(MSc) Sebinomics

I like searching for songs on YouTube, because I keep finding material I would never had thought of searching for, like Hamasaki Ayumi’s Rule, the Dragonball Evolution theme song. Unfortunately, most Rule videos have no audio, because AVEX Entertainment, Inc., a Japanese major record corporation and owner of the rights of the song, have ordered anyone to take down the song. I know, I know, they are entitled to ask for that, because they own the rights and “those YouTubers” simply stole the song for making a great fan video. But having fans making these videos, wouldn’t that be free promotion, especially since I couldn’t an official music video to Hamasaki’s song?

After clicking on three different videos tagged as Dragonball Evolution theme song that had no audio, I thought for myself, “This is an idiocy! AVEX just lost a customer. Why should I buy a song on iTunes that only gives me a preview of 30 seconds?” I kept searching, just for the sake of it, and after a while, I found the song in full-length. Most probably, AVEX didn’t find that one yet. Otherwise it wouldn’t be up.

In my opinion, record companies shouldn’t try to fight YouTubers. Fan videos are among the best promotion an artist can get. Fans spend hours giving their best making the great fan videos and want to share them with their friends and anyone who is interested. If you order your followers to take down part of their creation, they will be hurt. I am disappointed to see companies not recognizing the work and input of their fans. Particularly, because these fans are usually very loyal customers as well. I say, “If someone wants to work for your company for free, let them!”

As posted on NeoDMC.com. 

Employee fired because of Facebook

Nationale Suisse, a Swiss insurance company, can be rather narrow-minded when it comes to their employees using social media on their sick-days.

Nationale Suisse fired one of their employees in Basel/Switzerland, because she used Facebook at home while suffering from a migraine attack. Read details here in German and in English. The 30-year old employee said she was not able to work on a PC because it gave her a headache and she had to stay in the dark. Hence, she took a sick-day and went home, where she took care of herself and used her iPhone to access Facebook. According to an article in 20 Minuten, labor law expert Matthias Häuptli sais that employees who are sick do not need to stay in bed at all times. Using the Internet is like reading a newspaper. Therefore, firing an employee because she used Facebook on a sick-day is arguable. 

My take: How did Nationale Suisse know that their employee was surfing Facebook? Apparently, the woman added a stranger to her Facebook friends, which after the incident disappeared. On second thought, she assumes it was someone from Nationale Suisse spying on her. After all the crazy spying that happened in large European corporations last  year, I can well imagine that Nationale Suisse embraced such a tactic.

As we have read and seen all over the news, many companies decided to block social media channels for their workers, to keep them less distracted. I don’t agree with that approach but can live with it. But if it is true that some companies decide to spy on their workforce outside of the office in such a sneaky way, I would never ever want to work for such a company ever again, would not want to buy any products or services from them, and would recommend to my acquaintances not to engage in any way with that company. 

This might sound harsh, but as my friend Garr Reynolds discussed in a blog post, How can I trust you if you don’t trust me?

After years and years of playing bass in bands and performing on stage and on records, I found a new way to express myself with music, through multi-window video-songs on YouTube. Funny how it all started (read it here).

By now, I have to admit that I get much more satisfaction from playing on the digital stage that YouTube offers compared to playing offline. Sure, playing live is a rush no matter what the size of your audience is. I played everything from audiences of 4 listeners to a sea of people. Nonetheless, I have never been closer to an audience than now. In the past 6 months more than 60,000 people viewed my ukulele and bass videos, which in my niche world is a very large number. I have been able to improve my music skills and work on my creative attitude thanks to the love-and-hate comments I have received on YouTube and other social media platforms.

In addition, virtual collaborations with fellow YouTubers, like the You and I cover with Jason in California, Kelsey in New York, and me in Switzerland, can be very rewarding. You get to play with musicians you have never met and you might never ever meet in your life and you create something very innovative, a virtual band. Check out my favorite virtual band, here, Virtually Rush. Playing in a virtual band will give you the possibility to reach a far wider audience than by creating something yourself. Each musician can tap the following of the other members and hopefully find new followers.

I’m not suggesting not to play offline. Club gigs (usually) pay you good money if you attract a large audience. But if you can reach an audience of 100,000 with niche music in just a few months, like some YouTubers do, you might be able to fill clubs and bars with 400 seats easier after playing online. Especially if your followers are all into you.

