Famine City

YouTube has changed music history

12/1/2009: Over the holidays last week, I was listening to music via YouTube and thinking these very same thoughts again. This is one of my favorite posts from this year. Begin post....

In 1988, I started playing the guitar. I remember the exact moment I decided to seriously attempt it. I was thirteen, channel surfing, and then I came across Stevie Ray Vaughan playing a three song set on VH1's Unplugged. Our paths crossed at that very moment and my musical tastes have never been the same.

Today I can revisit or share that moment through the power YouTube. Though I'm an avid fan of Stevie Ray, I would have never known or experienced all of his influences, yet I know them today because of the technology revolution around music. I know and have listened to some of the influences that Stevie borrowed musical phrasing and style from, like Albert King. I listened to Albert King doing Blue's Power on YouTube recently, thinking, "um sounded an awful lot like the intro to SRV's Texas Flood." It's funny how all of those things are interrelated. What is even better is that we have the best way to preserve, see and experience those musical relationships via the interwebs, specifically YouTube. That's why YouTube is now my musical library of choice.

YouTube is preserving history. I have found versions of my favorite songs that I did not know existed. I found a version of Hendrix doing Little Wing from Royal Albert Hall in 1969 that is simply amazing, my favorite version. The recently departed and super talented Jeff Healey can be found doing some hot jazz from the 1930's or you can find some of his blues contributions as well. Like a little country? Find Bartender's Blues, written by James Taylor and performed by George Jones or even better (in my opinion), find Sunday Morning Coming Down by Cash and Kristofferson. Regardless of your musical taste, YouTube democratized contributing to the pages of musical history. In some cases, the videos are simply slide shows, but that's not the important part, the music is and it's there.

It's not just about history, it's about influences. I mentioned it above, but never before in history could you tie the musical influence history together so rapidly. Just look at the blues, you can start at Robert Johnson and see how he influenced Muddy Waters, Albert King, Hendrix, Clapton, SRV and end up with Doyle Bramhall II. It's not just the blues though. You get to experience the artists performing their favorite music and that's my favorite thing about grabbing music on YouTube. There's a version of Valerie, made more known by Amy Winehouse, but written by the Zutons. The acoustic version by Amy is great, just her and a guitarist. However, you get to see the original version in a related link. Never before has a musical genealogy like this been present.

The key is the fans. There were millions and millions of little videos, recordings and fragments of history disbursed throughout the world. The interwebs has provided the methods to collect, aggregate and share. Music companies could do this, but they are too disorganized and the purpose of sharing on their behalf is singular, money. They may have something on tape, but it's simply not worth it for a company to aggregate and release a single for someone that would receive limited sales. The fan is motivated by enjoyment, not dollars. It turns out that is pretty powerful. Fans go to great lengths to share, record and put slideshows to music on YouTube. My kids now get to enjoy some of the musical legacy, commercial and independent that I've enjoyed.

Location shift. I was in St. Louis a number of years ago and starting following the Tony Campanella Band. St. Louis has a great blues scene and he's an active part of it. I was at that show in 1997 and whether it was his immense talent or the libations, I was hooked. Today, I keep up with him through his website and find him on YouTube as well. I've been down to St. Louis at least six or seven times for the purpose of seeing him perform. Never before has enjoying even local bands been so easy to do.

Teaching legacy. If you weed through some of the noise on YouTube, you can find some pretty amazing teaching techniques on YouTube. I saw this guy teaching Hendrix's Voodoo Chile. In another example, there are people teaching classical techniques, like tremolo. There is nothing more that assures legacy than teaching it and the medium is being used to teach new musicians everyday.

We, the fans, are creating a more accurate, compelling and accessible version of music history every day. The interwebs has democratized everyone's ability to contribute, experience and share music, regardless of taste or location. Never before have we been able to experience have we been able to experience musical legacy, history and influence so quickly. This is why YouTube has become my music station of choice.

I invite everyone to critique this post as I'm interested as to how you're musical experience has changed with technology.

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

When will colleges go the way of the internet?

Colleges are experiencing the technology changes of the internet, delivering content and courses in new ways, but economic flattening has not occurred (yet). The internet has had an amazing flattening force on the economics of many businesses, but college education has never cost more and I'm wondering why.

