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Mar 30

Unity is Not Always a Good Thing

March 30, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

I’ve been watching “Heroes” a lot lately. I’m actually behind the ball on it and am only on season two (please don’t spoil anything for me).

After watching the first season, I realized 1.) it would have meant a lot to me to have seen it when it originally aired because of its context and 2.) stories are harder to write, but convey lessons a lot better than silly things like blog posts (d’oh!).

I won’t ruin it for you because I think “Heroes” is a good show that you should watch. The theme that is recurring is that unity is not always a good thing, and people often do evil things for the sake of unity. We see people disagree and we often feel like we have to fix it so that they don’t. The problem? Many others try to solve the same problem in their own way. People get impatient and then bend rules. Instead of supporting each other, we end up with dozens of well intended people all trying to force a community to be united.

Diversity is good. Individuality is good. We will never “unite” everyone. We can only have goals and then meet people with similar goals. If people were all united, we would not have artists or free thinkers. We would live in similar houses, have similar jobs, and offer similar thoughts. We’d have to like everyone, and then life would suck basically.

So don’t unite. Not the Linux community, not the social media community, not Austin. Inspire and be inspired. Support others and respect people’s choice to be different from you. Otherwise you’ll be like the Malcolm McDowell character in “Heroes” and although Malcolm McDowell is cool, he’s kind of an asshole in the show.

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Mar 24

Have Free Drinks, Talk Tech with Brewster McCracken this Thursday

March 24, 2009 • View Comments • Politics and Current Events

I don’t follow local politics. This is what my options often feel like:

CANDIDATE A (stances):
Supports trees. Supports upping minimum wage 800%. Supports local government unions. Supports creeks. Supports public nudity and free luvin. Supports marriage between man and beast. Supports clean bong water. Keeps Austin Weird. Hates The Man.

CANDIDATE B (stances):
Supports real estate. Supports big business. Supports Hummers. Supports boat owners and those who frequent Hula Hut. Supports anyone who lives west of Mopac and south of Steck. Supports mowing down hippies with tractors. Is The Man.

So you can see my frustration as someone who sees that development of technology, which could possibly favor supporters of Candidate B, would also actually help the people looking for Candidate A. Software and technology saves energy, time, and space. It solves problems. Why is it that in Austin, tech savvy people seem to be the last people to get involved with decision makers? We all want investors to come here, and the city can help us with this.

So City Council member and mayoral candidate Brewster McCracken asked me to throw a tweetup so he can meet people in technology who can help him 1.) get elected and 2.) generated more jobs in tech sectors in Austin. I’m not getting paid–I just feel this is good for us. Politicians should listen to people who are tech savvy. It’s good for the economy. Steve Calkins from Breeze Marketing and I are paying for the first $400 worth in drinks, so you might as well come down to Maudie’s off of South Lamar on Thursday at 9:00 to hang out. Here’s the link:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=63058166532&ref=nf

This event follows Richard Linklater’s screening of “Dazed and Confused” at Alamo Drafthouse. So come down! It should be a good time.

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Mar 19

Why People Aren’t Spending Money

March 19, 2009 • View Comments • Politics and Current Events

We are in a recession. People aren’t spending money. They aren’t taking risks. We are wondering when everything is going to bottom out even worse.

Wired just came out with an edition explaining why the economy caved. I honestly didn’t read it, but it had a bunch of complex formulas on the front.

Here’s my big fancy philosophical theory:
When companies exploit both their workforce and their customers, it hurts everyone.

Take the music industry. Major record labels often pay artists very little money for a hectic lifestyle. If an artist isn’t smart and doesn’t buy the rights to his or her songs or make money on tour, the label makes a lot of money for a little work and the artist makes a little money of a lot of work.

In this equation, do people really care that much about stealing the music if they know they will go to the musician’s tour, which is the big money maker for them?

Take shoe companies. The label makes a lot of money off a little work, and the makers of the shoe are often in very poor conditions for very little money. I understand economies of scale and realize it can be better to work in a factory than a rice paddy. But when my shoes are $110 and I realize that a company spent $3 on the materials and $30 to market it to me, is it really true that we get what we pay for?

And if a company treats me poorly and I connect with someone else who has the same experience, why do I want to go back? I’M NOT PROFIT MARGIN FOR YOUR INVESTORS. I am the person who ultimately pays your bills.

The internet teaches us that you don’t always get what you pay for. Instead of going to Macy’s to buy a necklace, I can go to eBay and pay a fraction of the price from the eBay seller in China who made it. Instead of going to a major record label, I can find a musician on Pandora for free and then I can pay that musician directly instead of having a record label muck it up by trying to appeal to the biggest audience possible.

