It's an exciting time to be a fan of music; the barriers to producing one's own work have come crashing down. The technology is inexpensive. Social media connects artists to their fans. There are a plethora of low-cost options for outsourcing the commerce aspect of the business. Combined with the collapse of the terrestrial radio music industry - that means independent artists are on almost equal footing with the oligopoly of major record labels in terms of being able to create work, connect with fans and earn a living.
If this fan-generated Green Lantern trailer is any indication, the same will be true for movies sooner rather than later.
Robert Rodriguez already sent shockwaves through Hollywood when he produced Sin City at his ranch in Texas for $40 million on a digital backlot. Inexpensive digital cameras like the Red One are putting gorgeous digital images that rival the warmth of analog film even closer within reach.
The major hurdle to an explosion of diverse, fan-generated content is the thicket of intellectual property (IP) legislation the major entertainment companies have bought by lobbying congress for decades. We need a comprehensive rewrite of IP legislation so that creativity can thrive and the cabals of giant conglomerates that control the entertainment industry can't keep watering down artistic works so that they appeal to the broadest audience possible for (perceived) maximum profitability.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Marketers Miss the Point of Social Media (Again)
As audiences continue to fragment and marketers scramble to find the next big thing that is going to save the traditional advertising industry, they continue to mistakenly apply the traditional one-way mass media model to the tribalized digital environment. It's the equivalent of using chess pieces to play Halo 3.
Either as a result of naivete or a concerted effort to mislead those who buy advertising, they also continue to use delusive statistics to quantify that the traditional media is still on top. The latest example is a study by Knowledge Networks (written up in MediaPost). It concludes that in spite of the fact that 83 percent of the population on the Internet is using social media, "...genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will."
The conclusion is based on (among other things) the statistics that "5% of social media users regularly turn to these social networks for 'guidance on purchase decisions'" and "only 16% of social media users say they are more likely to buy from companies that advertise on social sites."
Based on these statistics, a Knowledge Networks VP reaches the conclusion, "...word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV. The influence of social media isn't at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing - about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads.'"
It sounds compelling until one realizes that they're completely missing the point.
First, social media enables people to broaden their social networks and to interact with friends and family in new ways. It not only greases the skids for interactions within one's social circle, but it indexes them and makes them searchable. Put another way - social media is a more effective iteration of word of mouth.
This makes it very difficult to draw the line between a decision influenced purely by word-of-mouth and a decision influenced purely by an interaction within a social media environment. For example, if I buy a car because my friend recommended it to me at a social function, but I learned this friend was an expert because of articles they posted on their Facebook profile - which medium gets the credit for the transaction?
Of course social media fails when used for traditional marketing efforts. It's created a completely new paradigm that has made possible entirely new economic systems and business models (to say nothing of how it has affected aspects of business like marketing). If you're a business built on volume trying to reach a mass audience - you're likely going to fail using social media. In fact, your failure is virtually guaranteed if you go about it in the traditional ways.
Invariably some percentage of those sales attributed to "word-of-mouth" rightly belong to social media, because of the way social media allows individuals to maintain contact with those they take "word-of-mouth" recommendations from.
The point of using social media for marketing is that allows one to easily target a very small, specialized audience in a very inexpensive way. So if you're trying to sell the most popular car (Toyota Camry) in the most popular color (White), you're wasting your time. If, instead, you're trying to sell a custom-crafted automobile (Tesla Roadster) in a custom color (Chartreuse) - you can now find and influence your audience more cheaply and easily.
Either as a result of naivete or a concerted effort to mislead those who buy advertising, they also continue to use delusive statistics to quantify that the traditional media is still on top. The latest example is a study by Knowledge Networks (written up in MediaPost). It concludes that in spite of the fact that 83 percent of the population on the Internet is using social media, "...genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will."
The conclusion is based on (among other things) the statistics that "5% of social media users regularly turn to these social networks for 'guidance on purchase decisions'" and "only 16% of social media users say they are more likely to buy from companies that advertise on social sites."
Based on these statistics, a Knowledge Networks VP reaches the conclusion, "...word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV. The influence of social media isn't at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing - about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads.'"
It sounds compelling until one realizes that they're completely missing the point.
First, social media enables people to broaden their social networks and to interact with friends and family in new ways. It not only greases the skids for interactions within one's social circle, but it indexes them and makes them searchable. Put another way - social media is a more effective iteration of word of mouth.
This makes it very difficult to draw the line between a decision influenced purely by word-of-mouth and a decision influenced purely by an interaction within a social media environment. For example, if I buy a car because my friend recommended it to me at a social function, but I learned this friend was an expert because of articles they posted on their Facebook profile - which medium gets the credit for the transaction?
Of course social media fails when used for traditional marketing efforts. It's created a completely new paradigm that has made possible entirely new economic systems and business models (to say nothing of how it has affected aspects of business like marketing). If you're a business built on volume trying to reach a mass audience - you're likely going to fail using social media. In fact, your failure is virtually guaranteed if you go about it in the traditional ways.
