The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

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.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Customers, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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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).

Tags: Business, Conversation Economy, Customers, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Wired’s lastest issue is all about “free”, specifically, FREE, the book by editor Chris Anderson (coming out in 2009) that is bound to get more than a few economists’ knickers in a twist.

I highly recommend that anyone who plans on doing business in the next decade or so go read the article, paying special attention to the scenarios (in gray boxes) and other supplementary resources they’ve decorated the article with (including the video - it’s just a few minutes long and worth the click.)

In the video, Chris Anderson notes:

“The difference between one penny and free is the difference between having to make a conscious decision to purchase a product and to just do it.”

And while that seems to be a subtle difference, when you actually think about it it’s actually quite a significant gap. Crossing that gap requires a decision. And anytime your customer has to make a decision, the answer could always be “no.” Take that decision away, and the answer is almost always “yes.” Now, if the cost of production, distribution and materials is essentially nil, why risk “no” when you could virtually guarantee “yes” by eating that almost non-existent cost?¹

A few quotes from the article:

From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.

[snip]

Surely economics has something to say about that?

It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we’ve always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The “attention economy” and “reputation economy” are too fuzzy to merit an academic department, but there’s something real at the heart of both. Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

In short, it’s very possible that free will be the basis of trade and commerce for the foreseeable future. And yet, as Anderson points out, all of the biggest vendors of free services - Yahoo, Google, etc - are filthy rich and increasingly raking it in hand over fist. So yes, it’s possible to get rich on free.

But you have to embrace it, rather than fearing and avoiding it, or trying to take it on in baby steps. The first response will simply keep you in the realm of the buying decision (i.e. trying to work around “no”). The second will simply ensure you’re left slugging it out for customers and memespace as those who embrace free wholeheartedly get all the buzz (and all the crowd momentum).

1. In most cases, it’s greed, ego, habit and confusion, in that order. Greed operates at the “Even a penny is better than nothing” level, which is patently untrue anymore. Also, any time you hear any argument against free that includes the term “stakeholder value,” you’re probably looking at greed and, not insignificantly, the primary stakeholder the speaker probably has in mind. Ego is concerned with the “appearance” of giving things away equated with lack of quality, and the “I don’t have to give it away, because I’m so good” argument…again, neither are relevant here. Habit is just that - business as usual making it hard to envision business as it’s becoming and hard to get out of the rut of the way it’s always been done. And confusion is simply a matter of doing what you’ve always done, because it’s easier than figuring out how to make the new ways work. [↩]

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Conversation Economy, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Ah, the plaintive cry of the spam-hounded netizen (that quote was nabbed from a comments thread about bulletin board spambots). No doubt you, yourself, have bitched or moaned something similar in response to a particularly annoying or persistent ad. Remember that feeling? Great, now turn it around…

What does that frame of mind mean for you, as a business owner?

Simply this:

1. Make it dead easy to find you.
2. Don’t give me any reasons to click away when I do find you.*
3. Make it easy to complete the transaction that I want to complete, and make it worthwhile and fun for me to do so.
4. Stay in touch whenever it’s in my benefit for you to do so, not yours.
5. Leave me alone when none of the above are happening.

I see some of you out there nodding your heads. Now contrast those rules with the rules for Business As Usual:

1. Get in their face as often as you can, wherever you can, however you can, and as loudly as you can.
2. Do things your way, regardless of what the rabble wants. What do they know, anyway? (Or, alternately, “Who’s the professional here?” God, I just can’t get enough of that…)
3. Proprietary code that only functions on one specific browser and build, unnavigable Flash, impenetrable navigation schemes, unfindable goods, pop-ups, unholy web design, redirects, etc…it’s all good. So what if it makes things a little harder to use? We paid good money for that website/software/technology. If they want it bad enough, they’ll slog through it. And make sure they only buy what we want them to buy, in the packages we want them to buy it and under whatever conditions we happen to set. While you’re at it, make sure you don’t give away any more than you have to for the money. Man, I’m telling you…if you don’t keep an eye on them, those customers will rip you off to the bone!
4. Keep hounding them until they buy something. Then take note who bought and really turn up the burner underneath those “valued customers.” 7 touches is just the start!
5. GOTO 1
   DO NOT END

