Archives for 2009

By Devin Hurd

In no particular order, my impressions of The Whuffie Factor by Tara Hunt:

1) The concept of whuffie–and the creative application of evolving social networking mechanisms–is strong. It’s stretched a little thin over the course of this read, but it is thought provoking nonetheless.

2) While heavy on anecdotes, it is well written. Tara Hunt establishes her own credibility on this topic through a significant dose of practicing whuffie and her impressive contacts in industry.

3) Much of the advice in this book felt backwards to me. The assumption was that marketing concepts are easy, while sincere interaction with online communities is hard. I find the opposite to be true.

4) Business writing promotes thinking of people as “customers.” In the arts, I like to substitute the Anthony Braxton term: “friendly experiencers.”

5) This book did continually prod me to think more about my own online
presence via blogging and social network activities. Most of which I
engage in without a thought toward selling or promoting anything.

By Alex Shapiro

This has been a fun week of whuffie for us all. Our lively discussions about Tara Hunt’s book have been picked up and tossed around by a number of other bloggers and sites this week, thus enacting the very concepts of social capital and relationship-building we’ve been typing about. Full circle! If any of us makes a new professional (and remunerative!) contact that came from someone clicking on the link in our by-line here, well, fess up and let folks know. It’s pretty exciting to see positive whuffie in action. The proof is in the posting. Thanks for giving us all a space to hang, Molly. You are the consummate e-host.

For those of us who create, or re-create music, it’s clear that the way we work isn’t either/or, it’s both/and. Traditional methods of building professional relationships that involve physical acts of phone calling, concert going, wine glass holding and… uh… the need to get out of those pajamas and take a shower, will always be important. Pheromones rock! There is no substitute. But all our swirling biochemicals of attraction cannot reach anyone online anywhere in the world at any time of the day or night. Social media gives us the ability to do business 24/7 and open the floodgates of opportunity even as we sleep, while a new client in New Delhi surfs the net and discovers us. Because we put ourselves and our music where it can be discovered. Gertrude Stein’s famous quote about Los Angeles, “there is no there, there” can now be smartly countered by Ram Dass’s “be here now.” The Whuffie Factor reminds us that now, there is here, everywhere.

Molly adds:

As we make towards the door on another book club gathering and say so long, I also wanted to add my thanks to everyone for a really fun week. Appropriately, this was a whuffie-rich experience on the participant level, as well as beyond: people visited often and then spread the word by blog post, by email, by Twitter. They analyzed our analysis and added theirs to the pot.

And as always, if you have comments, complaints, or suggestions related to book club, Mind the Gap, or life in general, or know what book we should read next, please let me know!

By Brian Sacawa

I have a website. I have a blog. I tweet. I have also been spotted on delicious, Flickr, and MySpace. So I think it’s pretty obvious which side of the “whuffie” argument I come down on, and I have a theory about non-adopters. I think the anti-whuffies fall into two categories: the ‘scaredy cats’ and the ‘resisters’.

‘Scaredy cats’ refuse to engage with this technology not because they’re frightened of technology–quite the contrary, many of them use technology to make their living/art–but because they’re frightened that the transparency this brings to the creative process will allow others to steal their ideas. And since those idea poachers will likely be plugged into the latest social networking gimmick, they will be able to put the stolen ideas out there first and pass them off as their own.

‘Resisters’ are those who are probably sorry they didn’t adopt social networking applications early, either because they thought it wouldn’t last or because they didn’t want to be seen as jumping on the bandwagon. And now that these things have become ubiquitous, they continue to resist because they don’t want to be seen to have gone along just because many others have. They feel the need to separate themselves from the pack by being ‘different’ and not embracing these applications, stubbornly so, probably to the detriment of their careers. (N.B. Though I’ve personally embraced quite a few social networking applications, I am a Facebook resister partly for the reasons stated above and partly because I feel like my cobbled-together virtual existence is Facebook-y enough even though I’m not plugged into their network.)

