This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual. A longing indicates that something is missing in our lives. What is missing is the sound of the human voice. The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice. "The Longing", by David Weinberger, from The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual My wife and I celebrated our 11th anniversary this past weekend with a little family getaway to Lancaster County, PA, and had the wonderful kind of physically exhausting, mentally stimulating time that…
Eleven years ago next month, in Austin, TX, I took one of the most life-changing thrill rides ever when I attended my first National Poetry Slam, as a member of the 1998 team representing the Nuyorican Poets Café that would go on to become their first (and still only) team to win the Championship. The victory itself was amazing, but what really struck me and lasted much, much longer was the diverse community of poets in attendance, and their passion for the event that brought them together every Summer.
The competition was fierce, and there were some who took it way too seriously (myself included!), but late at night, after all of the bouts were done and people gathered in groups of old and new friends to talk, drink and trade poems, the true spirit of the slam always shone through: “It’s not about the points, it’s about the poetry.”
I came back from that first NPS inspired and on a mission, and in September of 1998 added a regular slam series to my fledgling reading series, a little bit louder, and the rest is history.
Mets Fan at Shea Stadium (Queens, New York) by Luke Redmond
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. —Kevin Kelly, 1,000 True Fans
The “1,000 True Fans” theory states, effectively, that 1,000 literal fanatics each spending $100/year on your stuff is all you need for a sustainable career. It’s a model for which Trent Reznor is often used as an example, and much like the discredited “Long Tail Theory” it’s based on (Kelly and Chris Anderson are colleagues at Wired), it is overly simplistic and doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.
It does, however, offer a reference point for the next step in building an author’s platform.
Platform 101 was about laying the foundation, physically and virtually. Once you have your foundation in place, you will slowly begin to attract an audience, some of whom might one day become enthusiastic fans who will not only buy your books (and short stories, and CDs, and t-shirts, etc.) but, perhaps more importantly, will also mobilize and spread the word far and wide on your behalf, sometimes without your even having to ask.
Platform 201 is about attracting, engaging and energizing that community, and these are three fundamental points to keep in mind while doing so:
Solid info and insights, coupled with clear (if sometimes incomplete) case studies make GROUNDSWELL: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business School Press; 2008) ideal for the C-Suite skeptic and those trying to influence their embrace of socialization. Published last year, and working primarily from data collected in 2007, it holds up reasonably well as a “proof of concept” vehicle, and as such, is a perfect companion to Geoff Livingston’s NOW IS GONE: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs.
Basically, the “groundswell” is Water Cooler 2.0 — people using technology to share their thoughts and opinions about products and services they love and loathe — and GROUNDSWELL makes a smart, practical case for listening, tapping, embracing and empowering that groundswell for the best competitive advantage of all: a passionate customer.
Co-authors Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, both analysts with Forrester Research, take pains to keep things simple, writing in a style that’s one step above “Social Media for Dummies”, presenting a step-by-step strategic approach to understanding and leveraging their “groundswell” premise which wisely focuses on PEOPLE and OBJECTIVES before technology.
“The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.”
—Seth Godin
In an era of immediate gratification and information overload, patience is something few people have time for. They want “it” right now, whether “it” is an email response, a well-paying career, or the proverbial house with a white picket fence. For writers, the social web whispers promises of instant success and overnight fame if only they had a big enough following on Twitter, but the reality is, as Godin notes, very different.
I’ve realized over the past several months that there’s a tendency to oversimplify things, to assume everyone has a certain level of web and marketing savvy (not to mention free time), starting discussions about writers’ platforms, curating communities and “free vs. freemium” way too far ahead of the curve. For a lot of writers. something as seemingly simple as setting up a blog can become a huge, time-consuming effort for which the long-term value isn’t always quite clear or worthwhile.
It most certainly is worthwhile, though, so what follows is a simple 3-step model for building the foundation of your writer’s platform, no matter where you are on Godin’s theoretical timeline:
What [FREE author Chris Anderson] is proposing is down somewhere, on the scale of ethics, well beneath Wal-Mart’s policies of no longer hiring any full-time workers so as to avoid health and unemployment insurance. It is in fact some weird sort of neo-feudal, post-contract-worker society, in which he will create a dystopian and eager volunteer-slave system of “attention-paid” enthusiasts (which is to say, people with no other options, and no capital of their own) to create products from which rich people can get richer.
The “FREE” debate rages on — with thought-provoking posts by Will Hindmarch, Mitch Ratcliffe, Fred Wilson and Mark Cuban added to the mix (along with the one quoted above, from The Awl) — and in the midst of it, the need for some clarification jumped out at me: “Free” and “Freemium” are NOT the same thing.
They’re getting intertwined in the debate, though, and for writers developing their own platform, understanding the difference between them is critical.
“Free” is the realm of venture capitalists like Wilson and cagey opportunists like Anderson. It is usually based on an advertising-supported model that demands scale and/or desirable demographics for profitability, along with as much freely contributed content as possible to keep expenses down. A niche strategy can work, too, if the audience is highly targeted; ie: Anderson’s GeekDad site, whose business model The Awl criticized for resembling “a digital-age medieval society”.
In the print world, most B2B magazines are built on the “free” model, with “qualified” subscribers getting the magazine for free (controlled circulation) because it’s subsidized by advertisers who want to reach that particular niche. Much of their content is often freely contributed by non-writing professionals, too, primarily to position themselves as thought-leaders within their respective industries. With the stark decline in ad revenues of late, “free” is an increasingly precarious business model for publishers, and many are struggling to transform to a “freemium” model, developing additional products and services that are of value to their readers and worth paying a premium for.
“Free” isn’t a viable business model for writers, but “freemium” just might work… for some.
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.
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.
