The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

A few weeks ago, I took on a new position which simply doesn’t leave me the time to do everything I’d like to do. Since this blog was the “last in,” as it were, it seems destined to be the “first out.”

Not that I’ve been blogging all hot and heavy here lately, or anything - this blog was a victim of my success long before now. This is just the final straw. I’ll leave the blog up for now - it’s got some good advice and it’s not costing me much of anything to store. But until such a time that I have more time, or enough enthusiasm to replace time with energy, this is - quite literally - all she wrote.

Thanks, and goodbye.

Categories: Housekeeping, Announcements and Related Fussing About // Add Comment »

Dwight Design offers these 11 website design mistakes that you shouldn’t be making. If your website commits any of these sins, it’s time to have a word with your webmaster (unless you insisted on them over their objections, in which case it’s time you sat down in front of a mirror and repeated “I am NOT a web designer” until you really, truly get it.)

Categories: Advertising and Marketing, Internet Marketing, Random Silliness, Web 2.0 // Add Comment »

You think your job sucks. I swear, I keep looking for an Onion byline on this story. The more I read, the more whiskey-tango-foxtrot it gets:

PROVO, Utah — No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

Yes, you read that right. In an attempt to spur the sales team into making more sales, this company waterboarded one of their own guys as a motivational exercise!

What makes this even more surreal (I would say funnier, but this is so far past funny and into downright disturbing that if my eyebrows go any higher, I’m going to end up with a permanent Klingon forehead crest) is that the company in question is a coaching company (warning, annoying flash intro) that makes success and leadership products.

And what makes it scarier is the sheer level of cluelessness involved. Because, see, the exercise wasn’t actually based on the waterboarding-as-torture, but was rather a misbegotten re-creation of student abuse perpetrated by Socrates. Now, I’m not even sure what part of holding someone’s head underwater as a motivational exercise made sense to the old Greek pederast himself, even allowing for differing cultural realities. But it’s unfathomable how anyone in this day and age of waterboarding scandal perma-reporting can look at Socrates’ actions and think, “Brilliant! Smithers, fetch me a bucket! It’s time for a little team building.”

Again, this would be frikkin hilarious…if it were a parody. The fact that it really happened is just…hell, I don’t even have the words for what it is. Terrifying. Sick. Twisted. Mind-boggling. Another nail in the coffin of my desire to never, ever work for anyone else, certainly, and yet another reason to avoiding any activity that smacks of team building.

What is funny, though, is reading the company’s About Us statement in light of the above “team-building” activity:

Prosper, Inc. provides executive-level coaching for individuals. Our mission is to provide our students with the education and hands-on experiences they need to achieve their personal and professional goals. We strive to make the road to personal achievement meaningful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

By understanding our business and by becoming sensitive to our world, we position ourselves to help others become leaders in an ever-changing marketplace. Our products and services are based on proven principles that, when applied, produce positive results in the lives of individuals and families.

Kinda like those games where you add “…under the bed” to the end of hymn titles. Heh, hands on experiences - in waterboarding! D’oh!

Seriously, Onion. Did you guys write this? C’mon, fess up. I won’t tell, I promise!

Categories: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business // Add Comment »

These people are idiots!

Do you know how little I care about that last statement? Allow me to explain…

I’m on an email list that I think is a very valuable resource. And it’s a new list, so I’m a little more forgiving in terms of giving a pass to the inevitable bumps and rough spots. But there’s been a recent issue that I think would make for a good discussion here, so I thought I’d share it with y’all.

If you run an email list of any sort, one rule is paramount: Keep the list professional, and don’t use it as a bully pulpit from which to whinge on about how stupid other people are who don’t agree with you or who don’t “get” you.

Here’s the story:

This list is new and growing. It’s one of those compilation lists that comes out three times a day (sorta like a Yahoo group, but private label). A while back, apparently some folks griped to the list-runner that three emails a day was too many. So he held a survey of the subscribers, and the overwhelming response was that three emails was just fine, thank you very much. So the list-runner has decided (wisely, I feel) to keep it to three emails a day and let those who disagree unsubscribe.

And if that were the end of the story - list owner takes the responsible route vis-a-vis some complaints, checks in with the list and comes out with a majority ruling - we’d have nothing to talk about. But it’s not.

The list-runner has spent the time since that event complaining about the people who think three emails is too many - basically trying to argue them out of their own opinions. In a recent email, he pointed out that a similar service sends over a dozen emails a day, and by that comparison his list is downright shy and retiring, so these people are crazy for thinking three emails is too much. Which is a ridiculous argument to make, because A) how many emails constitute too many is for them to decide, not you, and B) if they’re unsubscribing to a list with three emails, they’re almost certainly NOT subscribing to the other list anyway.

