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Operation Switch: Where Small = Big

Tuesday, May 11th, 2010

Today Fight and Portland General Electric launched Operation Switch, a small program aimed at changing the way that people use power.
Emphasis on small.

We all have some idea that putting information out into the world can help people make positive change.  But we also know that just putting the information out there will only go so far.

So we’re doing an experiment: We’re giving people something small to do and asking them to announce when they’ve done it.  We call each thing a “Mission”, and each Mission runs for one to three weeks.  At the end of each Mission, PGE will announce – via their PortGen_Save Twitter account – what the total effect of everyone’s participation is.  The hope is that over the course of a few Missions we’ll see more significant numbers of people completing each Mission, and the total impact done by everyone will become large.

Will we be able to build a movement?  We hope so, but we don’t know for sure.  So we’re starting small as well.  If the project fails, then we’ve learned something important (the project is set up to provide us with specific answers to assumptions that we have).  If it succeeds, then we are achieving the project objectives and have a stronger case to build out the program further.

And, of course, you can help.  Check out the Operation Switch site, and try out a Mission or two.  Then let us know what resonated with you and you think that things could be better.

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Luxury Brands online

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

PSFK has an interesting post about the failure of many luxury brand websites to render on the iPad due to their reliance on Flash to display content. In the article, PSFK points to the benefit for these brands to be accessible on what has emerged as a very popular way for people to get to web content.

It makes total sense on a tactical level – if your customers are the same people who can afford to buy iPad (not that all, or even most, iPad owners are also luxury brand customers, but there is clearly an overlap) you should probably be where they are, and right now that’s not possible with a Flash driven site.

I think though that Jason Kottke gets even closer to the core issue for these brands – a broken site is fundamentally at odds with role of an industry that is, in Kottke’s words, about effortlessness.

In both cases though I still feel that the underlying issue is an industry that has never come to terms with what interactive, or even the web means to them. Almost universally, the answer for these brands has been to take their catalogue, put it on the web, and wrap it in some fancy transition animations. Meanwhile, the iPad is just latest in a long line of products and services that have changed the way contemporary culture uses technology.

So while any luxury brand should certainly be updating their site to at least WORK on something like the iPad, it would also be a good time to also ask “what do we mean in the digital space?”, ” What is the Cartier (or LV, or Gucci, or Chanel) experience on the web?” It’s a little mind boggling to me that this question is still unanswered given that the web is very likely the first, and probably most frequent, direct experience people will have with a brand.

So with that, who’s doing it right? Are there any luxury brands right now really extending their customer experience into the web?

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Collapse Is Simply The Last Remaining Method of Simplification

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Clay Shirky Fight Portland
Clay Shirky

We are very lucky to have Clay Shirky amongst us as he brings an incredible knack for being able to explain, very simply, seemingly complex problems in the digital arena. His latest post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models, covers his thoughts on the transition to the web for TV companies and producers. Before addressing their concerns he takes a moment to reflect upon Joseph Tainter‘s book, The Collapse of Complex Societies where Tainter looked at several ancient, sophisticated societies that suddenly collapsed. As it turns out, it was bureaucracy that ruined those societies – “In such systems, there is no way to make things a little bit simpler – the whole edifice becomes a huge, interlocking system not readily amenable to change.”

He then turns to the TV producers, news content providers and their issues with the web:

About 15 years ago, the supply part of media’s supply-and-demand curve went parabolic, with a predictably inverse effect on price. Since then, a battalion of media elites have lined up to declare that exactly the opposite thing will start happening any day now.

