Any company should by now have learnt that its customers can talk about them, to massive effect, without their permission. (As the HuffPo says here, it is kind of a leap of logic to think that United Breaks Guitars lost the company 10% of its market capitalisation, but it certainly wasn’t good for them.) But today we can also pretty effectively organise without their permission. Continue reading Stolen from the greatest HR policy PowerPoint ever made
Following this post I had this IM discussion which I’m copying here because I think it provides some additional clarity and context. They asked to be anonymous. Continue reading latte drinking cont’d
I tweeted on Friday that I was profoundly dismayed with democracy in America. I was called out on this by one of my friends, who accused me of being a latte drinking, Guardian reading liberal and, I suspect his point was, of not respecting the will of the people in Massachusetts. He’s got at least three points right there, but he’s not right about the last one. And it’s an important point to respond to because actually I’m excited by the lessons that the will of the people taught us in Massachusetts. I think they’ve confirmed our exit from the twentieth century. Continue reading I may be a latte drinking liberal but I respect Massachusetts’ voters
Every Christmas I like to have an argument with my mum, usually about technology, and usually conducted like an irregular serial – picked up several times over the course of the holiday. In previous years my Christmas technology arguments have been about kitchen appliances; can you believe we still don’t have a microwave or a dishwasher? Next Christmas it has got to finally be about the pitiful size of our TV, a debate that was this time sidelined by 2009’s topic: social networking.
In a car ride to visit grandma, mum passes this article by Julia Neuberger over to the back seat. (Her producing articles from the Guardian, often snipped out and left on my bed, is a feature of our arguments.) Essentially Baroness Neuberger had summarised what my mum thinks: that social networking is making us less social by wrapping us in a virtual world and isolating us from ‘real’ relationships.
This is of course bunk. Continue reading Liberals shouldn’t slam Facebook
Pretty much anybody I meet I try to friend on Facebook. I’m friends with my dad, I’m friends with some kids I used to teach, my colleagues, my uni friends, school friends, some people I’ve only ever met once, and I’m sure I’m friends with some people I don’t actually like.
Let me quickly say this is not a post about how you should use Facebook. There are legitimate conversations to be had about how we should interact with each other online. But you miss the point if you debate things like how many friends you ‘should’ have on Facebook (what portion of your social graph you should friend). The internet is almost defined by the fact that we are able to use the tools that emerge in – often unexpected – ways that most suit us. Continue reading I’m a better person because of Facebook (we all are)
The tools that are (really only just) becoming available on the internet have the potential to place the interests of the many, probably for the first time in our history (since the early Medieval period, since…forever?) , on an equal footing with the special interests of the few.
Continue reading A little (Blairite?) optimism about the internet.
I think the guys at Pear Analytics, as reported by the BBC here, are missing the point about Twitter.
The whole bloody point of this social web business is that there is zero cost to tweet or post or comment. So it is almost impossible to pass-along no value. Even if only my mum is interested that ‘I’m eating a sandwich’ then I have passed on a tiny bit of value at zero cost.
Moreover, it is exactly their categorization of this kind of message as ‘pointless babble’ that show they miss the point.
We are in an age of zero cost, peer to peer and mass communication. It is not the role of anybody to describe conversation as pointless babble. That’s an old media mindset. There aren’t gatekeepers any more. I’ll define what I think is pointless thank you very much.
It is very difficult to separately categorize ‘self-promotion’ from ‘conversation’ or even ‘pointless babble’. Anybody in the business of self-promotion is increasingly required to engage in conversation.
And far more importantly: Aggregate the pointless babble of hundreds of thousands of people and it’s no longer pointless babble.
This is another from my work blog.
Does the music itself have value, or is monetization through gigs & merchandise enough?
Cont’d from Should music be free? Part 1 where Oli and Jacob discussed the musician Trent Reznor’s pioneering efforts online to make music pay. And Oli told Jacob he may have got the wrong end of the stick.