To the ‘scaredy cats’, I say: Get over it. You have control over what you put out there. You can still conceal and manage the flow of your own information. (If you need help with this, look to the government for some strategies.) Maybe somebody will appropriate some of your ideas, but wouldn’t that be flattering?

To the ‘resisters’, I say: Get over it. Your peers in the musical community, and indeed all of America, will not think you are a sell-out easily swayed by the latest fads just because you start tweeting.

By Molly Sheridan

In the good timing department, Anne Midgette weighs in on the classical music community’s applications of technology in this morning’s WaPo.

The sad thing is that neither of these camps seems to have a very sophisticated idea of what “new technology” actually is. In classical music, new technology generally means either the use of video projections during performance or anything related to the Internet. The problem is that people on both sides of the argument — those in favor of new technology and those opposed — start equating new technology with “cheesy,” when the whole point is that it can enhance the experience rather than making it stupider.

Well that’s it in a nut shell, isn’t it?

Full article is here. The take-away: “What classical music audiences and administrators too often forget is that all these new technologies are mediums, not messages: How well they work depends entirely on how intelligently they’re used in the service of what they’re trying to communicate.”

So what do we think is a sophisticated, enriching use of the technology in the performing arts? What have you seen out there that impressed? What would you like to see?

UPDATE: Meanwhile, that other dinosaur, print media, give these mediums an honest fighting chance. Check out the Social Sun.

By Matthew Guerrieri

Am I the only one that finds it funny/odd that so many Web 2.0 terms
sound like they should be characters on a kids’ TV show? Whuffie,
Twitter, Flickr, Wiki, Bebo, Plurk, Yelp–I feel like I’m naming the
Lost Boys. And I think it points to something about Internet
interactivity: the services are, at least initially and sometimes
exclusively, driven more by the gee-whiz novelty of the technology
rather than filling an actual need. Reading The Whuffie Factor,
I similarly sensed a solution in search of a problem. I noticed that
both of Hunt’s key points–that online social networking covers an
enormous, unignorable demographic swath, and that social capital will
translate into financial capital–were illustrated anecdotally, not
comprehensively. The case studies were interesting enough: obviously,
some entrepreneurs have been able to leverage social networks with
some success. But every time the book moved into its broader
don’t-miss-the-boat rhetoric, it felt a little like a salto
mortale. And I think it’s because the book is studiously ignoring
the quirky limits of social networking.

I find Twitter the most
fascinating of these platforms, because a) it’s the first piece of
well-known technology that kind of makes me feel like a cranky old
geezer, which is even more fun than I had imagined, and b) it’s an
unusually pithy example of how Internet technology is full of hidden
restrictions that make the Internet a lot less stylistically universal
and democratic than we like to think. I’ve been reading Hegel lately,
which gives rise to an easy Hegel-on-Twitter joke:

The
object has the form and character of thinghood, i.e., is independent:
but self-consciousness has the conviction that this independent
ob
1807 from
Jena

One could certainly argue that a
140-character limit might have made Hegel a little clearer, but that’s
the way the man wrote, and, by design, the style is inseperable from
the content. More importantly, though, it’s a style criticism that’s
based not on aesthetics, but on the technological limits of Twitter
itself. Now, all language is limiting in this way, but it’s normally
nowhere near this restrictive. (For perspective: everyday English is
flexible enough that I can be meaningfully networked, even through the
screen of translation, printing, and physical distribution, with a
long-dead German without much trouble.)

This is an extreme
case. But think about the shift from the old classical-music industry
structure to an online classical-music industry structure. The old
system was plauged by inequities based around aesthetics. But the
inequities of the new system are based around the technology that
holds up the system. I’m not sure one is better than the other. As
someone who loves a lot of, well, unpopular music, my spider-sense
started tingling as soon as Hunt started talking about the 80/20 rule.
Is this argument going where I think it’s going? Yes! Yes it
is.