To pick a couple of examples more or less at random, last year Barry Diller of IAC said, of content available on the web, “It is not free, and is not going to be,” Steve Brill of Journalism Online said that users “just need to get back into the habit of doing so [paying for content] online”, and Rupert Murdoch of News Corp said “Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use.” Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”

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Posted in Analysis, Anthropology, Fight, Strategy, Thinking, society | View Comments

Social Networks, Privacy and The New Obscurity

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Danah Boyd Privacy Fight SXSWi

Very briefly here are a few things I learned at this year’s SXSWi Conference – 1. SXSWi may have already jumped the shark. This year the conference appeared to be packed with people who felt that they had to be there or that the idea of a once-a-year party was too much to pass up. No other reason. 2. Many panelists forgot that being on a panel requires being prepared and that they are there to share their wisdom, or at the very least entertain us. [The NYT columnist David Carr also mentioned this lack of sparkle.] 3. The biggest buzz was which new platform would be this year’s Twitter. I mean c’mon people… 4. Geeks live in a bubble and SXSWi provides the biggest bubble of all. 5. Judging by the overuse of Foursquare and Gowalla, conference attendees do not have any privacy concerns, or perhaps they are happy with the idea that “privacy is dead.”

I’ve written often of our anthropological need to stay in touch with friends and family, and that technology merely shortens the distance between us. What I am now interested in is how to handle living in public while attempting to hold on to my privacy. And while I’m at it, I thought I’d take a look at the numbers game that occurs in social networking and how that relates to the quality of friends and followers, versus quantity.

Let’s start with privacy. During SXSWi Foursquare use was rampant, I was getting literally hundreds of Foursquare updates a day from people I follow on Twitter. It became incredibly annoying because a message like this – “I’m at Mohawk, 722 Red River, Austin TX with 171 others” – is of no importance to me as it lacks context. Ok, so it could be argued that the message conveys a trending topic of where SXSWi attendees are gathering, which may be useful to some, but I expected that everyone would be at the Mohawk at some time during the conference. Why wouldn’t they? Free food and drink always succeeds in creating lines around blocks.

But, all sarcasm aside, I like what Chris Conrey has to say about the phenomenon of sharing our whereabouts. In his post titled, Why I Deleted Foursquare and Gowalla After SXSW, he says: “I don’t see the value to the end user in these things. What I do see is a huge data mine for marketers, advertisers and stalkers to glean for information.” As for worrying about stalkers, thankfully there’s always PleaseRobMe.com to help folks begin to understand that privacy is, on the whole, a good thing.

As Chris points out, our real friends would let us know their whereabouts via Twitter, text or IM if they wanted to really share that info with people they care about. And they would also supply context, as in its definition – the set of facts or circumstances that surround a situation or event. In other words, “I’m down at the Coach and Horses having a drink with Charlie, and Anne and Pete will join us later…” That’s a little more personal than “with 171 others..” It’s also a private message.

@simonmainwaring
“In life, private by default, public by effort is normal. In social media its the opposite.” #SXSW #danahboyd

That sentence, posted to Twitter by Simon Mainwaring, is an excerpt from a keynote speech that danah boyd, [she uses only lowercase letters in her name,] a Social Media Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, gave at the 2010 SXSWi Conference.

She also said “Privacy isn’t hiding, it’s control.” Here’s a crib of her entire speech at SXSW, here’s her blog and this is her message to Google’s Eric Schmidt:

DEAR ERIC SCHMIDT, PRIVACY IS NOT DEAD. KTHXBY.

And she continues: “No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead. People of all ages care deeply about privacy. And they care just as much about privacy online as they do offline. But what privacy means may not be what you think.

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately. To do so, people must trust their interpretation of the context, including the people in the room and the architecture that defines the setting. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.”

Privacy foul? Google Buzz anyone..?

The Quantity of Your Friends and Followers Versus the Quality; It’s A Numbers Game.

So, if the idea of social networks is to further conversation, then the problem is in the numbers game. I mean, how often do we see this on Twitter? – “hey tweeps, I’m almost at 9,950 followers help me get to 10k by end of day.” The first question I would ask would be, why do you want to achieve a certain number of followers? The second would be, how on earth will you have a true conversation with 10k+ followers? Arguably the answer to the first question is “look at me, aren’t I so special” and to the second, there is no way one can have a meaningful relationship or conversation with that many people.

Which brings us to Dunbar’s Number. From Wikipedia: “Dunbar’s number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.”