Here you are my 20th multi-window YouTube video, The Big Bang Theory Theme by the Barenaked Ladies:

Ghostwriting on Twitter is like,..

Michelle Tripp’s blog post Ghost Tweeting is the Milli Vanilli of Web 3.0 gave me a lot of thinking. She unfollowed Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) on Twitter because, in her words,

Guy Kawasaki used to get it. But when he announced last week at #SESNY that he has three ghost tweeters writing under his Twitter account, I realized somewhere along the way, he lost it. If he can’t see the incredible value of a genuine, unfiltered Twitter persona and the abomination that is a ghosted account, then my friends the man no longer gets it. 

This reminded me of an article by Seth Godin that stated,

Marketers like to talk about transparency and authenticity. I think for most people, most of the time, we care a lot more about the effect and use of a product or service and less about who made it and why. We chose Converse because they get us a date, and we don’t change brands just cause Nike owns them now. Except for when we do. When we feel deceived or tricked, the game can change, and rapidly.

Guy Kawasaki exposed himself to the topic of ghostwriting and openly named his ghostwriters and the reason why he hired them, which should actually make it okay. Nonetheless, I feel that ghostwriting on Twitter is like pretending to have played a wonderful guitar solo on a classic song when you have not! My friend Sam (@Magganpice) asked me through Twitter, “Do u think tweeting for customers is bad? Is there more than one way for brands to use Twitter?” My answer in less than 140 characters was, “Ghosttweeting for brands like Coke/Nike is inevitable, but brands with a face, such as @GuyKawasaki, need to be authentic,” which is more or less what Michelle wrote in her blog post.

The Magic of Social Media

I don’t argue that big profit machines such as Coca Cola, Nike, Reckitt Benckiser or P&G have to put a face onto their Twitter accounts and be all human, because that is not who they are. But brands such as Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki), Jeff Howe (@Crowdsourcing), Garr Reynolds (@presentationzen), or Julia Roy (@juliaroy) have a genuine human face and I want to read their words written by them, because I imagine them typing those tweets on a keyboard or on an iPhone, and I would be disappointed to find out it isn’t so. If I would have to find out that Coca Cola or Reckitt Benckiser hired one person to tweet with their name for the company, I would want to follow them with more interest, because I would know it’s authentic and there is an actual chance for real interaction.

A blog post on triiibes.com by Mary McKnight discusses the sociology of being cool and popular and how to use it to be an online rockstar and made me realize, once again, that it is essential in today’s social media world to be authentic and simply be yourself. Fans and followers picture the person they are following and take their words for something special. Now imagine how a fan feels when she has to find out that someone else wrote the words she was reading so carefully. A whole picture falls apart and disappointment is immense, and once the trust of a follower is gone, it will be very, very hard to reestablish a strong relationship.

Marty and Doc Brown did it about 20 years ago in the popular Back To The Future-series: Doc makes a reference to Jules Verne in 1885 and Marty asks for a Pepsi in 1955. Today, pop culture references belong to movies and TV shows like bubbles to Coke.

The other day, I was watching Kevin Smith’s great 2008 movie Zack and Miri Make a Porno and found it interesting how the movie refers to Youtube (and the iPhone), where one of the characters becomes an Internet celebrity within just a few hours because of a video. The Rocker with Rainn Wilson is another movie that depicts the story of a band that becomes famous because of a remarkable video of their drummer on Youtube. In Sydney White college girls fight for the #1 spot on a Myspace Hot or Not ranking. This is not a new phenomenon. Teen shows such as Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Dawson’s Creek played with it already by the end of the 1990s. 

In my opinion, one of the coolest pop culture references can be found in the last episode of  Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Buffy remarks to Angel, in relation to his disapproval of her controversial relationship with Spike, “Are you just going to come here and go all Dawson on me every time I have a boyfriend?” For better understanding: Dawson, the main character from Dawson’s Creek, another popular WB’s TV show, is a teenager who believes in romance but is rather melodramatic and helpless when it comes to love. He also believes to find all of life’s answers in Steven Spielberg movies. And there we have another reference to pop culture.