Finding out what your customers need, then designing
for the features that most of them need, while cutting the extra
features that only some of them need, will help you design your
product for your wider audience…. This builds more whuffie for you
as those customers spread the word that they love your product because
it’s so easy and straightforward to use. (p. 86)

Pick any
musical genre you want, and it won’t be hard to come up with a list of
pieces for which cutting the extra features that only some listeners
need would take away everything that makes that piece special.
(Real-world example: iTunes’ distinction between 99-cent tracks and
longer, “album-only” tracks, which leaves those 20-minute symphonic
canvases at a marketing disadvantage.) This is not to say that online
networking can’t be a boon to musical entrepreneurship, but there are
some genres and styles that lend themselves more readily to it; for
the rest, I think the necessary decision between changing style or
waiting for the technology to catch up somewhat blunts the sweep of
the book’s prescription.

Then again: I’m still skeptical just
how well social capital translates into actual profit. An awful lot of
Hunt’s case studies are Web 1.0 companies integrating a social
networking element into their already fairly mature business model. I
kept thinking of Burger King and McDonald’s–Burger King has spent the
past couple of years rolling out an elaborate, attention-grabbing
marketing campaign with lots of online interactivity and social
network presence. McDonald’s has stuck largely to boring traditional
advertising. Guess
who increased their market share? Hunt mentions the cautionary
tale of Federated Media (which includes Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow’s
site) taking money from Microsoft. But this spring, they
did it again, taking money from previously-criticized Comcast.
Mea culpa: just more anecdotal evidence. But maybe whuffie is
harder to monetize than Hunt is letting on.

By Molly Sheridan

Embracing the chaos of community means letting go of the need to plan everything and the fantasy that you can control any given situation. Instead of building up plans and structure, you should be building flexibility and environmental awareness into your campaigns. You need to be hyperaware of your surroundings and be able to tap into opportunities as they arise and that you never could have predicted.

–Tara Hunt, The Wuffie Factor

What’s the biggest secret you have?

Often when I speak with reticent artists/arts organizations about their online presence, a lot of their fears make them sound like presidential candidates about to appear on national television: I can’t talk about this, what if that person says that. And I have to wonder: Just what are they doing in there that, if every passerby on Central Ave. knew about it, would be damaging? Seriously, what’s the worst thing we could find out about you (and if it’s that juicy, maybe we should make a side project out of it)? What’s the outcome of professional transparency you most fear? Am I being naive here?

Which leads to another point (and a bit of a personal rant): the culture industry is not the military. There is no real reason to reinvent every website and social networking tool that comes down the pike, but I watch cultural institutions try to do just that over and over again. That may offer more control and precision, but why do we seek these qualities in this area of our work? Are those really our top goals when it comes to building bridges with our communities? Reinvention of the social wheel is expensive and counterproductive because it cuts us off from the larger community–the very thing most of us are combating in the real world. Few organizations are that interesting that a person would only want to play on their exclusive playground. We do not need Audiencer and PatronBook when in many cases the originals will server our purposes quite well if not exactly. The Metropolitan Opera may need a specialized ticketing system, for instance, but most of us probably could be using the simpler services that sell tickets to a lot of different events. A universal access point like this is important because people who may never have thought about coming to hear your symphony have the chance to stumble on the fact that you’re playing Berlioz next week and consider it.

This “let the experts work for you” course of action is also exponentially more cost effective and easier on overworked/inexperienced staff members. You don’t need to hire and coach and monitor a web developer to develop a specialized website that will showcase your activities: Just pick a template offered by WordPress and add the necessary plugins. Let their employees do the R&D sweating every time technology lurches forward again. Your audience will trust you because your materials will always feel up-to-date.