Oli: Why shouldn’t people pay to own or play a record (and yes, ‘pay’ here could include Spotify style ad-supported models, I mean it in a wide sense where musicians are being reimbursed for people listening to their recorded music)? I believe musicians should be able to monetize the actual music.
Some people are claiming that music should be free, that digital piracy is absolutely fine because Artists can and should make money out of just gigs and merchandise. This is a position held by a fair number of technology utopians but I believe is disconnected from how most people feel. Most people see value in music and are quite happy to buy a song from the artist. The current problems have been to do with cost and ease of purchase/use, not with the actual concept of paying for music.
Jacob: Completely agree that music has a value. I’d be cautious of one point: ‘musicians should be able to monetize [it]’ – I’m not sure how far ‘shoulds’ get you in economics…
Artists need to monetize music however they can. And I don’t think making money out of gigs and merchandise is a consolation prize for them.
I think you’re right that the Nine Inch Nails innovation is exactly what we need to see. I also agree that the concept of paying for music is probably accepted and that it’s issues around ease of purchase (and also ideas around ‘fair value’ – the feeling that we’ve been ripped off for so long) that are really the important ones.
Oli: Fair point on the sloppy usage of ‘should’. What I intended to convey was that I believe people are actually okay with the concept of paying for recorded music and most people do not expect it to be free. If I am correct in this, then musicians should be in a position where they can charge money for it and people will want to pay for it. I didn’t intend ‘should’ to convey that there was some ‘God-given’ right, or that there was any moral cause here.
I still disagree about gigs & merchandise. I think we may be going across purposes here because I’m not saying that these aren’t important revenue streams, I am merely rejecting the notion put forward by some people that all recorded music should be free and that gigs & merch are an entirely satisfactory alternative revenue stream.
This is hugely insulting to these individuals who have worked to produce the music, they are effectively being told that all that work is worthless and they must now do further work before they should be recompensed. I can’t understand how it could be argued making money off merchandise is okay, but making money off recorded music is not. If someone were to come along and start producing perfect replicas of the bands merchandise at a lower cost, stealing their customers, how does the band now make money? Purely through gigs? If we would protect the band and make producing these cheaper replicas illegal, why is this different from recorded music?
I currently cannot see the feasibility of any system where bands are not recompensed for recorded work. Ultimately I won’t be surprised if the mechanism for payment gets hidden (e.g. a subscription/tax is hidden somewhere, song plays are tracked and artists are then recompensed out of a pot based on this) but there has to be some system whereby artists get paid for recorded music.
Part 3 cont’d from Batmanghelidjh vs. Batty Boy
In Part 2 we looked at two versions of new types of schools. We can debate whether either of these models constitute good schooling. I think it’s exactly this debate (essentially on structural change in education; about how schools could be reorganised) that is good news for UK education. It’s because of this debate, and my hope for the fruits of it, that I believe we may even be about to see a Renaissance in UK education.
A Renaissance?!
Yes. Because the time – the next few years – in which this debate will occur, and its fruits grow (gosh this is a cheesy metaphor) has got some good things going for it:
1. A good place to start from
The foundations for a renaissance are pretty strong. Education today is reaping the benefits of the increased spending of the Blair years.
We have a teaching profession who have been feeling pretty good about themselves. They have a better status and more money than for sometime before ’97. And the profession has lots of new, young, motivated teachers (including recently some new maths teachers fresh from the banking sector).
But for some time we’ve been getting close to realistic limits on education spending. It isn’t clear that more money would make much more difference.
Well now we can’t spend any more and everybody knows it. The debate has to move.
It will be the new entrants, I think, the Young Turks, who will prove instrumental in achieving structural change.
2. Education 3.0
You can’t make a point about anything these days without referencing the social media-internet-tech revolution. And, yes that does have lots of practical and game-changing implications for the classroom.