Invariably some percentage of those sales attributed to "word-of-mouth" rightly belong to social media, because of the way social media allows individuals to maintain contact with those they take "word-of-mouth" recommendations from.
The point of using social media for marketing is that allows one to easily target a very small, specialized audience in a very inexpensive way. So if you're trying to sell the most popular car (Toyota Camry) in the most popular color (White), you're wasting your time. If, instead, you're trying to sell a custom-crafted automobile (Tesla Roadster) in a custom color (Chartreuse) - you can now find and influence your audience more cheaply and easily.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Social Media Ethical Dilemma: the Admin-less Facebook Group
Case Study: As with any institution of a reasonable size, Grand Rapids Community College has its detractors who occasionally express themselves via social media.
One of the handful of anti-GRCC groups on Facebook recently had its administrator vacate his position, leaving the group leaderless. The ethical dilemma I'm presented with is: do I seize this opportunity to join the group, establish myself as the admin, and promptly abolish the group?
The answer is, of course, no. That would be unethical, and I run the risk of making the problem worse. Here's why:
One of the handful of anti-GRCC groups on Facebook recently had its administrator vacate his position, leaving the group leaderless. The ethical dilemma I'm presented with is: do I seize this opportunity to join the group, establish myself as the admin, and promptly abolish the group?
The answer is, of course, no. That would be unethical, and I run the risk of making the problem worse. Here's why:
- First, criticism is perfectly fine - not everyone has had a positive experience and they're entitled to tell the world about it. Moreover, their complaints are powerful in helping frame the college's priorities which ultimately resolves the problems.
- Second, the deletion of the group may be noticed by those who are currently members as a status update, which may spark an investigation which (along with their resulting ire) will be directed at me - a GRCC flak.
- Third, the content on the group is barely-coherent and riddled with profanity, anti-gay slurs, misspellings and shoddy grammar - so it's unlikely many people will take it seriously.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Chevron's Fake News as Public Relations
Scenario: An oil company has polluted a South American nation with 30 times the amount of oil spilled in the Exxon Valdez disaster. A major news outlet is about to do an expose on the pending multi-million dollar lawsuit over the environmental damage. What's a corporation to do?
Increase transparency by inviting citizens' groups inside the organization to help improve policies procedures? Invest in infrastructure improvements? Offer to clean up the damage and donate to rainforest preservation efforts?
Naah - they just pay to produce their own favorable news report.
That's precisely what Chevron just did. They hired former CNN anchor Gene Randall (laid off in 2001) to do an "investigation" into the disaster and resulting lawsuit to counteract a "60 Minutes" report that was about to drop with Chevron's "side" of the story (featuring solely consultants, lawyers and experts on the Chevron payroll).
A few years ago, when the Bush Administration was illegally using taxpayer money to produce propaganda in support of its No Child Left Behind" and Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit programs, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) condemned the practice when it is not transparent that the "news" was not produced by an objective journalistic outfit. In fact, they specifically noted "PRSA recommends that organizations that prepare VNRs should not use the word "reporting" if the narrator is not a reporter."
This is significant because in the Chevron propaganda piece, it opens with a key graphic "Gene Randal, Reporting" (that same graphic appears again later in the piece as Randall speaks while standing in front of a building in a trenchcoat), and the segment closes with Randall saying "this is Gene Randall, reporting" (a direct violation of PRSA's standards). It also mimics the style of magazine-style investigative news programs, opening with Randall standing in front of a bank of monitors in a video editing room. Thus far, PRSA has not issued any statements about the effort, though they mentioned it in PR Tactics and Strategist Online.
The Chevron-produced piece (available here) fails to mention in the video who produced the piece (one must infer that from the profile of the user "TexacoEcuador"). The video puts the blame for the damage on PetroEcuador (inferring that Chevron cleaned up all of its environmental damage with a $40 million clean-up campaign back in the 1990s) and greedy "trial lawyers." Not surprisingly, comments on all of the videos are disabled.
With disinformation tactics like this in such wide use and the investigative news media continually seeing declines in funding/staffing, it's no wonder that 41 percent of the US population thinks that the threat of global climate change is exaggerated (up from 30 percent in 2006).
[Update: Bob Garfield of Media Matters Interviews Gene Randall on the Chevron Piece.]
Increase transparency by inviting citizens' groups inside the organization to help improve policies procedures? Invest in infrastructure improvements? Offer to clean up the damage and donate to rainforest preservation efforts?
Naah - they just pay to produce their own favorable news report.
That's precisely what Chevron just did. They hired former CNN anchor Gene Randall (laid off in 2001) to do an "investigation" into the disaster and resulting lawsuit to counteract a "60 Minutes" report that was about to drop with Chevron's "side" of the story (featuring solely consultants, lawyers and experts on the Chevron payroll).
A few years ago, when the Bush Administration was illegally using taxpayer money to produce propaganda in support of its No Child Left Behind" and Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit programs, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) condemned the practice when it is not transparent that the "news" was not produced by an objective journalistic outfit. In fact, they specifically noted "PRSA recommends that organizations that prepare VNRs should not use the word "reporting" if the narrator is not a reporter."