If you recognize yourself or your business strategy in any of these last 5 rules, you have some work to do. Time to get busy…

*Note that on number 2 of the first list, I DID NOT say “Give me a reason to click through or to stay once I find you.” These days, you start with “NO” and earn “YES,” not the other way around. Remember that.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Conversation Economy, Internet Marketing, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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That’s a quote from Rabbi Pinny Gniwisch, speaking on a podcast with Hugh McLeod about marketing and “Influencers.” They discuss a lot more, and the conversation goes in some very interesting areas, so you might want to give it a listen.

But the primary reason I stopped by to blog was to lay out some righteous honesty for you, from a marketer who hates to hype:

The reality is, you can have the best copy, the coolest widget, the best demographic targeting, the shiniest website and the most bitchin’ marketing plan this side of Eden’s apple and your product launch can still completely and utterly fail. As in no sales, no interest and no money. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

Why?

Luck. Happenstance. Random acts of wtf.

Maybe you just happened to launch at the same time as someone else did and they got all the juice. They don’t even have to be superior to win, just first. Or loudest. Or luckiest. (Remember the Betamax/VHS tech race, now being replayed between HD-DVD/Blue-Ray tech.)

Maybe your launch got overshadowed and out-shouted by world events, local news or just the latest, greatest Internet meme hitting the feeds at the same time.

Maybe, despite all your careful research, quality control and expensive design, no one gets it. Or wants to. Why? Don’t ask me. You’d think that in this day and age, those teeny-tiny gas-sipping mini-cars that the British are so fond of would be all the rage over here in the States. But they’re not. Why? Many reasons, few of which have anything to do with the quality, utility or value of the vehicles. Mostly it’s just cultural machismo bullshit.

Maybe a partner firm or even an unrelated company, in the same business or a completely different one is going down in flames, and for some reason people are associating you and your products with them and the nasty taste in their mouths that the company left behind. This happens completely at random as often as it makes any sense. Several specific toys made in China are discovered to be contaminated with lead. Your toys are made in Japan, or Poland. Now no one will touch them with a ten-foot pole. Why? Mass hysteria bleed-over, that’s why. Foreign toys = death on a stick, no matter what the facts really are.

Mostly, though, success is just a matter of nearly pure luck, thinly plated with a veneer of wisdom, experience, skill and confidence.

And that’s something that marketers don’t always want to admit - the reality that with all of our fancy tricks, our secret handshakes, our specialized knowledge, our dark and eldrich incantations and so on, the best we can do is give you a reasonable chance of taking advantage of whatever luck comes your way.

We can’t guarantee results. We can’t say you’ll make more sales. We can’t promise you the world. We’d love to, trust me, we would. But we can’t. Or at least the honest one’s can’t. Because your luck (or mine) can change on a dime and give you back 8 cents change. And the best copywriting, marketing or advertising can’t do a damned thing about it.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Subtitled: If You Don’t Get That Flyer Out of My Face, I’m Going to Strangle You With Your Own Spam Thread

[This is crossposted from a response I wrote on an a Google group in reaction to a bit of spam trying to sell a video full of “Google Smashing” techniques to get you to #1 on Google overnight, or some such crap.]

Here’s my question:

There are all kinds of tricks, tips and tools for getting your website, your ebook, your telecourse or your blog into the top spot at Google. And some of them even work, no question about it.

But (and that rustling sound you hear is me dusting off and donning my coaching hat), let’s reframe this issue for just a second and ask:

Does your content actually DESERVE to be #1?

Is it, really, the most relevant information on the topic a person could find if they went searching for those keywords and phrases? Is your product, site or blog really what they’re hoping to find?

Or, by putting yourself at #1, are you simply acting like one of those annoying campaigners standing outside of the voting hall that won’t let you through their ranks to vote for who you have already decided to vote for without listening to their spiel first and, probably, taking a piece of brightly colored and expensively printed landfill with you?

Are you helping, really, or are you simply getting in the way?