I chalk it up to this being a new list, and have corresponded with the list-runner to share my opinions (and they have responded more or less in agreement). Hopefully, this will die a natural death and all will be well.

The point I’m trying to make here is that if you’re running a list, a newsletter or any other professional public correspondence, keep the tone professional and on-topic. This is not to say you have to be without any personality at all. Said list-runner does include some witty personal banter in the emails which I find very humanizing and funny, and which I think adds to rather than subtracts from the list, although that’s also an opinion others have apparently differed on.

But for God’s sake, don’t use the list to harangue others, revile people who don’t agree with you, ridicule “losers” who leave the list for some reason or basically turn the list into a platform for you to rage against all those people out there who just don’t get you, and how stupid they are because of it.

Doing so only makes you look whiny, intolerant, ungracious and unprofessional. It never makes the others look stupid, no matter how clearly you try to connect those dots, because every single person on your list has held a minority opinion on something at some point and knows good and well that opinions are just that - a matter of personal preference, and as such, always right (for that person, at that time, in that situation). If I hate meatloaf, than I’m right, regardless of how much you feel meatloaf to be the food of the Gods - trying to argue me out of my opinion by pointing out how much other people like meatloaf, how nutritious it is, how cheap it is to make and so on is both pointless and makes you look like a blithering idiot for trying.

I’ve had to unsubscribe to countless lists for just this reason - some of which were hard to give up, given the value I was otherwise receiving. But, as I noted in my correspondence with the list-runner, I’ve got enough drama in my life to be adding someone else’s to the mix.

Do your subscribers a favor. Keep it light and professional, stay on topic and don’t give into the temptation to feed the trolls. This is even easier if you’re running an email list or newsletter, since the trolls can’t even be heard by anyone but you unless you give them a platform in the first place.

Your subscribers are there to get the information you’re sharing and to be a part of the community. And none of them wants to wade through your rants about the philistine, uncultured idiots who are chapping your ass because they don’t get your particular brand of genius in order to do so.

Categories: Conversation Economy, Ethics and Business, Internet Marketing // Add Comment »

The Creative “FAIL Your Way to a Win” Business Model:

Sell Crippled Hardware and Shut Down Anyone Who Tries to Make It Work Right

Profit!!!

Well, I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time…

Don’t know how many non-geeks are aware of the flaming ball of suck that has become hardware producer Creative’s response to a user-created hack, but it’s worth paying attention to.

To make a long story short, Creative produces the popular Sound Blaster soundcard. Which is great, except that there are some functionality issues in Vista and just in general that the users aren’t thrilled with. To be blunt, the sound cards are crippleware, meaning that their functionality is intentionally dehanced (lovely neologism, that) by the company in order to…well, I have no idea why, personally, since I’m not a hardware geek. But I’m guessing it’s either to sell more of a different hardware or upgrade, or as a butt-kiss to someone like Microsoft or the RIAA, as such companies have an unsettling tendency to get hardware makers to hobble their goods so as not to give the end user Too Much Freedom To Do With Their Purchased Goods As They Wish. (Can’t have the peasants getting it all their way, now can we?)

It’s like buying a car that won’t make left turns, because the car manufacturer has a deal with a soft drink company who’s slogan is “The ‘Right Way’ to Refresh,” or they have another line selling GPS units and want you to buy them in order to generate right-turn-only paths to your destinations. I.e. your car has the capacity to make left turns, but the company has interfered with the steering so that it won’t. But it’s your car…surely once you own it, you should be able to go in and remove that “fix” or have it removed for you. Right? Wrong…

Along comes Daniel_K, a modder (geek speak for someone who creates “mods,” or modifications). Daniel_K mods custom drivers for people who have bought the crippled hardware. These drivers give you the ability to actually use your Creative soundcard to do essential soundcardy things, functionality that the soundcard is already capable of but that has been hobbled in-store. In short, he makes downloadable “left-turn-enabling” patches.

Yay!!! The customers are thrilled. Now they can buy these really nice soundcards and still get the functionality they require for whatever applications they’re doing. So they buy more soundcards. The customers get functionality, the company gets sales, everybody’s happy, right? Wrong…

Here is Creative’s response to Daniel_K, basically a cease and desist letter whose content boils down to, “Quit making our stuff work, dammit. We farked it for a reason, and now you’re stealing from us by giving our customers the right to do what they want with the stuff they bought.”