That’s 150 people. As in your family, kin and all other close friends. Dunbar points out that it’s difficult to compare the quality of relationships versus the outcome of the relationship, but he says the time invested in relationships is directly related to the improvement of quality in those relationships. As you add more friends beyond the 150 he says that its akin to dropping a pebble in a pond and watching the ripples fan out across the surface. Each ripple represents a layer of relationships that are of a significantly lower quality than the initial 150. Oddly the layers scale in a consistent pattern of 10, 20, 100 etc, so when it comes to social networks he argues that any messaging or traffic really only speaks to the inner core [those 150] just like in offline relationships.

[Robin Dunbar is working on a study of Facebook and MySpace to be published later in 2010.] Watch a video of Dunbar’s talk to the RSC in London – How Many Friends Does One Person Need?

Clive Thompson’s article in the February 2010 edition of Wired Magazine, In Praise of Obscurity, also discusses social network users and their followers, where he wrote of the problem of follower scale – “…at a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they’re having fun – but any bigger and it falls apart. Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old fashioned broadcasting.“

So much for “earned media” then, we’ve unwittingly come full circle back to mass messaging. And the lesson?

He suggests: “There’s value in obscurity. After all, the world’s bravest and most important ideas are often forged away from the spotlight — in small, obscure groups of people who are passionately interested in a subject and like arguing about it. They’re willing to experiment with risky or dumb concepts because they’re among intimates. [It was, after all, small groups of marginal weirdos that brought us the computer, democracy, and the novel.]“

Which brings me back to SXSWi – the most interesting conversations that I had were either in the back channel, at dinner, or over drinks well away from the conference centre and often well away from downtown Austin and the party action. Here in Portland, at a recent dinner hosted by Intel’s Bryan Rhoads, I had a great discussion with him, W+K’s Renny Gleeson, China expert, Sam Flemming, Webtrends’ Justin Kistner and others, where, to use danah boyd’s phrase “context in environment,” the people in the room and the architecture defined the setting and therefore the conversation. The evening was a true social networking event. Context in these situations is when you can look someone in the eye and note their body language, things that help you interact and converse.

So, when do we back out of the Social Web, dump most of our Facebook “friends,” and relegate ourselves to one really good and useful Tweet a day, or one insightful blog post? Or should I say, when do we stop airing our dirty laundry while living in public..? As danah boyd said at SXSWi “In life, private by default, public by effort is normal. In social media its the opposite.”

As of the time of writing this post I currently have 6312 followers of @Pampelmoose and 842 followers of @DaveAtFight on Twitter. On Facebook I have 2,376 “friends.” My blog gets more than 250k unique visits a month. That’s a lot of “friends..”

WIll you continue using social networks and building up your friends and followers numbers? Are you happy sharing your personal data with 3rd party corporations? Or is 150 friends quite enough and does relative obscurity sound appealing?

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Posted in Anthropology, Fight, SXSW, Strategy, Technology, Thinking, Twitter, facebook, social web, society | View Comments

We Are All Distracted

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Iterative Marketing Fight Portland
The 11,500 year old Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey. [photo: Berthold Steinhilber]

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase.” – The Long Now Foundation.

We no longer consider the future. We apparently don’t have time for that. The Long Now Foundation and its 10,000 Year Clock project should at least make us find the time to again consider the future.

As Michael Chabon wrote about the Clock in his wonderful book of essays, Manhood For Amateurs, “…the Clock may accomplish its greatest task before it is ever finished, perhaps without ever being built at all. The point of the Clock Of The Long Now is not to measure out the passage into their unknown future of the race of creatures that built it. The point of the Clock is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future, to get us thinking about the Future again, to the same degree we used to, if not in quite the same way, and to reintroduce the idea that we don’t just bequeath the future – though we do, whether we think about it or not.”

The Long Now Fight Portland

How many of us even consider the future of 500 years from now, of only about 6 future generations of our families from today? And then consider 10,000 years. As Chabon points out, that’s about as long a time span as separates us from the first makers of pottery….11,500 years ago some people built the Gobekli Tepe temple near Sanliurfa, Turkey.