Google and other search engine rankings are supposed to be an indicator of relevance, not your 133t algorithm-hacking skillzzzoorzz. If you can’t get to the number one spot, or at least on the front page, simply by being the most relevant, the most interesting and the most current information, product or service specific to that keyword or search term, then really…you *shouldn’t* be there. (Yes, I’m simplifying a lot. The principle remains the same.)

What is it about being in business that changes us, the minute we get behind our desks, from thinking, caring and empathetic members of the human community into single-minded, blindered profit-makers with bottom-line eyes and a “sell-sell-sell” one-track mind? (Of course, I’m sure that none of you guys are like that. It’s all those other people. I’m using the generalized “royal we” here. Humor me for a minute.)

We stop thinking about how we would like to be treated, and start thinking about what we can do to make the next sale, regardless of how we respond to those exact same tactics when we’re back to our normal “just folks” selves (where most likely we’d spot it for the commercial pitch it is and either ignore it at best or be annoyed with it to the point of fissile combustion at worst).

We stop acting like people who like and are trying to help other people, and start acting like hunters on the prowl, loading up with the latest and greatest take-down weaponry, deceptive camouflage and covert maneuvers we can get our grease-painted, doe-scented fingers on.

In short, we quit being people and start being businesses.

“But the whole point of being in business is to make money…isn’t it?” I hear from the peanut gallery.

Look, I’ve got no beef with anyone making any amount of money, provided they do it legitimately and ethically. Go on, get rich. Roll around naked in a pile of shiny gold coins if it makes you happy (although…ouch). I couldn’t care less.

That’s not my point.

What I’m saying is…hell, you’ve been out there. You’ve been on the net looking for something you needed. You’ve bought stuff from people. You shop.

The times, they are a changing. People these days not only don’t want to be sold (they never did want that), but they’re savvier, smarter and have more recourse to avoid you if you try to sell them stuff.

Business is beginning to be viewed (at least by the customers, which includes you some of the time) as less of a commercial activity separate from and outside the sphere of the rest of human interaction and more of a stewardship of valuable goods from there to here. We the people expect to be able to find what we’re looking for and have it delivered to us with concerned attention to our needs, without having to wade through sidewalk squatters on the way in, or a gauntlet of ads, emails, harangues and other annoyances on the way out. And if we can’t get that, we’ll change laws, we’ll change technology and we’ll change the nature of commerce itself until we can.

Be an ass, and don’t be surprised if your assholery gets blogged, Tubed, Boinged, Dugg and Redd for all the world to see. And act on.

But some people in business just don’t get it. They see anyone who’s buying anything from anyone other than them (or even just looking) as someone who has just proven they have cash in their wallet, regardless of the fact that said wallet-bearing primate has demonstrated NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER IN THEIR CONTENT, PRODUCT OR SERVICE.

Trying to buy something online during this time of transition is a lot like trying to buy something in a big, open-air market in a third-world country. You spend the entire shopping trip fending off repeated, endless offers of guides and personal shoppers, ambulatory sellers trying to interest you in their wares and people whose uncle is selling the very thing you’re looking for, if you’ll just come this way, sirrah (even when they haven’t a clue as to what you’re interested in).

And God save you if you actually buy anything, because suddenly you’re the picnic at the ant Olympics. You’re immediately swarmed by a thronging mass of these same “helpers,” plus a veritable river of beggars and pickpockets that appears to pour forth from the very walls of the market itself. If you can make it back to your hotel room with all of your limbs, possessions and coins intact, you count yourself very, very lucky.

By participating in “Google smashing” techniques, by engaging in marketing and advertising strategies that would annoy or inflame you if you had to deal with them, by spending more time tweaking your SEO than your content, and by positioning yourself in front of what someone really wants in the hopes of catching some of that traffic (or, likewise, thronging around them on the way out of the store after they’ve bought), you just become part of that crowd of beggars and commercial mercenaries. You’ve become the problem, instead of the solution.

But don’t these tactics make money? Uh, yeah, they do. Quite a bit, actually. I won’t deny it. But they do so at the expense of our humanity, by turning other people into prey and turning us into people who see other people as prey.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is not who I ever want to be. Not for any amount of shiny gold coins.

