The Real Difference the Internet Makes
My client hasn’t come through with the raw materials of this week’s Project of Doom, so I have time to blog something that I encountered last night that I feel is incredibly important for anyone who’s interested in doing business in the 21st century to understand.
Uh, Toto? I Don’t Think We’re In Kansas Anymore
It was one of those serendipitous moments you find so often on the net these days. Last night while I was doing my evening blog rounds, I came upon one of the most clear explanations of why and how the internet is shaping our culture. Immediately afterward, I stumbled upon what I feel to be an incredible example of this concept in action.
Elizabeth Bear, a speculative fiction novelist, clearly and succinctly sums up the immensity of how and why the internet is changing the way we interact with people by riffing off of a blog post she found that was talking about the story behind a video of a Guitar Hero gaming session.
In this video, the song being “played” is John Coulton’s Code Monkey. For my less cyber-geeky friends, John Coulton is a musician who writes and performs these really cool, weird and funky songs and then distributes them through his website, most of it for free and under some version of a Creative Commons license (meaning, among other things, that people can use the music for mashups like creating a Guitar Hero song out of them). In doing so, he is now able to support himself as a popular, well-loved and successful full-time musician.
Because of his musical themes (geeky, humorous, weird), his talent (solidly A-list good) and his successful business model (making a living by giving away free music?!!?!?!OMGWTFBBQ!!!), Coulton has become something of an internet celebrity. This is a key point.
In her post, Bear points to the blog Corrugated Media, where she found the video in this post from blogger Patrick Kovacich:
I managed to track down the creator of this custom track, Andy Sage,who gets lots of points from me not only for his selection in music, but for how he went about this process. He secured permission from Coulton before posting the track, despite the source materials being freely available in a remix contest, and all of Coulton’s music being under a license he was not breaking. Sage was under no legal obligation to contact Coulton and make sure he was cool with this, but he did so anyway, and that is the kind of attitude that makes this sort of license and culture really work. Tying this back to why I think this story is so cool is the fact that he was ABLE to contact Jonathan to do so. Try doing that with Bono.
Bear goes on to say:
The reason that works, of course, is because the celebrities (loosely so termed) that one knows on the internet are suddenly real people. They’re not constructs anymore. Jonathan Coulton isn’t a construct to me, the way Bono (to use the example quoted above) is. Jonathan Coulton is some guy on the internets, whose work I really like. Tom Smith used to be a construct to me: I only knew his work through recordings, and I was a big fan. And yanno, then I met him online and at Penguicon, and now he’s just some super-talented guy I know, who is also funny. Wil Wheaton is the classic example of this: I keep forgetting he’s also a talented actor, because I think of him as one of the best bloggers on my daily information rounds.
And you know what? I like that. I don’t want to be a construct. I want to be some guy you know on the internets who tells stories. Who possibly you pay to tell you stories, much the same way I have friends I pay for web hosting or web design or massages. Because it’s their professional skill…
I think we may be looking at the end of reputation by fame, and the birth of a different kind of reputation. Because while there are people who want that mystique, that megastar distance, that princess in a tower thing… there’s also a lot of people who want to be able to drop Jonathan Coulton an email and say, “Hey, can I remix “Code Monkey?”
And eventually, we may be looking at a system where the President is some guy I know, who I pay to run the country.
Of course, we’re probably at least half a generation away from having the President on our Buddy list (although, unlike some of the other commenters on this post, I actually feel it to be a real possibility). But the rest of it absolutely exists in the here and now. And you’re a part of it, whether you like it or not. Your customers, your colleagues, your competitors, your enemies and your friends and so on have an immediate, real connection to you - or, at least they should, if you’re doing it right. (And as far as the current generation is concerned, not only should you be this open and approachable, they pretty much assume that anyone that isn’t is probably hiding something, or perhaps just terminally socially retarded.)
And this is where most businesses are still getting it wrong, wrong, wrong. They want to do the hip, Web 2.0 stuff - corporate blogs, interactive sites, Facebook marketing, YouTube, etc - because they can obviously see that it’s a vital part of the current cultural conversation. And that’s good.
But they screw it up because they completely fail to grasp the whole concept of “open and approachable.” The idea scares the crap out of them, and sends their legal department into convulsive fits. So they put up blogs that are basically just another channel for press releases other corporate-speak blather that’s been prescreened, filtered, sterilized and legal-department-approved to within an inch of its life. The put up Facebook profiles that are about as “real” as a paint-by-number edition of a counterfeit Warhol. They set up interactive and viral sites that are only marginally less engaging than watching C-SPAN on mute and basically constitute nothing more than interactive advertisements (fun for the whole family!!!).
And what gets past all this firewalling, legal redacting and corporate distancing bears the same relation to open conversation as the Third Reich did to concerned community involvement.
Getting It Right, The Live Demo
Immediately after I read Elizabeth Bear’s post, I landed on another blog where an example of “getting it right” materialized in the comments section of a post on the merits of various writing software programs that was so perfect, it was almost like it was orchestrated for the sole purpose of demonstrating this concept.
You can read the post here, but what I’m talking about happens further down in the comments section. At one point, a reader discusses her own experience with a software product called Scrivener, a Mac writing application that many writers use and love. Unfortunately, she had some issues with an upgrade that resulted in having problems reading older files, which she eventually resolved but remains frustrated about.
A few comments down comes this reply:
Thank you for your praise of Scrivener! Glad you are finding it so useful and I hope you are able to have a long and satisfying relationship with her.
Kristine - I’ve never received an e-mail from you about your problems and I don’t think you have posted these problems on the forum. It’s very difficult for me to solve problems I don’t know exist! E-mail me at support @ literatureandlatte dot com and I’m sure we can get to the bottom of your problem.
Thanks again and all the best,
Keith
(Scrivener developer)
Yep, that’s the guy who wrote the program, just dropping by a conversation about his product and inviting a user to email him directly with their problem.
In case you don’t see the significance, this is the equivalent of the head engineer at Ford dropping by your online rant about an ongoing engine problem and saying, “Hey, you gotta tell us about this stuff. Drop me a line and I get some guys on it immediately.” Just thinking about how unlikely that is given our current corporate reality, immediately following an example of it actually happening in a completely different (and increasingly more real) zone of reality, gives you some idea of the paradigm shift that has already occurred between the current generation of internet users and the people who are going to represent the next generation of business-as-usual.
It’s like a massive fault line abruptly shifted and suddenly, “the way it’s always been done” is standing on one side of a rift staring at “the way things are going to be done” across an unnavigable crevasse of cultural change. For most old-school businesses, there’s no safe or sane way to get from one side to the other - the gap is simply too large. But short of the entire web shutting down while leaving only uni-directional media like tv and radio alive, we’re not liable to go back.
The key question here is, which side of the fault is your business on?
It’s real. It’s hilarious. It’s blogalicious.