distribution channels and advertisers in a win-win-win scenario. Mochila’s Chairman, Ben Chen, describes his company as a ’syndication engine’ that automates and simplifies what would otherwise be an enormously complicated process of defining relationships and revenue streams between large numbers of producers, distributors and advertisers. What had been difficult if not downright impossible for the average content-creator gets made easier by Mochila. The enormous 24/7 appetite of distributors gets fed. Advertisers can tie into channels and content that contextualize their brand.

Morf Mobile is a mobile content provider founded by Van Jepson, who created the well-known site, Hot or Not? That web phenomenon invited its audience to contextualize random photos. Morf, geared toward a young adult audience, contextualizes content by parsing it into mobile channels and communities of interest. It adds context by tying real world experiences to online ones. Impulses to buy, connect, alert, comment — action! — become more immediate options when mobility gets added to the mix. For further context, Morf enables its licensees to private label their channels. Your brand can use the Morf technology to create its very own context. For example, fans of Artist X can dial up the Artist X channel to share news and keep current with the community and its favorite performer. Artist X, meanwhile gets a channel that lets everyone at a concert become an ambassador for the brand, or buy Artist X’s music and merch before they leave the parking lot.

It’s not only newbie brands who are generating value via context. Procter & Gamble’s Connect + Develop site lets people outside the company have a shot at making money by developing new products and innovative ideas. Applicants can browse a list of P & G’s ‘Needs,’ which includes items like “Packing for Cylindrically Packaged Food,” “Pain Free Hair Removal From the Roots” and my favorite, a call for a “Unique In-Mouth Experience.” P & G calculates that there are 1.5 million people in the world who have engineering and product design skills comparable to the skills of its own engineering and product development staff of 7,500. Changing the context of its development process by opening it up to the world and incentivizing participation enables P & G to increase its potential development staff by 7,500x. They call them ‘Game-Changing’ deals, which is not a very unique in-mouth experience, but we are flattered by the imitation flavor ; )

What do Jif Peanut Butter and the commedia dell’artes of the Renaissance have in common? Both are improvised performances that are informed by suggestions from the audience.

A suggestion is the word(s) or idea(s) given by the audience to an improv group from which the group develops themes for a performance. Suggestions are important to improvisation because they make the audience an active collaborator in the show. Watching a group springboard from a suggestion into an exploration of themes inspired by that suggestion is one of the most engaging aspects of an improv performance. It engenders a natural rapport between audience and performers, and gives the crowd a rooting interest in the outcome of the show. After all, if something is our idea, we want it to be good.

The business improviser also acts on suggestions from the audience. The purpose is the same: to bring the audience into active collaboration on your performance and give it a rooting interest in your success.

In the commedia dell’artes, an early form of improvised theater, small troupes of performers traveled from town to town in Italy and central Europe, giving spontaneous shows on street corners. These troupes used satire as a way of appealing to the locals’ sense of humor. Before the show began the performers would gather as much information as they could about the town and its people. Who the bigshots were. The name of the constable. The concerns of the citizens. The performance would then arise organically from this ‘conversation with the audience’. Because the troupe had been given useful information and invariably had a repertoire of stock (usually masked) characters that figured into the life of every small town, they could perform scenes that hit home with the audience.

Entrepreneurs and business executives like Jim Stengel, the Chief Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble, maker of Jif peanut butter and a hundred other familiar consumer brands, understand that brands in the Networked World are, in effect, improvisational performances for the marketplace, and spend much of their strategic focus ‘listening to the community describe itself’. These days marketers like Stengel call on their brands to reflect to an unprecedented degree what the community is saying. A multi-billion-dollar company like Procter & Gamble and a centuries-gone commedia dell’artes company from Italy have this same vital fact of life in common: The success of each depends on how adept they are at acting on suggestions from their audiences. In business, the community describing itself instigates what I call an Umbilical Loop of interactions between audience and performer by which brands are built and sustained in the marketplace.

Business-related suggestions are usually complex and come in a multitude of forms via many channels and, if the organization is wired at all, in massive volume. On the other hand, sometimes suggestions can be slap-you-in-the-face simple.

In 1998 Dr. Taryn Rose was an orthopedic surgeon practicing in San Francisco. Her patients included quite a few stylish, shoe-loving women who frequently complained to Dr. Rose about and needed treatment for foot pain – pain caused by those stylish shoes. Dr. Rose, too, wore fashionable shoes, and her feet would suffer during the long hours she spent building her practice. The complaint was so chronic that Rose took it as a suggestion from the audience. From the suggestion of ‘hurting feet’, the entrepreneurial physician arrived at a theme of ‘comfortable fashion’ and began designing shoes that appealed to her audience’s sense of style and her doctor’s sense of good health. Suffice it to say that Rose no longer practices medicine. Today, she is a well-documented business success story, the founder and CEO of Taryn Rose, Inc., which in 2007 will enjoy retail sales worldwide in excess of $20 million.