This was posted in Creative’s own support/user forums. It was the equivalent of dumping flaming gasoline on a beehive. Welcome to the world of the Internet swarm. Enraged geeks from all over the place have been breaking their soundboards and posting pics, calling for boycotts, including setting up a site named BoycottCreative.com, spreading the word through top-listed sites like Digg and Reddit and just basically rampaging around loudly in forums and other outlets ‘net-wide. The Creative forum itself is full of thread titles like, “Recommend me a NON Creative sound card”, “Creative Boycott,” “FAIL” and just plain old “Bye.” (Or, at least, these posts are there right now, and haven’t been removed as of this writing.) There’s even a rather ominous thread titled “Class Action Filing.” That can’t be good.

To sum up, Creative got greedy and stupid. They decided it was better to sell crippled hardware to geeks whose sole purpose in life is to tweak their stuff for maximum power and functionality, and then attempt to tightly control what users could do with it (and thereby make more money through some corporate sleight of hand). And when someone came along and gave their customers what they actually wanted (i.e. the ability to use their soundcards to their fullest capacity), instead of saying, “Hey, great, thanks for fixing that - now our customers will be thrilled to buy even more of our stuff,” Creative shut them down, publicly and with clear statements to the effect that their priority was making money, not providing functional sound cards.

End result? It’s a reasonable possibility that Creative will suffer enough of a financial and PR setback to deal them a critical, or even possibly fatal, blow. The original cease-and-desist only went public two days ago, and already some retailers are suspending sales of Creative products due to the high rate of returns. Geeks around the world are boycotting, breaking and busting on Creative loudly and publicly.

In just a few days, Creative went from merely a clueless company producing good quality products that required some tweaking to really work well, to pure, unadulterated, kitten-punching evil bastards who have been caught publicly monologuing their evil plans at the battle-bloodied and bound-and-gagged hero (Daniel_K) who was trying to free the princess and save the day.

As they used to say back in the day, “Smooth move, Ex-lax.”

Moral of the story: DO NOT PISS IN YOUR OWN WELL.

Don’t try to sucker your core customers by selling them junk and pretending it’s a business model. Give them what they want, not what you want to give them. Don’t try to cripple what you sell in the hopes of selling more stuff to make up for what isn’t working (or by bowing to outside commercial influences) and then get mad when someone creates a work-around to your craptastic fail. You should be hiring those people, not trying to bury them.

And if you do fail to heed this warning, you’d better hope like hell you have a really good Plan B, such as a hefty retirement fund. Because you can’t unkill the Golden Goose, and your customers will be winging those golden eggs right back at your head with a vengeance when they find out what you’ve done.

Categories: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Customers, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture // 1 Comment »

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse lists 20 (plus a few extra, in the update) static pages that every blogger should have in their blog. In addition to the traditional About page and FAQ, there are quite a few you probably haven’t thought of before, such as a Press Page, Affiliate Presell pages and special event landing pages.

Considering that Darren makes an exceedingly healthy living as a professional blogger, I’d listen to what he has to say if you’re serious about making money with your blog. Check out ProBlogger’s take on the 20 vital pages your blog should have.

Categories: Blogs and Blogging, Internet Marketing // Add Comment »

Inside CRM has a great article, 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site.

Some ideas:

1. Tell readers why they should perform a task. If your site is full of passive suggestions, toughen it up. People are trained to follow a request, as long as you give them a good reason to do it.

14. Make an offer that visitors can’t refuse. Check out your site to make sure that you’re giving your visitors a reason to pick your company out of an overcrowded field.

24. Never ask for more information than you need. If you’re currently asking for excessive information, rethink your data-mining tendencies. When you get greedy for data, you’ll turn off some visitors.

46. Take off the black hat. If you’ve used tactics like keyword stuffing, remove them from your site. They may be working now, but in the long run, they’ll only hurt.

58. Remove text from images. Using image text will make it difficult for those using screen readers to read text.

82. Ditch frames. If your site uses frames, you need to move on to another method, like CSS or SSI (Server-Side Includes).

87. Ditch crazy fonts. If you’re using a ransom-note font, it’s time to switch to something simpler. Chances are, your visitors’ browsers are rendering it as Times New Roman anyway.

100. Store a Web site cache. Keep a copy of your site handy in case of copyright disputes or loss.

Categories: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Internet Marketing // Add Comment »

My current favorite author, John Scalzi (of whom I am an obsessive fan, if not yet financially a True Fan), has a thoughtful and well-reasoned argument against Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans concept that I wrote about last week.

The Problem With 1,000 True Fans

…it’s not impossible to get 1,000 “true fans.” It can be done. The problem is that Kevin Kelly, in his enthusiasm, wants to make it seem that getting 1,000 people to give you $100 is no great trick. What I am telling you is that it actually is — it’s a pretty damn neat trick, in point of fact. Even if you manage it, the financial reward is not likely to be anything close to what you had hoped for, nor will it likely be as permanent as Kelly seems to imply.

