The New Music-World Order ...

As if there is any doubt as to what has happened to music in the wake of MP3's, I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I heard the familiar intro to one of my favorite Smashing Pumpkins songs titled 'Today.'

I turned around the nook and peered into the television and saw good ol' fashioned down to earth American images ... people working hard, fruit off the farm truck - I was starting to think they leased one of their songs to a non-profit organization. Alas, it was a commercial for VISA.

In the 90's this commercial would have been enough to get people on the streets with pitchforks and torches. They'd be hunkering down at SP headquarters and calling them sell outs. I wonder how this commercial makes the band feel? Do they care? Was it a hard decision?

I certainly doubt it. The music industry has changed to such a degree that licensing your music to a big corporation like VISA is just plain smart, and it is the way to go.

Does VISA tying the Smashing Pumpkins make me like their brand more? Not necessarily, but I must admit it pulls at my heartstrings a bit. However, VISA's problem isn't necessarily an image problem - it's the fact that they are selling me a predatory service, charging me ridiculous fees if I am a day late on my monthly payment (of which, the day seems to change from month to month), and giving me an interest rate that isn't in my best interest.

So marketing team of VISA who I am almost certain is reading this, kudos to you. I hope you paid the Smashing Pumpkins well.

And to the Smashing Pumpkins who may or may not have a social media monitoring team - thank you for all the great music and I wish you would come back to Portland, OR and put me on the guestlist +1 because I haven't had a decent job in years and wouldn't be able to afford a ticket if you came to town.

Ways Newspapers Can Turn Red Into Black ...

I'm sitting here late at night thinking not about the historic election that took place last night ....

Ok, I am thinking about that. I've spent the past two hours scanning various media to find the latest on close races, stats from states, poll numbers ... I've looked at a huge variety of data that obviously news organizations and other groups have spent tons of money to acquire! Someone's gotta be out there beating feet to interview folks about who they are voting for, why, what their background is, etc etc etc.

After carousing the NY Times - for free, the Irish Times - for free, the BBC - for free, The Oregonian - for free, CNN - for free, Pollster.com - for free, ABC - for free, CBS - for free ... I finally ended up at my hometown newspaper the Port Townsend Leader and realized I was reading news about my hometown that someone spent hours gathering, writing, and posting on the internet - and all this took place for the outlandish price of FREE!!!

It is no wonder Reuters is outsourcing some of their work to India. Should we be worried that creative jobs are being outsourced? Isn't the promise of outsourcing that only ridiculous manual labor jobs that Americans don't want to do will be outsourced? Should we be worried the Seattle Times has cut their staff by 20% ...

Well, that's a topic for another blog.

Ok, here is the meat.

Last night I went to an election party at the Grand Central Bowl in Portland, OR. Sponsors included the Bus Project, AM 970, and the Willamette Week among others. While checking out my hometown paper I had the idea:

Newspapers should fight the lack of funds induced by the advent of electronic media by getting into the event planning business!!! Who else has awesome contacts better than the editors and reporters of print media! They review books, they review bands, they review actors, politicians ... all sorts of interesting people!

Who do you want to party with??? INTERESTING PEOPLE!!!

So, while newspapers are busy slashing jobs wondering how to keep up with electronic media and the collaborative world of Web 2.0 AND losing TONS of advertising revenue, perhaps they should look outside of the box for their revenue streams.

Use the community they have built to promote concerts and artists and comedians and various other interesting people. THAT, is how people are starting to look at Web 2.0. Why not turn the mirror back upon real life ... is it time for REAL LIFE 2.0? Or wait ... that is what Second Life is for ...

Worried about objectivity?

Create some serious and rigorous standards and regulations.

Write them on paper.

Put them on your door so you have to look at them every time you go outside.

And for God Sake Man - Stop Sending Creative Jobs Overseas.

I hate being a delivery driver.

My brain is mush.

I can't throw ideas off my co-workers.

The majority of my conversations consists of "Thanks" or "hi" or "Seeya to-mar-ah."

I can't talk about anything creative ...