The world doesn’t have time or money for large bureaucracies. With many points of refined connections, we can act much faster and more effectively than a bureaucracy. In order for America to get out of this recession, we are going to have to embrace and nurture this new model instead of propping up broken business models. A company’s long-term worth and value to society is not its stock price. It is only its worth to its customers. Enron, AIG, GM, Ford, Sun, and just about every other fledgling corporation teach us that.

So choose wisely in this new economy. Your customers will talk about you. They will do the selling for you. If you neglect them or the employees who produce for them, you could end up in a host of trouble.

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Mar 18

My Big Twitter Advice

March 18, 2009 • View Comments • Twitter

Effective tweets are
Like interactive haikus
Practice makes perfect.

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Mar 04

Is Twitter Mainstream Yet? No (and That’s Okay).

March 4, 2009 • View Comments • Twitter

From all reports, social media is going nowhere but up in every age demographic and geographic place. Twitter gets mentioned on CNN from time to time. Even FoxNews makes its usual mockery of it. With all this traditional press, is Twitter going mainstream?

There is no mainstream media anymore. And that is okay.

Due to the low barriers of entry the internet introduces, anyone can be “media”. There are many channels that can be used to introduce media and like Twitter, they can be created quickly and for little expense. This results in segmented media or niche media, a concept Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson calls “the long tail”.

Put it in perspective: Figures are not exact, but back in the day, up to 109 million people purchased Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album. 24.56 million people in the U.S. alone watched American Idol just last Wednesday. 95 million people watched this last SuperBowl. Twitter has just under 6 million users despite being 100% free and unlike the SuperBowl, international. It’s not mainstream. That is okay.

Why is that okay? Because unlike other traditional mainstream sources, there is no overhead associated with it. The SuperBowl ad GoDaddy put out cost them at least $3 million. The Twitter contests I run for NameCheap, a rival registrar, cost around $15000. I can’t reach 95 million people, but I don’t have to because my costs are 200 times less. I am appealing to a niche, and since Twitter seems to be full of people who are at their computers a lot and therefore buy a lot of domains, it’s a much more targeted approach than the machine gun approach of a SuperBowl ad.

When printing presses were rare, the only book people could get their hands on was the Bible. It was “the mainstream” of the time. As printing presses were created en masse, people could increasingly print information that was more specialized to a local area or subject. We now have a medium (the internet) that allows people to create all sorts of different types of content in all sorts of forms. The overhead is lower, so more people publish in more ways and in different subjects. The diversity of media is amazing these days. In this way, the internet is destroying what we formerly knew of mainstream. When you tell someone that Twitter is now “mainstream”, please bare in mind the common perception of what mainstream actually is and the numbers associated with it (Michael Jackson, Super Bowl, Coca Cola, etc.).

Not everyone is going to like Twitter. Some people like videos. Some people like LiveJournal. My sister has a whole community on Flickr. Go to the DMV for ten minutes, look around, and tell me you are excited for Twitter to go mainstream. Media is segmented, will be segmented, and that is okay.

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Mar 02

Yawn. New Skittles Site is Different, Yet Boring

March 2, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

Come on, Skittles! I loved you as a kid! You were my favorite Halloween candy besides the chocolate!

So why the lame site?

Skittles is jumping the social media bandwagon by integrating YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter into its website. That’s basically their site. Why do I think this is a lame idea they probably paid way too much money for?

1.) IT’S FREAKING CANDY. Unless it’s Pop Rocks and is killing kids or something, no one is going to talk about it. The novelty of your site will wear off quickly and your designers will be laughing all the way to the bank. Candy is not a social object that gets the blogosphere talking.
2.) It looks unprofessional. The people who are going to your website who are looking for nutritional information or allergy info are doing to think you are going bankrupt.

What would I have done if Mars had hired me?
1.) An interactive flash element that allowed people to play and make arrangements with Skittle graphics.
2.) Games. “Easter eggs” (fun elements) hidden throughout your site. Kids love playing games online. Advertise on your candy package that you have games on your site. Have a leader board and everything (first name and last initial only, of course. Gotta protect the kids). Kids love games–now kids REALLY love your candy.
3.) A scholarship contest where kids can win a $2k scholarship and a Toys R Us gift card for kid created “Skittles” art (Skittles glued to paper to make pictures). Advertise to mommy bloggers and have them upload pics up on Flickr.

No, instead you have a lame site no one understands but the very select niche of people who use social networks. Your audience (=primarily kids) will not care about it at all. Props.

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