We all have, and have had, the future in our hands – just yesterday for instance – yet by definition the future doesn’t exist. Some of you reading this post, when you consider technology and how we now expect new developments in technology to bring us the “future,” may consider the iPad the future; it’s coming soon after all. And with that example, let’s consider the outpouring of rage from the Flash developer community over the iPad’s lack of Flash… they chose to ignore that the iPad will change the way people interact with computers in the future, instead they got all hysterical over the lack of a multimedia platform on the device; short term thinking in other words.

It’s interesting to note that one of the Long Now’s founding board members, Brian Eno, seemed to suggest that the lack of long term future thinking was an American problem. When he moved to New York City, he found that “here” and “now” meant “this room” and “this five minutes” as opposed to the larger here and longer now that he was used to in England. Because of that, he wanted the Long Now foundation to focus on stretching out what people consider as now.

I’m not sure what year it was when Eno considered the “here and now” issue, but I don’t actually believe it’s an American problem, it’s a global problem. We can see it when humans get all worked up about saving the Earth, without realizing that humans haven’t been on Earth long enough for the planet to care. We may or may not be destroying the atmosphere via global warming, but either way, when the Earth is truly done with us it will rid itself of us. We may not be around to witness the Clock Of The Long Now in 10,000 years; we need to be ok with that.

Here’s the Long Now guidelines for a long-lived, long-valuable institution:

Serve the long view
Foster responsibility
Reward patience
Mine mythic depth
Ally with competition
Take no sides
Leverage longevity

And here’s some food for thought; the Future, as considered over just the last few decades, was not all shiny bright advances in technology that improved our lives. It also brought the fear of Armageddon, of destruction by nuclear weapons. Chabon again – “…the Future…can be unremittingly and wryly bleak..”

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Posted in Anthropology, Fight, Strategy, Technology, Thinking, brand, social web, society | View Comments

An Update on The 30 Coffees Project

Friday, March 5th, 2010

You may or may not know that in February, Fight kicked off its 30 Coffees project. 30 coffees is an idea conjured up by Fight partner, Rob Shields, and at its heart it’s a simple social web exercise. As Rob said at the beginning – “Fight has an awesome community of supporters, so we thought: Who better to turn to to help us make a good thing better? We believe that Fight is a different kind of company from other marketing strategy firms, and we’d like to get some practice talking about ourselves to people in the business, marketing, and agency worlds so that when we talk to potential clients we can really shine.”

I have already met with 16 people since we started, and along the way the concept became elastic enough to include meetings I have had with some of the heads of Portland’s advertising and marketing agencies. It’s been a fascinating discussion, and I stress the word discussion as this was never intended to be an opportunity to pitch people, it is intended to help Fight form its own internal and external narrative. The feedback from the talks has been extremely useful. And more importantly, by the end of the project [it looks like it may run over a bit because of scheduling plus my speaking engagement at SXSW,] I am certain we will have honed our story along with our elevator pitch, and have them nailed down. 14 more to go and then I will be writing up the whole endeavor very soon…

I wish to say thanks to the first set of participants. I’ve included their Twitter accounts where possible, so if you use Twitter I encourage you to follow these good people:

Erik Johnson
David Burn @davidburn
Brandon Schoessler @transport_1
Denny Mcentire @dfatouchi
Dian Crawford @diancrawford
Aaron Day
Jennifer Day-Burget @portlandwater
Jennie Fitzhugh @sasquatcha
Stephen Landau @stlandau
Ed Borasky @znmeb
Bryan Rhoads @bryanrhoads
Jay Cosnett @jaycosnett
Amanda Bernard
Jim Woolfrey @informative
Charlie Quirk @CharlieQuirk
Emanuel Brown @emanuelbrown

And honorable mentions to the following for being involved, somewhat unwittingly!

Ashly Stewart @AshlyStewart
David Ewald @motorcoatdave
Justin Yeun @jyuen
Rebecca Armstrong @rebeccamary
Arve Overland @ArveOverland
Jerry Ketel @JerryKetel
Dennis Hahn

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Posted in Advertising, Fight, Process, Strategy, Thinking, Twitter, agencies, brand, social web | View Comments

Musicians Doing Things Differently – Holcombe Waller and Ume

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Holcombe Waller Kickstarter Pampelmoose Fight

I recently posted to this blog, an interview I did with SXSW Magazine – SXSWorld which resulted in a very interesting comments thread, wherein I was called out by a couple of people over what they perceived as a lack of new ideas from me regarding musicians and their utilization of the web. I don’t mind being challenged over my ideas, after all this is a forum for discussing ideas and what I learn here can be applied, not only to more posts on the subject, but also to my panel at SXSW this year. The only problem I had with the comments is that I couldn’t help but feel I was being asked to provide tactics that might lead to success for some musicians on the web, whereas I was attempting to discuss web strategy – two very different approaches basically.