... just sports, video games, porn, and a bunch of other stuff I haven't cared about since I was 16 years old.

Last social media/web 2.0 blog ... until i write one again

I need to stop writing about social media and web 2.0 because:

#1 - I'm a bystander with nothing new to say
#2 - Our Fenbi pals would rather have us talk about music and cultural things
#3 - It's more exciting to talk about scandalous things

But that said, let me give you my top three experiences that exemplify why I embrace social media and follow it through blogs and magazines.

#1 - Hot for Sarah - When I performed with the band The Young Immortals I created a scheme to write to all the Sarah's I could find on myspace to say:

"Hey Sarah! How are you! I just wanted to let you know we wrote a sweet little song juuuust for you! I hope you like it, cheers, TYI"

You'd be surprised how many Sarah's thought we were awesome for taking the time to write to them and how many loyal fans we created. It was verified when we toured across the country and met tons of Sarah's who said "Someone from your band emailed us and said ..... "

By pure coincidence I contacted the producer from Portland's AM 970 "The Rick Emerson Show" producer Sarah X Dylan. She humored us enough to bring us on the show, thereby my scheme earning us FREE MEDIA. Boo ya! When are they gonna bring the new band on? We are much more entertaining and exciting if I may say so ...

#2 - Writing blogs - Our current band - The Fenbi International Superstars has absolutely no music recorded or displayed on our myspace page (www.myspace.com/fenbi) aside from this 'Sheep Shearing' track that is really just Orion and myself goofing around to the backdrop of some hot Pogues tune.

In order to compensate for our lack of tunes I have been writing several blogs per day resulting in over 200 profile views per week on our myspace page. It is hard enough getting that when you HAVE music ... but we don't ... so we have to compensate somehow. And IT'S WORKING!!!

#3 - Confronting someone trash talking Tony Greene - We tried out for the Pizzazz talent show and lost miserably to some rad and talented kids - one of them being Tony Greene. When I checked out the blog of the sponsor I saw someone had written a comment degrading Tony's victory and since the kid was a genius 10 year old I rose to his defense - basically calling out the criticizer on her gross over-generalizations. How is this a beautiful example of the wonders of social media??? Because the person retracted all of their venom and retreated into their cold lonely dark cave ...

... annnnnd I got off a great zinger about them maybe checking out "Season 4 of the OC if they can't find better ways to entertain themselves." Or something like that. It was great, trust me.

It's a wondrous thing this social media ... it offers so many tricks for community building and image control ... and now I am going to shut up and hopefully start writing blogs about gypsies or tinkers or crazy arts scenes in Portland, OR starting with THURSDAY NIGHTS AT 9 MUSES ACOUSTIC TAVERN ON SE 28TH AND BELMONT, $1 PABST BLUE RIBBON, FOOLS,

Employed ... almost REALLY employed ...

So ... I am not always the best decision maker.

Today I went to my third interview for a position that will include scanning and reading blogs for a PR company. That would be my job. I would be entry-level and the people above me would be the experts that I would be learning from.

I have been excited about this job for some time because I am very interested in social media and all the debates over metrics and how to measure your reach and the effectiveness of social media campaigns ... I really think my enthusiasm came across in the interview today and I will find out whether or not I got the job in a day or so.

Until I hear back from them I get to continue my wonderful delivery driving job. I have been back at work for less than two weeks and already I am training someone. That means I spent the entire day riding shotgun looking at the same scenery on the same route that I have had on and off for over two years. Being a passenger for five hours whilst driving in circles gives one time to think.

I pondered my interview performance and wondered what I might have said better ... what I may have forgotten to bring up ... what they might have thought of me dressed up in my fanciest outfit. I've never made more than $8,500 in a year and this job has the potential to triple or even quadruple that - doing something I clearly enjoy. I find that fascinating.

Anyway - as I cruised around crashing from my coffee buzz and thinking about my future I realized I had one skeleton in my closet ... THIS BLOG!!!!! And my myspace blog!!!!!!

Perhaps I shouldn't have told them about my band ... or perhaps I shouldn't have spelled out my band's name. Chances are ... since they are influential monitors and experts in searching through social media - they may have looked up my blogs. And they may not have appreciated what they found.