But what I really mean builds on the Young Turks point above. Is it just me or do my generation look admiringly at the boot-straps, start-up attitude of Silicon Valley et al, in a way that maybe previous generations in Britain haven’t looked at entrepreneurialism before?
What is exciting about education at the moment, for sure, is the talk of hacking or disrupting it (the A VC blog talks a good talk on this). Education 3.0 (yes, that is my tongue slightly in my cheek for the silly name) is about taking that Silicon Valley attitude of entrepreneurial disruption into the school system – one of (the?) most conservative and outdated of institutions.
What if we looked at the fundamentals of education and found a more efficient way to make it work? Those in the education Renaissance are in a good position to do for education what Amazon did for retail or Apple for music.
Ps. There’s not a bad track record of disruption coming out of recessions.
3. Change is a-comin’
Amazingly the Tories may be talking some of the right ideas. They want a focus on outputs. They seem to want to break down the monolith – making it easier to start new schools.
And it looks pretty likely that they’ll be winning the next election.
Plus, we live in grassroots days. Bottom-up movements have been inspired by Obama and the power of the internet.
I think we could be about to see pressure for structural change in education coming effectively from both the top and the bottom.
………..
This is from my work blog
…the first post in an occasional series called ‘Head to Head’, in which Promise employees publish email conversations they are having on topical issues. The first debate comes from Oli and Jacob, who worked together out of our Dubai office in 2008, building Promise’s largest and longest running online community to date.
On their days off in Dubai they would debate all things interesting about the impact of the new era of mushrooming diversity, globalization and mediated communication – particularly in relation to the geeky world of the web.
Jacob thinks Oli is an unfailing cynic, hyper-critical of anything that smells like a fad or a bandwagon. Oli thinks Jacob is way too optimistic and doesn’t want to hear him talk about ‘web 3.0’ or Twitter ever again.
They were arguing so much that Jacob was sent to our Washington, DC office. These informal posts are cut and pasted pretty much directly from their continuing email conversations…
Oli kicked off the debate with a link about Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails releasing an iPhone App and generally being pretty innovative online: building communities and pioneering ‘a new, fan-centered business model that radically breaks with the practices of the struggling music industry’.
Jacob: The way to make money as an artist is to build a massively engaged community online. Monetize through concerts, (+ merchandising I suppose). Love it. I like his point about starting where the fans are. Starting from the point that we expect a lot of that stuff to be free now. I like it as another way to monetize eyeballs without relying on advertising. The attention economy is not dead.
Oli: Yeah although I’m cautious you may have gotten the wrong end of the stick. Reznor doesn’t believe music should be free but he’s being pragmatic in a world where you are often competing against free. He‘s done a lot of innovative stuff selling his records.
His collaborative album with Saul Williams was released as a free MP3 or for $5 you could get it in a variety of higher quality formats including lossless. Ghosts I-IV was available as a partial free download, a complete free stream as well as several paid editions at various price points. At the top end was a limited edition $300 CD/Vinyl/Blu-Ray deluxe pack with footage, original multi-track audio files, signed photography book etc. So he is doing what he can to actually retain the value in the music but unlike the record companies he’s starting from the premise that you need to show people the value in the product, not just demand that there is value in it.
A lot of things work well for him because he’s an established artist, but I like the fact that unlike the cynical Radiohead gimmick etc. he is actually looking into new business models that other artists could replicate (e.g. the Saul Williams case).
Jacob: Absolutely. Not saying music should free. Monetizing gigs and merchandise is still monetizing the music. As you and he say it’s about being pragmatic and starting from where people are now (in terms of their attitude to music consumption), rather than moaning that people aren’t where you want them to be. Paul Carr in No use crying over spilt ink is on a similar theme in relation to newspapers.
I think the new business model is the most interesting point. It’s a different kind of community to what we do. But, you’re right – he knows how to engage people. The point of his new business model is to convert that engagement into revenue.
TBC shortly…
Jacob Kestner's blog. 