Fortunately Justin Spohn, one of my business partners here at Fight, bailed me out by saying this – “The first thing I think it’s important to note is that at Fight, we almost never have blanket recommendations for anything when it comes to tactical recommendations, and I fear that may be part of the frustration I’m hearing.” In other words, what’s your strategy and can we help you with that?

And it is the frustrations of musicians that I would love to help alleviate. Unfortunately I doubt that I can assuage all musician’s frustrations along with their doubts about embracing a new way of thinking about selling music. As Justin says above, we are not in the business of simply providing tactics, but I did think it may be useful to offer up some info of how a couple of bands I admire are working their way through the new paradigm.

Last week I met with the Portland-by-way-of-San Francisco musician and artist, Holcombe Waller. We had a lively discussion about the challenges that all creative people in the arts now face, the least of which being one’s ability to gain attention and traction in a world of high-speed communications and online hyperactivity.

So what is Holcombe up to? Well, he’s not in the least bit perturbed by the ever changing cultural landscape. He has set out to win, and along the way he’d like to make a difference and also be brilliant. We discussed the 1000 True Fans model which Holcombe has essentially embraced. We agreed on many things so I’m not going to go into detail about his hard work, [we definitely agreed that hard work and talent are two very important prerequisites for achieving success these days], I will simply give you the links to his ambitious project.

First, Holcombe has a web site with his own URL. That’s important especially in a world of real time search and especially in light ofGoogle Music search – you want your own URL to appear in search results so that your fans can respond to any calls to actions there, not your MySpace page.

You will notice when you land on Holcombe’s site that he is very clearly calling out his current project, one that he is funding through his Kickstarter site. This is where Holcombe’s 1000 True Fans can pledge money to help him reach his financial goal. He has also been very smart and created a Facebook fan page where he continues to further press his campaign. He has currently garnered 54% of his stated goal.

Ume Austin SXSW Pampelmoose

Meanwhile last week I received a great email from Lauren who fronts one of my favorite bands, Ume, [pronounced ooo-may] who are based in Austin. I met her and the band last year at SXSW and became a sort of advisor, sharing ideas with them whenever they felt that they’d hit a roadblock or perhaps had been offered a “deal that just sounds too good to be true.” Basically they’ve been out on the road as often as possible building a fan base and capitalizing on it. You’ll see from Lauren’s email below that they had the guts to turn down offers when ever they felt that it just wasn’t right for them.

“Hi Dave,

Hope you’re doing awesome and super excited to hang at SXSW! Reading your recent blogs, I wanted to give you a little update on us and hopefully [get] a little encouragement.

We had 5 record label offers this year and did not take one. While I was flattered by Joan Jett’s offer, it was a career crusher that claimed a piece of EVERYTHING and I continually heard your voice advising against it.

As you might know, our EP landed at #57 on WOXY‘s best of 09 list. Last night, as I skimmed this list I noticed every record ranked above us was released by a label. “See,” I said at first, “every band that’s breaking has a label.” But then I realized that our name made this list and we really are doing-it-ourselves!

We are trying to work outside the – sign me/book me/manage me/make me – box. What I’m finding difficult is that those inside this box don’t want to leave.

For example, we met several major booking agents this year, all of whom want to work with us “when we get a label.” The biggest influx of traffic we received was when there was a false rumor that Sub-Pop and Matador were in a bidding war for us. Magazines, publicists, the manager of MGMT, Atlantic Records, A&R guys, blogs, and lawyers – all contacted us within a week because of this made-up rumor about “the labels interested in Ume” circulating the internet. Ha!