Just something to consider, the next time you see an ad for something that promises to get you to the top of Google, or the next time you’re considering just how intensively you want to market your next product or service offering.

I’ve got no beef with good business practices. And I think people who actually have something of value are ethically and morally required to do their best to get it into the hands of those who can benefit from it. But this isn’t that. And if you can’t tell the difference between the two, or if the glare from those shiny coins tends to blind you to such subtleties, then IMHO you really have no business being in business in the first place.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business, Ethics and Business, Internet Marketing, Society and Culture, Success by Soni Pitts
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Kevin Kelly has a great new essay out on his blog The Technicum, called Better Than Free. In it, he discusses how the cost of things that can be copied - which is pretty much anything tangible - is quickly approaching free. And yet, he says, it is still possible to make a living, and in some instances a fortune, in this giveaway economy.

How is this possible? As Kelly puts it:

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

So, what can’t be copied? Kelly suggests that in the land of FREE, making a living becomes less about the thing, and more about the qualities of that thing, particularly what he calls “generative values.”

These generative values are concepts like Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage and Findability. These and similar qualities surround the free core with a layer of value for which people are willing to pay sometimes great sums of money.

For example, Kelly has this to say about Accessibility:

Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them…The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.

There is a huge backlash going on right now in the realm of traditional business against this economy of free. This is most memorably embodied in the litigious flounderings of the music recording industry, who have adopted what can only be perceived as insane business model of suing their customer. To those industries, all this brouhaha appears to be a simple attempt to “protect their interests.” To everyone else, however, it is seen for what it really is: the death throes of a creature who’s to stupid to realize it’s already dead.

Here’s the important take-away from this discussion: Your product is worthless.

Not worthless as in devoid of value, mind you. But worthless in that somewhere, somehow, someone who cares enough can get it for free. And the more people who bother to do so, the more free versions there are. After a while (and usually this happens very, very quickly if your product is even remotely desirable) there are enough free versions on the market that getting one of those is even easier than going to your site or store and simply paying for it.

It’s pointless to fight this. It will only cost you more time, more money and more energy than you have to spare, and in the end you can only hope to accomplish one of two undesirable alternatives:

You could lose, in which case you’ll find yourself right back where you started and all that time, money and effort might as well have been dropped into a black hole for all the effect it will have.

Or you could win, and in doing so make your product harder to get and more expensive than everyone else’s and permeated by such negative public opinion that only those who have no other choice will buy it (and then complain about having to do so prolifically and vociferously to anyone who’ll listen). And as soon as any other reasonable choice presents itself, you can bet that what few customers you do retain will scatter like rats fleeing a burning building.

Your only real option, therefore, is to accept that your product is, in and of itself, a commodity of little or no monetary value and learn to leverage with qualities and values that people are willing to pay for. The downside is that this is all still pretty new, so only a few people have figured out how to make it work for them. The upside is that this is all still pretty new, so the field’s still wide open and there’s lots of room for innovation, creativity and fun.

So go play. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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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?

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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The collapse of Ginko Financial, a virtual investment bank inside the online world Second Life, has people wondering just what is the difference between real and not real. The verdict? Not much. Why should you care? Because what happens now may change the nature of business in the future.

[Read more →]

Tags: Business, Changing the World, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Those crazy kids over at Parsons School of Design have gone and created a course called “Internet Famous” The point, as you might suspect from the title, is to have the students pursue a competitive curriculum designed to see who can garner the greatest degree of Internet fame during the course the semester by using social sites, videos, pranks, hoaxes and any other manner of web fame fun.

Now, for your edification, the syllabus and class assignments for said course are online so that you, dear reader, can play along and make your own sparkling self Internet Famous (minus the hassles of meeting in person for class, turning in homework and paying tuition), design-school style.

The above link goes to the syllabus overview, which will give you some idea of what the course involves. You can click through the archives to view individual class instructions, or hit the blog to get the latest updates on what those wacky coeds have been up to.

Enjoy.

Oh, and Happy Internet Famous New Year to you, too.

Tags: Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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