John’s an exceptionally smart and well-educated man with a very popular blog (30,000-40,000 hits a day), several earned-out novels (meaning, they’ve sold well enough to pay out the advance and earn him royalties, which is the novelists’ holy grail), several current and past paying gigs for media corps like AOL and the Chicago Sun-Times and has a backlist of fiction, non-fiction and commercial work that takes up a respectable chunk of a webpage to list. In short, he knows whereof he speaks, and I always find it instructive and entertaining to pay attention when he does.

If you read 1000 True Fans and are considering that approach to making a living, it’s only smart to give the Devil’s Advocate at least as much attention - if only to make sure you’re armed with all the enemy intelligence you need to plan your ambushes. And John’s a smart a DA as you’re likely to find out there.

Oh, and don’t skip the comments section. John’s readership is every bit as whip-smart and well-spoken as he is, so at least half the shiny of any post he puts up sits below the comments cut (which is saying a lot, considering his posts are usually quite shiny enough all by themselves).

Categories: Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Society and Culture // Add Comment »

Since a not-insignificant portion of my peeps and potential clients are organ grinders of the artistic sort, I thought I’s pass along Kevin Kelly’s thought-provoking article on making a living as an artist in the 21st century, 1000 True Fans.

According to Kelly,

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

[snip]

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

Kelly’s formula is at once breathtakingly simple and yet compellingly feasible:

First, create 1000 True Fans. According to Kelly, this involves finding and converting 1000 regular fans to True Fans by connecting with them personally and directly, which is an imminently rational goal and one that any artist worth their salt should be able to do, given access to such basic resources as an Internet connection, some basic marketing smarts and a salable product or service.

Second, Kelly estimates that a True Fan will spend an average of one day’s income per year on a favorite artist, although of course some will spend more and others less. For easy math, he rounds this sum out to $100 per True Fan. At this rate (which is, you have to admit, an entirely realistic reflection of what many of us spend on our own favorite artists in a year’s time) 1000 True Fans + $100/year = $100,000.00 per year gross, a nifty living by any artist’s standards.

The key, he points out, rests on that personal contact. You’ll need to nurture, connect with and personally involve these True Fans. Of course, for the average artist, this isn’t a problem. You want to reach out and touch people personally and profoundly. You want to enter into a conversation with them and hear their responses to your work. You want to learn about them and geek out over mutual interests and so on. That connection is a vital part of what makes your art worth doing. It’s fun. And it’s one of the reasons why you sing/paint/play/film/photograph in the first place. (For those who don’t, however, he suggests that an intermediary or manager can handle this task perfectly well.)

Obviously, as Kelly himself points out, the requirement of 1000 True Fans applies best to the solo artist. Bands, comedy troupes, painter’s collectives and other groups would have to increase their effort to achieve enough True Fans per member to scale the formula. But nonetheless, it does scale relatively easily. Also, the number of fans varies depending on the type of media, price of the work, costs and so on, although not by so much that it upsets the formula in very many cases. Finally, Kelly notes that this formula only applies when the fan support is direct (people go to your site and buy a download) rather than indirect (people buy your book or click on a blog ad, which spreads the money out over a wide variety of middlemen). Indirect income means you’ll need far more True Fans to support you in a reasonable manner.

There are several interesting case studies mentioned in the article, including an author that funded his novel through direction donations and a musician who is paying for the production costs of her next CD through a truly creative, tiered level of direct support ranging from…

…$10 “unpolished rock,” which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it’s made, to the $10,000 “weapons-grade plutonium level,” where she promises “you get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing - we can fix that on our end.

Wrapping up, Kelly has this to say:

The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty…I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Categories: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Social Media // Add Comment »

March 2008’s Trendwatching Briefing is all about the rise of free and the gift/attention economy. In fact, their calling the phenomenon “Free Love.” (Warning: Mildly NSFW photo)

Some ideas they explore:

• The trend toward using advertising to create revenue out in a free economy, now showing up in places you wouldn’t have expected, including free airline seats, photographic prints and food/drink vending machines. That’s right, folks - free food, free flights and free photos, among other options.
• How the Freeconomy is changing the way not-free items are marketed and sold, including a revisit to the “Tryvertising” and “Trysumers” trends.
• The rise of FREE C2C, or the production of consumer created content for the enjoyment of other consumers.
• Swapping, recycling and other no-money transactions, from as low-end as finding a new home for those old National Geographic magazines to the high-end of house and car swapping.

Categories: Trends // Add Comment »