The point is not that we “need” these people. We sold-out of the first pressing of the EP and played 70 out-of-town shows last year without a label or booking agent. The challenge – but not the barrier – is we still don’t have the financial means to record and we’re still averaging a $50-$100 pay-out at packed shows (while bands on these bills with agents/managers/labels are averaging $2,000). We almost went broke on this tour, but were sustainable because I had a line awaiting me at the merch table after shows.

Yet, our fan-base is still growing, we own everything we do, and we’re learning the importance of being patient. Oh, and we’ve written a lot of new music and now are just looking for ways to get it into ears…”

Although it’s clear that Ume have not been able to raise the money to make a new record yet, [Lauren, use Kickstarter...] they remain completely independent and in control of their career. The challenges they face come from the industry itself – agents who won’t book a band without a label, or a label that wants too much control of a band’s copyrights. Those folks are guilty of having their heads in the sand, not just when it comes to a great band like Ume, but because they are missing a chance to take a risk that may successfully change the way they do business in future. There will be many, many hard working bands coming up in the future, who have completely different mind sets and who have a real understanding of what works when it comes to getting their music into their fans hands. Who will be the right partners for these young musicians?

Meanwhile – The Music Industry’s Demographic Problem.

Posted in Fight, Music, Strategy, pampelmoose, social web | View Comments

SXSW Magazine Interview with Dave Allen

Monday, February 15th, 2010

SXSW Fight Portland

At last count, if I’m correct, I’ve attended the SXSW Conference at least 17 times, and on many of those visits I have been very grateful for the opportunity to speak on a panel. When Brian Zisk, a co-founder of the SanFran MusicTech conference, invited me to speak again on a panel in December, and also to join him on his panel at this year’s SXSW, I gave pause. 17 years is a long time, therefore that begs the question – what has all the talking, presenting, networking and mingling at SXSW achieved for the music industry/community at large? The answer to that is simple – it’s hard to know what, if anything, changed and even harder to quantify. Yet change came along anyway.

In that 17 year timeframe we all saw the rise of the more public face of the Internet, the nascent World Wide Web. And as Chris Anderson of Wired points out, “… the Internet is the once-a-century invention. The Web is just one application upon it. There are, and will be, others.” For music, as we know, this was a serious game changer. The labels blinked. Some musicians learned to use the web well and at SXSW in March 2007 David Byrne warned record labels that they must act very quickly and adapt much faster to the web’s promise. He predicted that by 2012, sales of music as downloads or through streaming services would strip the sales of CDs. He was very prescient.

I share his views but I also now lay the blame at the feet of the musicians themselves. There is so much more they could be doing if they fully embraced the social web with a strong, well planned digital strategy. Or, as I put it in this essay – Dear Musicians, Please Be Brilliant or Get Out of The Way.

What follows here is the full version of an interview I gave for SXSWorld Magazine. An edited version appears in the print and online magazine on page 58. The discussion centered around our company Fight and its approach to brand strategy and iterative marketing. Our ideas would work just as well for bands and labels. After all, they are brands too.

For the layman, how would you describe what your company does, and how it functions in relation to the changing online and media landscape?

Fight is a brand strategy company that works with clients to help them align their brand strategy both online and off. For too long, advertising agencies have been struggling with the asymmetrical online world. It puzzles them because they consider the web like TV, as if it has multiple channels. They see the web as packed with eyeballs all wanting to see their clients messages – that is totally untrue. Getting attention online is the key. One-way, controlled messaging is not the answer.

Fight approaches this problem by working with companies, setting realistic goals and targets, then moving ahead in iterative steps to see what is working. If all is well, we move to the second stage of the campaign – based on results. If something isn’t working we move back to the previous phase. We continue testing and analyzing throughout the campaign. The old adage of “build it and they will come” doesn’t work on the web. We want to show results and actual $$ ROI for our clients.

How does the social-networking aspect fit into this, and how can musicians make better use of it?

