Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Platform 101 For Busy Writers: 3 Simple Steps

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:July 10, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:14 Comments

“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:

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Free is wrong for writers; Freemium might not be

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:July 6, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:38 Comments

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.

“Chris Anderson Is Worse Than Wal-Mart“, The Awl

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.

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The Limitations of FREE; Godin vs. Gladwell

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:June 30, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:16 Comments

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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Sorry, but Chris Brogan is no Warren Buffett

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:June 29, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:4 Comments

“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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Crowds vs. Gatekeepers: Not a Zero-Sum Game

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:June 17, 2009
Post category:Media
Post comments:15 Comments

“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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Not Every Conversation is Worth Having

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:June 15, 2009
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:5 Comments

“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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Review: NOW IS GONE by Geoff Livingston

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:June 11, 2009
Post category:Media Reviews
Post comments:3 Comments

With the Internet continuing to evolve at a dizzying pace, where six months can feel like six years, most printed books about new media are outdated by the time they hit bookstore shelves. One published back in 2007 should, by all rights, be completely worthless at this point.

That Geoff Livingston’s now is gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs (Bartleby Press, November 2007) still holds up is a testament to his wisely focusing on “social media principles rather than tactics” and offering a practical take on the opportunities and challenges new media technologies have introduced to the marketing mix.

For “traditional media” organizations, new media has been a remarkably disruptive force, leveling the playing field for consumers and marketers alike to connect without traditional intermediaries, and enabling both to become influential and competitive content producers themselves. The learning curve for successful integration of new media into a traditional media organization can be steep, leaving all but the savviest executives in the dark about how to proceed.

The future impact of social media on marketing will be felt throughout all disciplines. When there are vast changes in the way people communicate, like social media, marketing tactics and entire programs need to be rethought. For some more consumer-based industries, a shift in marketing means an even more dramatic organizational change.

Credited as being written “with Brian Solis” — the hyperbolic PR 2.0 guru seemingly afflicted with Munchausen by proxy syndrome and a flair for belaboring the obvious — Livingston’s more rational voice is, thankfully, dominant throughout. While there is nothing particularly revelatory here that any savvy marketing professional shouldn’t already be familiar with, most will appreciate its recognition of social media as a fundamental piece of the marketing mix, part of a long-term strategy tied to a company’s core values, and not a short-term tactic tied to the latest new shiny du jour.

Everyone thinks it’s a revolution, when in reality it’s a return to old-fashioned values. Relationships and values in the sense of the baker, the butcher and general store owners down on Main Street… By talking with its community rather than at them, a company becomes an integral part of those communities.

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