As Hunt outlines in the quote above, the online public square/marketplace requires flexibility and creativity that, as members of the so-called “creative class”, we should be uniquely positioned to excel at. It’s particularly suited to low-budget/no-budget operations with a dream and a message and personally invested staff members (even if that’s just you). If you actually have a few dollars to do what you do and are feeling protective, take a deep breath and peel a few fingers off the rope you cling to every day: You can do this well if you think about it. And as Hunt and Shapiro have extensively illustrated, the rewards are more than worth the risks. You can stay inside your box if you’d like, but that’s arguably an even riskier venture. Like it or not, we can’t stop: We’ve come too far.

By Marc Weidenbaum

The non-fiction book we’re yapping about, The Whuffie Factor, takes its key word, “whuffie,” from a science fiction novel by Cory Doctorow. That book was Doctorow’s first published novel, and it feels very much like a first novel, especially a first sci-fi novel. The book is titled Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it’s jam-packed with seriously cool ideas, follows a fairly simple plot with relatively off-the-rack characters, and comes to a close that’s all too quick and none too satisfying.

So, in the end, the primary purpose of Down and Out seems to be not the plot, not the characters, but those ideas–many of which are tossed off with a bubbly, rapid-fire, the-future-is-now headiness fitting to the book’s setting. (At least those ideas are what it does best, and what Doctorow seems to have invested himself in most. That said, fans of his most recent, and I’d say best, novel, Little Brother, will find in Down and Out some nice precursors to what made Little Brother so good, especially the protagonist’s penchant for acting without fully thinking things through.)

Anyhow, that setting is called the Bitchun Society, a newly revised world–in the near-ish future–in which social capital (what everyone calls “whuffie”) has, as far as I can tell, entirely replaced any other form of compensation, and in which the virtual world has so come to be the real world that humans regularly “back up” their brains (as we do our hard drives, or at least are supposed to) and drop them into new clones, thus extending life for, well, as long as they want.

As in any science fiction, that’s a leap of faith that Doctorow requires the reader to take, but to his credit, he takes it himself, with a degree of seriousness that is something of a (purposeful) downer. What he says in the book is that those folk who had trouble adopting to the Bitchun Society mode (to the economy of social capital, to the technological gift of near-eternal life) didn’t really have much say in the matter, because by definition…they all died off.

They headed to the woods, literally or figuratively, stuck to their philosophical guns, and died the natural death that their ancestors had died. Meanwhile, the (apparent) vast majority of inhabitants of the world adopted the Bitchun mode, and that is the norm when the book opens.

The (largely online) social capital that Tara Hunt discusses in Whuffie Factor requires a much smaller leap of faith, with little of the dire seriousness that circulates around it in Doctorow’s book (for example, one of the secondary characters in Down and Out spends much of the novel not so much contemplating suicide as working toward suicide).

Or does it? I wonder if artists and organizations today risk self-exile from the broader world of culture if they do not embrace the facts of online culture.

I’ll focus, for the moment, just on retail. Once upon a time, almost all records were sold in record stores. A good record store, like a great specialty shop or the deceased Tower at its best (full disclosure: I was an editor on Tower’s Pulse! and Classical Pulse! magazines and its web-based publications for many years) was where music was sold, jazz or pop, classical or Latin. Customers found out about music in their lives and inside the stores, talking with clerks, and purchased those records in stores.

Today, both those lives (at least as defined as the interactions between individuals) and sales are taking place increasingly online. I do personally believe that as in Down and Out, there’s no turning back. The world we inhabit today is not so drastically altered as the Bitchun Society, but it is altered, so much so that we can’t quite see it because we’ve experienced it in real time. Things move quickly. I re-read Down and Out (originally published in 2003) in advance of this discussion, and was humored to find the word “twittering” in there, since he was using the word in its original sense, in advance of the launch, in 2006, of what is now a near-ubiquitous form of interaction, a form of interaction that is emblematic of the kind of communication that Hunt is evangelizing.

I’m not sure what option there is other than embracing the new form of communication. What Hunt does best in her book is provide people and organizations practical examples of how to–and how not to–embrace it.