What needs pointing out is that “social media” is just an idea. [Edit: I prefer to use the term, Social Web] The term “social media” feels like it was dreamed up by marketers, who, believing the web is like TV, wanted to create “channels” to reach people online. Remember, as Chris Anderson of Wired wrote in a Tweet recently “the Internet is one of those ‘once in a century’ inventions and the web is just an application that sits on the Internet. There are, and will be other applications.” 

Social networks are simply places where people gather online. Anthropology takes care of the need for humans to be constantly in touch, technology just shortens the distance between us via, say, the web or mobile devices. Therefore, I’d argue, that bands need an online digital strategy worked out in advance. Having a MySpace page or Facebook fan page is not a digital strategy for musicians. Now that Google has delivered Google Music Search and Twitter provides real time search, I argue that musicians must now have their own url. If they did, then they would benefit from those searches by having their url come up in the results. If they don’t then their MySpace url will come up first. A digital strategy would ensure that the intended actions of a fan landing on the musician’s web page might include buying some music, a T-shirt or signing up to an email list. If you are just one of millions of bands on MySpace I’d say those are difficult result to achieve. All those social network tools should simply be used as part of a strong digital/online strategy.

How does your background as a musician and [former] label owner influence the way you approach these issues now?

I developed my thoughts and ideas about online music distribution over the last 15 years. I reached my current phase of thoughts and ideas after attending SXSW 2009 and realizing that musicians were using the web because of its zero barrier-to-entry model, but I felt they weren’t using it wisely. That was when I wrote “The End of The Recording Album As The Organizing Principle” 

In your SanFranMusicTech essay, you lay much of the responsibility for the current state of the music industry on musicians, rather than record companies, for not taking better advantage of the branding and social-networking opportunities available to them.  Could you expand on this a bit, and on what musicians can do to function more efficiently in the current climate?  Should artists be focusing more on building and developing their brand, rather than focusing on record sales?

I’m not sure that you’ve grasped the big idea behind the essay. I’m not saying that musicians should necessarily be using the web for branding and social networking opportunities, I’m saying that merely releasing a CD in 2010 will be a bad idea. The web should be used as one part of musician’s strategies for the music-release-as-an-event idea. Big thinking is required and unfortunately the thinking still remains small and cloistered around the old way of releasing a CD, as part of a release/reviews/tour campaign that is still a label mindset. The web isn’t suited to a ‘campaign’ strategy. Labels will argue “oh, but we use the web by posting videos to YouTube and getting MP3s to music blogs” but that is small potatoes I think. I know it’s a cliché, but Radiohead and NIN gave everyone pointers to how it can be done. Embracing those ideas is now up to musicians. If they don’t start to embrace bigger thinking, then musicians will definitely not make a living from their recorded works.

What are your goals and objectives for your SXSW appearance this year, and what issues do you plan to address?

I believe I have attended SXSW at least 15 times and I have been fortunate enough to have been asked to speak on panels for many of those visits. I always look forward to SXSW [especially now, as it has expanded into the Interactive world] and I arrive expecting to learn something new, which does happen occasionally. One example was being able to sit in and hear Clay Shirky remind a panel of journalists, book publishers and newspaper folks that “the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history…” 

That phrase of his could also be paraphrased as “the internet is the largest group of people who care about music ever assembled in history…” When musicians, labels and others paint music downloading as ‘piracy,’ ‘stealing’ or ‘illegal’ they are creating a “Fog of War” that is intended to serve one purpose that can be summed up as – We don’t understand how music lovers want to access music, nor do we understand how an eight year old girl today will want to access her music in future. Therefore we will continue to speak out in media catch phrases, instead of doing deep research that will allow us to understand, via real data, how better to serve new generations of music fans. 

My goal? That’s easy. I would love nothing more than to have a forward-thinking record label or band manager hire Fight, to help them be successful in a shifting online music world. Talk is cheap, action is required based on real information.