More examples: The Simpsons use Google, Shrek sings on American Idol, the characters in Gossip Girl read GQ and use cell phones like the BlackBerry Storm, Blue LG Chocolate, and LG enV Orange, and there are many more. This is obviously only the beginning. I haven’t seen a reference to Twitter yet. But it is only a matter of time until The Twitter Song gets picked up by an influential screenwriter, who brings it to the mainstream. Looking forward to that.

Some music labels have by now understood that file sharing is not necessarily a bad thing for the music business, since it can open up other channels of revenue from concert tickets to t-shirts and other merchandise. Jeff Howe explains in his 2008 book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business how a band called Hawthorne Heights managed to avoid falling into a major label’s debt trap with a big help of the Internet and them being reachable and touchable for their fans. This is what I highlighted in chapter 3 of Crowdsourcing:

Distribution used to be the point in the supply chain at which big companies could control the market. If smaller players couldn’t get their product to retailers, they couldn’t compete. The Internet turned this upside down by making distribution as easy as hitting Send on an e-mail. Hawthorne Heights didn’t need the bank or the trucks. Instead it had the crowd. (p. 92)

But [Hawthorne Heights drummer Eric] Bucarelli wasn’t looking for a big check. “We could have gotten a million dollars up front and all lived large for a while,” he says, “but we’d have spent the rest of our careers trying to recoup.” That’s the way a standard-issue major label contract works: Any label’s outlay associated with the band–from studio time to radio promotions–is billed against the band’s advance. … Hawthorne Heights needed a cheap way to build demand for their June 2004 album release. Enter the crowd. (p. 93)

[O]n tour, each musician would spend four to five hours [on MySpace] every day, engaging their fans in banter and generally making themselves accessible. “the fans loved it,” notes Bucarelli. “They can’t believe they’re getting a response. You’ve got a fan for life.” (p. 94)

Electronic word of mouth becomes a marketing strategy that doubles as a distribution strategy, as more and more potential customers download the group’s music and in turn–the band hopes–share it with their friends as well. … In a digital ecosystem, the music becomes a loss leader whose purpose is simply to create more fans, more evangelists, more ticket buyers. Most up-and-coming bands don’t regard illegal peer-to-peer file sharing as piracy; they view it as a promotional and distribution channel. (p. 95)

Hawthorne Heights is not the only band that cut off the middlemen. Many artists figured out how to reach their fans through different social media channels. One of my absolute favorite songs “Mario Kart Love Song” by Sam Hart reached two million viewers within a couple of month from its upload on Youtube and eventually found its way to iTunes and CD Baby. Sam receives a way bigger share from every item sold on these platforms than if he had a deal with a major label. Well done, Sam!

lovers vs haters

If you have ever posted a blog entry, a Youtube video, or a picture on the internet that is remarkable and different from the mainstream, you might have received comments by so-called haters. The Wiktionary defines a hater (as by March 24, 2009) as “One who hates; One who expresses unfounded or inappropriate hatred or dislike, particularly if motivated by jealousy.” Online-hating is very bothering (and unnecessary), because it makes people insecure and it is so easy for haters to write inappropriate comments and stay unknown. As the Wiktionary states, it is mostly driven by jealousy. 

A world famous author once told me that if you don’t get hate-mails, you’re not important; meaning, you don’t touch them where they don’t want to be touched. And that’s a fact! The more famous and important you become, the more haters and lovers will follow you. Fortunately, lovers–your fans–will protect you from haters. I have experienced that lovers are willing to put things straight and stand up for you. 

In the Youtube video Kevin Smith Part 4: The Dark Side Of The Internet, Kevin Smith, a popular American screenwriter and director, talks about how much negative comments he found on the internet about himself and his work affected his well-being and how much time he wasted fighting those comments himself. Later he realized that it was not necessary to engage in conversations with haters, or at least, not to fight their opinion. Everyone has her own opinion and there is no need to force yours onto someone else, even if they attack you verbally. 

I suggest to anyone being active on the internet:

I got my opinion and you got yours. We can discuss our differences, but in the end both opinions stand and we have to accept them. And if one party starts using insulting words, just erase them out of the picture. It is easily done on every platform, with just one single click.