Up until about 20 minutes ago this blog was filled with entries saying crass things ... using the F word ... using all kinds of language as if I were some street punk from the inner city.

Potential employer ... please forgive me ... and please ignore what you may or may not have read earlier today ...

First Day Unemployed ...

Today I begin anew as an unemployed social media enthusiast (and musician - that's a double-whammy).

I am going to write out the official business plan for Fenbi Media International and hopefully it makes sense.

So far I am hampered by several important developments:

#1 - I can't spend any money in the process because I don't have any
#2 - I haven't recovered any good programs since my hard-drive crashed 5 months ago
#3 - I no longer have access to Microsoft Office or Photoshop or Publisher or Powerpoint
#4 - When I need internet connection I need to hang my computer half-way out the second story window to try to tap into the neighboring coffee shop network (Thank you Adagio)
#5 - I am in another coffee shop and it's 10am and this hippy guy with a fedora is dancing to Indian music ... it's kind of annoying ... not an ideal work environment

At any rate ... this is the beginning of a new era and I hope to treat it as such. I hope to write blogs that actually have some relevance to people's lives and are less of a long-winded vanity rant ... ooops too late ...

Portland Social Media Blogging Experience

It's ok if your head is in the sand when it comes to social media, there are worse places it could be … like up your ____ .... and that is where it usually is when you are talking to many "professionals."

For many years the focus of marketers and advertisers has been to shout at consumers using their proverbial loudspeakers in the mass media. They measure their success through complex calculations representing their "return on investment." Use wikipedia and check out what that formula looks like. It's complicated and it sucks! I hate math!

I wonder what formula they used to make this gem appear a worthwhile investment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX-Zk_LNZWg

The fact is, and everyone knows this but everyone is afraid to say it, people can make numbers say whatever the hell they want. There are certain areas you cannot manipulate numbers ... say 1+1=2 ... but when you are trying to measure things that were never meant to be more than qualitative experiments from uncreative minds then you will always be doomed to data manipulation. A good idea is often universally acknowledged ... a bad idea or gamble is something you have to convince people of. Why do people continually buy cheap plastic s**** from China? Oh, it's because they are BRIBED by low prices to do so. You see what I am saying?

In the case of the Pinto ... if you are a car manufacturer in the 21st century you are going to know almost immediately when you put a piece of garbage off the assembly line. Within moments of a bumper falling off, or say an EXPLODING BUMPER (as the case of the Pinto) bloggers are going to be all over that ... sharing, linking, sharing some more. Perhaps in the 80's they could snuff the firestorm to buy some time, but now days that just wont happen.

But in all seriousness, there are other ways to measure your ROI and often times it involves the ancient (and rarely practiced) art of listening. Listening is to marketers as polka is to rock bands. It's foreign, it's unattractive, and for the cynical professional it's easy to write off as unfashionable. We're talking about humanizing an industry that revolves around numbers and calculations and lying and manipulation.

After all isn't marketing founded on the principal that if you say the same thing enough times, eventually people will believe it? (oh wait, that is what Goebbels and McDonalds said).

As Charlene Li, co-author of Groundswell (http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/) says, the number one rule for utilizing social media is to focus on the relationships and not the technology. Otherwise you find yourself with accounts for Twitter, Plaxo, Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Linkedin and having never logged in since the day you signed up.

Translated, this means that it is not entirely necessary for your company to create a forum just because your competitor did so. Perhaps you can get the same effect by tapping into existing social networks on Myspace or Facebook. Perhaps you can save your company a lot of time and money by testing new ideas in these communities that already exist! That is what people mean when they talk about tapping into the Groundswell.

The world wide web contains forums, blogs, social networking sites and everyone is interconnected and possibly talking about you.

1. What can you learn from this swarm of interaction?
2. Better yet, how can you use this buzz to save your company money?
3. How can you corral these wild stallions and test new ideas?

Maybe I'll get the urge to write more next Friday when I find myself unemployed and crying in my 40 ... haha