Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Way Wrong by demzpix

For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

–Malcolm Gladwell, Priced to Sell

Gladwell’s must-read New Yorker review of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price nails its short-sighted, conference circuit talking point to the wall for anyone to see, so I was a bit surprised and disappointed when Seth Godin offered a rather weak defense of Anderson’s work, simply titled “Malcolm is wrong“.

I became a big fan of Godin’s after reading Tribes last year, and honestly, much of what I’ve been doing over the past 6+ months here on the blog, at work, and in my side pursuits was inspired by its underlying message of “be the change you want to see in the world.” Both in Tribes and on his blog, he tends to keep things simple without belaboring the obvious, but sometimes that simplicity can be a major flaw, as it is in his support of Anderson’s hyper-simplistic premise.

Ironically, he uses poetry as an example to prove his point, but ends up doing the exact opposite:

In a world of free, everyone can play.

This is huge. When there are thousands of people writing about something, many will be willing to do it for free (like poets) and some of them might even be really good (like some poets). There is no poetry shortage.

While it’s true there is no poetry shortage, quantitatively speaking, the “everyone can play” idea was the basic premise of the poetry slam which ultimately proved to be tragically flawed and a perfect case study for new media evangelists.

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tunnel vision by Tommy Ellis

“the social media echo chamber is starting to crumble”
–David Armano, Senior Partner, Dachis Corp

Depending on whom you choose to interact with on Twitter, it can easily seem like an echo chamber, and the release of a “report” last week declaring “It’s Official: Fortune 100 CEOs are Social Media Slackers” did nothing to change that perception.

The research found that the vast majority of Fortune 100 CEOs (Warren Buffett, Allan Lafley, Kenneth Chenault, Mary Sammons, et al) aren’t using most, if any, social networking tools, and came to a rather ridiculous, naive conclusion:

In our opinion, the top CEOs appear to be disconnected from the way their own customers are communicating.  They’re giving the impression that they’re disconnected, disengaged and disinterested. No doubt regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley and Reg-FD make CEOs cautious about comunicating freely, they’re missing a fabulous opportunity to connect with their target audience.

Conducted by ÜBERCEO – a TMZ-ish wannabe that claims to offer “the latest news, commentary, rumor and discussion about all things CEO” (noting they’re ”about” CEOs, not “for” them) – one of the most glaring flaws in their “analysis’ is their definition of target audience, an antiquated term the social media “revolution” is supposed to have done away with.

There are some wonderful social media tools that have enabled people to communicate across boundaries; to broadcast their opinions, beliefs and experiences to the world; to “interact” with celebrities, representatives of their favorite brands, and other like-minded people; and, sometimes, even to sell each other stuff. But at its core, social media isn’t about connecting businesses, or their CEOs, to “target audiences” — it’s about people communicating with each other.

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Mediocrity by mercurialn

“It’s bullshit! Crowds have terrible taste… If you let the people decide, then nothing truly adventurous ever gets out. And that’s a problem.”

–Christopher R. Weingarten (@1000TimesYes), #140Conf

Speaking at the 140 Characters Conference — a brazenly opportunistic affair best described as “a meeting of Twitter Early Adopters Anonymous” and the “biggest circle jerk of nothingness” — Weingarten’s rant has been called elitist by some, but it reiterated a point I’ve been harping on for a while now: the “wisdom of the crowds” is overrated.

The mythical “crowds” give us the bland mediocrity that dominates the bestseller lists in books and music, Hollywood’s Box Office and Nielsen’s TV ratings, at local poetry slams and on the crowded shelves of bodegas across the country! Of course, the flip side of that argument is that in every one of those examples, there’s a gatekeeper involved — a publisher, producer, writer, curator, marketer or buyer — giving the crowd what [they think] they want.

Times are changing and appealing to mediocrity isn’t quite as profitable as it used to be; the over-leveraged, over-extended, value-extracting publishers that have thrived on it for years are in trouble because they’re simply too big to change direction. Most of them will be gone or unrecognizably splintered in the next 5-10 years, and good riddance!

Make no mistake about it, however, you are committing an act of rebellion with every new channel you support. The record labels and major networks are starting to realize they cannot make money anymore. Soon they will realize the nagging truth that some of us have been shouting from the town square for years: The artists and the fans no longer need them… YOU are my record label.

–Matthew Ebel, You Are The Revolution

Hyperbole aside, Ebel’s point is a valid one. As has been noted ad nauseum lately, the Internet has leveled the playing field, theoretically enabling everyone to be a publisher, a marketer, a critic and a consumer. The democratization of the gatekeeper’s role hasn’t led to the increased creation nor consumption of quality content, though; quite the opposite, actually.

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grandmaster FLAX ~ II by striatic

“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.”
Alice Kahn

I follow a lot of experienced marketers on Twitter, along with several whose real-world experience is questionable, and one of the most annoying memes I’ve seen is the belief that everyone should be on Twitter, particularly major brands and small businesses. When a colleague tweeted a link to a study that claimed “97% of users believe that brands should engage with their customers on Twitter”, I literally laughed out loud, noting that 97% of the people who’d take a poll like that are probably marketers.

I should have said “social media gurus” instead of marketers, because the “study” — a  statistically irrelevant, 6-question survey of 208 people — is the kind of vacuous “data” that gets referenced by the former all the time.

NEWSFLASH: You’re not a guru, you just tweet a lot!

Twitter is a great personal networking tool, and there are numerous examples of businesses using it well to engage in genuine conversations with their fans, customers and critics (ie: my dustup with Starbucks), but at the end of the day, some conversations simply aren’t worth having because they can bring even more attention to your shortcomings, leading to the worst case scenario: public disengagement.

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