It is old news that Twitter grew fantastic 1382 % from February 2008 to February 2009. And it is obvious that more and more products and services for and around Twitter will come up to give us more opportunities and choices. I already mentioned Tweetie and the Brain, a Twitter consulting agency from the UK, in an earlier post, and yesterday, I found another interesting service: twitterjobsearch.com.

The Swiss commuter magazine NEWS wrote in its March 19, 2009, issue that Workdigital, an Austin-based company, just launched twitterjobsearch.com, “a job search engine which enables you to search through global job opportunities that have been posted to Twitter and to other social network sites,” as described on their website. The service goes through tweets and filters those messages that contain information on a job opening. These job openings are then listed on twitterjobsearch.com. Users are able to search for jobs with keywords.

TwitterJobSearch.com

This is a good way to find out if a company is future-oriented and already uses Twitter as a channel of communication. In some cases, this could be an important aspect when considering to take a job or not. Believe it or not, there are many companies that are very restrictive when it comes to their employees using social media at work. I would never accept a job that does not allow me to use social media for work. And I am by far not the only one thinking like that.

Jobs openings on Twitter will obviously be picked up first by Twitterers, who are the earliest adopters of new social media channels right now. This means that the company posting the opening, will be rather open to social media and is looking for someone, who fits into their company culture. In a few years, when every company will have joined Twitter, the discussion will be different. But that is far away. 

I see great potential in all Twitter-based services, since Twitter might be the next big thing. And everyone moving now, has definitely a first-mover advantage.

TweetShirts

My buddy Sam asked himself, How do you promote a product on Twitter? Bringing it to the point: his TweetShirts. He realized that if you mention your product too much, your followers start leaving you because they take it for spam. A tweet that kept me thinking was posted on March 14, 2009, at 8:02 AM, by Ralph Bassfeld, who stated, “People who put shortened urls in their Twitter profile usually have something to sell: i.e. affiliate links etc. [no follow love from me].” As you can see, better be very specific with your posts when including a URL.

Sam learned that writing a free e-book has proven to be a very effective way to gain the interest of friends, followers, and eventually buyers. This is why Sam, also known as Magganpice on Twitter, invested 7 minutes of his time and wrote a 12-page e-book for innovators and early adopters to read and write about Twitter promotion and, especially, his TweetShirts. Find his free e-book here.

In his blog, Sam also asks the question, Does this promotion work? His answer: Only with your help! Obviously, buzz marketing is the way to go here, like so many other times. Tell friends and followers, who then tell their friends and followers and soon it will be picked up by more influential bloggers and other writers and TweetShirts will eventually find their way to the masses.

This is a great marketing approach and I’m very anxious to see how far Sam will go with it. I’m blogging about his TweetShirts and some of you guys reading this post might blog about it too. Next step: Buy a TweetShirts and tweeter offline. Let the fun begin!

Twitter might be the next big thing. And like with all next big things first-movers have a significant lead on potential or future competitors. Even though Twitter has been around since 2006, it has still not been able to clearly established itself as the next big thing for the masses. Nonetheless, I was very surprised when I found a link to a Twitter consultancy and marketing agency called “Tweetie and the Brain.” 

Outsourcing

On second thought, why was I surprised? There are clearly many businesses and institutions out there that don’t have time to be bothered with yet another social media channel and rather outsource that to professionals. And for £99 per months Tweetie and the Brain will “create & maintain your Twitter presence based on carefully defined & guarded parameters, and produce weekly or monthly intelligence reports showing you what’s going on out there.” That’s what their website says. 

I know from different businesses and artists who do not want to emerge into the social media jungle and outsource all their Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, and other internet activities to students and/or professional web publishers. It is obvious that these businesses and artists rather focus on their core business. For many it is simply not possible to first learn how to use social media efficiently before they can actually start using it. 

This is where agencies like Tweetie and the Brain enter the picture. I have to admit that I don’t know much about the agency, but I like the idea behind it, because I see the need. There are businesses who are willing to pay for such a service and therefore, we need to feed that demand. On the other hand, I feel that a Twitter channel has to be as authentic as possible to keep the company’s followers happy. It is like on Youtube or any other net channel: You have to craft a story that is authentic, otherwise you will alienate your audience. Therefore, it is crucial to set up a very close collaboration with your outsourcing partner.