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Apple Jumps Into The Smart Grid Smart Meter Green Energy Game With 2 New Patents

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Smart Meter Smart Grid Green Energy Fight Portland

Apple didn’t have to be at CES to own the place, as every other person in attendance seemed to discussing the so-called, and much-anticipated Apple “Tablet.” Beyond that constant chatter and rumor mill there was also the ridiculous excitement surrounding the 3D Televisions. Eric Bee over at Denuo summed up whether there is a “need” for 3D TV quite nicely:

The state of modern technology can be summed up by the TV in my hotel room. It was a 50″ flatscreen LCD, mounted beautifully into a wooden console, but displaying a blocky, stretched standard definition signal. Despite the investment made into purchasing these top-tier TVs, the hotel wasn’t using them to their full, high-definition potential. At CES, one could walk through miles of glistening technology, showcasing 3D images, immersive soundscapes, and internet-enabled everything, but to what purpose? Are consumers so over HDTV that they need a third-dimension? Is the world ready for an internet-enabled alarm clock? If the SD broadcast of ESPN greeting me every morning was any indication, the answer might be no.

Read the full article.

Obviously we’ll see soon enough how the “Tablet” and 3D TVs pan out. Meanwhile, the Green Energy, Smart Power Meter and portable electrons folks had a large spread of products and gadgets in the North Hall at the convention center. Twice has an article on a CES eco tour provided by some of those green companies.

Ampergen, a medium-sized player in the renewables and recharging portable battery business, had a large and varied spread of products, and it seemed each and every booth had many solar-powered devices and portable battery chargers. The companies that created the most buzz were the Energy Management or Smart Meter product companies such as the Best In Show finalist, Control4 and its Energy Management System 100.

The Smart Grid and Smart Meter trend is, pardon the pun, beginning to buzz like a ‘fridge… It’s no surprise that here in the Northwest, in the environmentally-friendly city of Portland, business people are beginning to huddle in local corporate offices to discuss this green trend and its implications for changing people’s behavior when it comes to energy use. Portland’s Mayor Sam Adams is heading to Washington, DC to push an energy-efficiency program that is intended to save energy while creating jobs. The Portland Tribune reports that “Clean Energy Works Portland is in a 500-home pilot phase. It was started last year with $1.1 million in federal stimulus funds. Participating partners include PGE, Pacific Power, Northwest Natural and the Energy Trust.”

The big guys are getting involved too. The Google PowerMeter is a project of Google.org, Google’s philanthropic arm. Microsoft has its Hohm Energy Management Tool and now CNet reports that Apple is jumping into energy tracking with a couple of new patents.

As all these players start bringing the products and software applications to market it’s worth asking, what are the implications, and what does a large energy utility look like in the future, as people begin to have more direct control over their energy use?

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Rishad Tobaccowala – Future Moves

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Late last year I had the distinct pleasure of hearing Rishad Tobaccowala and Simon Mainwaring give a talk to some of Deb Morrison‘s students at the University of Oregon’s White Stag building in Portland, Or. Rishad has a way of explaining himself so thoroughly and incisively that he left me feeling like I was in 3rd grade..

This weekend, I came across an article, Future Moves, that he had written for the Economic Times of India. As usual he has some interesting insights into what we might call our digital future and how it will align with our analog existence. Here’s a couple of his thoughts below. Read the whole article here. I also recommend checking out Denuology.

REAL TIME SOCIAL PLATFORMS

SMS which is still the world’s most used communication medium is a social platform. But with 350 million Facebook users, tens of millions Twitter users and a range of local and international innovations (Google real time search) that combine real time and social we are going to see an explosion in the impact of both word of mouth and real time information . For instance in many ways the best way to keep abreast of the 11/9 terror in Mumbai was twitter and real time live streams. Expect every media company and consumer brand to invest in real time listening and response in 2010.

THE RISE OF THE POST DIGITAL WORLD

The world is going increasingly digital but a) the majority of media and marketing is analog and b) people are analog. Thus it is wrong to become overly hysterical even in advanced digital penetration countries by screaming about “digital at the core” ! What is important is people and their needs and passions at the core and most of us combine the real and virtual worlds in ways that allow us to connect, save money and time and pursue our passions. We use mobile tools to have real world meetings and we enhance real world occasions with digital augmentation. Just like Walmart stores are paying a lot of attention to digital capabilities one can expect digital companies like Amazon to have analog or real world presence . Today besides Kindle you will see Amazon stores and maybe even book stores just like Apple has its online store and its real stores.

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