This is significant because in the Chevron propaganda piece, it opens with a key graphic "Gene Randal, Reporting" (that same graphic appears again later in the piece as Randall speaks while standing in front of a building in a trenchcoat), and the segment closes with Randall saying "this is Gene Randall, reporting" (a direct violation of PRSA's standards). It also mimics the style of magazine-style investigative news programs, opening with Randall standing in front of a bank of monitors in a video editing room. Thus far, PRSA has not issued any statements about the effort, though they mentioned it in PR Tactics and Strategist Online.
The Chevron-produced piece (available here) fails to mention in the video who produced the piece (one must infer that from the profile of the user "TexacoEcuador"). The video puts the blame for the damage on PetroEcuador (inferring that Chevron cleaned up all of its environmental damage with a $40 million clean-up campaign back in the 1990s) and greedy "trial lawyers." Not surprisingly, comments on all of the videos are disabled.
With disinformation tactics like this in such wide use and the investigative news media continually seeing declines in funding/staffing, it's no wonder that 41 percent of the US population thinks that the threat of global climate change is exaggerated (up from 30 percent in 2006).
[Update: Bob Garfield of Media Matters Interviews Gene Randall on the Chevron Piece.]
Monday, May 04, 2009
The Radically-Transparent Classroom
Two stories in my feed reader caught my attention this weekend that hint at the growing friction between outmoded academic traditions and Web 2.0:
There have already been a few incidents that have hinted at the future of a radically-transparent classroom (like Jay Bennish, and the much-less publicized case of David Paszkiewicz).
Instead of being sensationalist fodder for special interest groups, however, it could be that transparency provides educational institutions with the leverage they need to overcome the problematic aspects of tenure in a constructive way. Make no mistake: having protections in place for faculty (like tenure) is absolutely necessary to ensure quality education. This is especially true in the polarized era we're living in where an indelicately-worded comment in a discussion on any of the hot-button issues in education (like the teaching of creationism/intelligent design) can bring out the torches and pitchforks.
The first way transparency can help ensure better quality education is the ability social media gives students to connect with one another and share information. It's no longer the case that poor conduct on the part of an educator (which includes, by the way, ending the "voicemail hell" students all too frequently find themseves in) is lost to the wind after the twenty or so students that witnessed it go their separate ways at the end of the semester. It can be documented and indexed (i.e. searchable) so that it is readily available to future classes that will be able to easily document patterns of bad (or good) conduct by educators.
Second, due to the fact that so much of what makes dismissing a bad teacher so difficult is the highly-specialized nature and context of each individual situation and the difficulty in documenting poor performance - it would seem that social media and technology may provide both the tools and framework to ensure that we can more efficiently provide due process for educators when a dispute arises.
There is a constructive way to go about this, and it can be a great thing for all those involved if it's done right. What that means, however, is that educators (and administrators) will need to relinquish some of the outdated policies they've come to rely upon and be more responsive to the concerns of their stakeholders (which is something the majority of faculty are doing already).
- First, the L.A. Times recently published an in-depth report about the difficulties of firing tenured teachers (Song, J. "Firing Tenured Teachers can be a Costly and Torturous Task,"May 3, 2009).
- Second, the UK Times Higher Education edition published a story (Attwood, R. "Students Union Accused of Snooping on Lectures," April 20, 2009) about the University and College Union (UCU) objecting to the Manchester Metropolitan Students Union's (MMSU) new practice of encouraging students to report (via text message) when faculty are late or when they suddenly cancel lectures.
There have already been a few incidents that have hinted at the future of a radically-transparent classroom (like Jay Bennish, and the much-less publicized case of David Paszkiewicz).
Instead of being sensationalist fodder for special interest groups, however, it could be that transparency provides educational institutions with the leverage they need to overcome the problematic aspects of tenure in a constructive way. Make no mistake: having protections in place for faculty (like tenure) is absolutely necessary to ensure quality education. This is especially true in the polarized era we're living in where an indelicately-worded comment in a discussion on any of the hot-button issues in education (like the teaching of creationism/intelligent design) can bring out the torches and pitchforks.
The first way transparency can help ensure better quality education is the ability social media gives students to connect with one another and share information. It's no longer the case that poor conduct on the part of an educator (which includes, by the way, ending the "voicemail hell" students all too frequently find themseves in) is lost to the wind after the twenty or so students that witnessed it go their separate ways at the end of the semester. It can be documented and indexed (i.e. searchable) so that it is readily available to future classes that will be able to easily document patterns of bad (or good) conduct by educators.
Second, due to the fact that so much of what makes dismissing a bad teacher so difficult is the highly-specialized nature and context of each individual situation and the difficulty in documenting poor performance - it would seem that social media and technology may provide both the tools and framework to ensure that we can more efficiently provide due process for educators when a dispute arises.
There is a constructive way to go about this, and it can be a great thing for all those involved if it's done right. What that means, however, is that educators (and administrators) will need to relinquish some of the outdated policies they've come to rely upon and be more responsive to the concerns of their stakeholders (which is something the majority of faculty are doing already).
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