The internet has created an environment where the price of information is driven to the cost of about zero. Meanwhile, the statement I often hear is that a degree is worth more than ever today. That’s true and academic institutions are simply raising their prices to levels to reflect the value of worth to the marketplace, not the value academic institutions provide. The tuition at the school I went to is greater than 200% more than what I paid just a bit over 10 years ago. However until there is economic pain, meaning less enrolled students and less government funding, we will not change our ways.

College used to be an area where you were introduced to new knowledge or it was knowledge discovery.  In times past, there were degrees of separation between knowledge and students that colleges served as the connector between. I'm not sure that applies anymore. Have you seen YouTube.com/edu or Ted.com? If you haven’t, I suggest that you take some time and click over to the content. It’s really good stuff. The point is the distance between content creator and end consumer, or learner in this case, has never been more direct. Again, college attendance and cost has never been higher.

The really smart schools are getting the value of their brand to potential suitors and are using the internet as a credentialing mechanism as to the type of education they will receive. Look at MIT, Harvard , UCLA, Carnegie Mellon--they all get it. They all have brand channels on YouTube/Edu. These colleges are building and protecting the brand. If I'm a student or parent, especially a paying parent, they will use the internet as the same vetting mechanism they use it for now before making a purchase. Good for those schools. They get how the world is changing and are changing with it. The sad thing is there are over 4,500 colleges and universities. They are in the minority.

I believe in education, earned a degree and so forth. I'm a life-long learner. However, I simply cannot understand while we've driven the cost of information to zero, the cost of college continues to skyrocket. My full expectation is the a company, like Google (this isn't a prediction, just example), will develop a credentialed program out of internet maintained content that will serve as a flattening force for many public institutions. A change like that, I welcome. 

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

     

Thanks to The Circuit

Thanks to the Circuit for letting me do a presentation yesterday about using web analytics to help gauge how your marketing is performing. You can download the presentation here http://tinyurl.com/okedf2. I also want to thank everyone for the follows, feedback and ideas generated from yesterday. Obviously, for web professionals yesterday's presentation could have felt rudimentary. However, I challenged one person afterwards that if these things are so simple that every should be doing it, why isn't everyone doing it?

Thanks again for the attendance and great feedback.

~marty

follow me on twitter @marty_b

Top ten reasons your brand should not be on twitter

It is almost a defacto standard that just about every brand in the world thinks, or perhaps their agency is recommending, that they should be on Twitter. Generally this means that the company or brand is being told they should interact with their consumers via the channel. I'm going to go out on a limb and share the top ten reasons you should not be a brand on Twitter.

1. You are not committed. Like any endeavor where you expect a reward, you must put forth effort. This comes in the form of dollars and time to discover its value to your brand. You must also be comfortable with discomfort. You must also be ready to change your approach quickly. At the very least, you must be willing to commit to a year of time to produce results (in my opinion). If you are wondering, creating a Twitter ID does not mean you are on Twitter.
2. You think of Twitter as a push medium. It's not a banner ad channel (yet). It's a two-way medium. It requires pushing out content and responding to it. You have to appreciate the community and respect the medium. 
3. You're going to create a personality on Twitter. If there isn't someone that personifies your brand within your organization, I think you'll be hard pressed to create an authentic personality for your brand.
4. Your legal department will ding you if you say H2O vs water. Why would that come up? Two extra characters, it's 140 character response mechanism. Be ready for your branded expression in that length. Be ready for misspelling, abbreviations, etc.
5. You have not found out what people are saying today on about your brand. If you aren't listening to what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, start today. Check out Twitter's Search and TwitScoop, create RSS feeds and follow what the community is saying about your brand. Start there and monitor for a couple months. If you can then see a clear way to add value to your consumer's lives, consider it an option.  
6. You don't have a strategy. Seriously, you probably don't. Are you going to use it to communicate stuff that people want to hear? Are you going to use it to handle consumer complaints? As research? Better have a clear idea about what you want to achieve with the channel.  
7. You are unwilling to cross-promote your other endeavors with your Twitter ID. This is is the "let's keep it in the closet" and just see how it turns out approach. I don't think this works so well. Be ready to pepper your existing communication(s) with follow me @yourbrandname.
8. People in your organization are not using Twitter. If your organization isn't using the medium, you probably shouldn't be either.  
9. You are not willing to allow consumers to co-create your brand. Your responses, retorts and consumer interactions are all subject of the user community. Get used to it.  
10. You don't have a sense of humor. If you can't find a sense of humor lodged in your corporate ethos, it's just not going to work. Don't try.   

The genesis of this blog post is simple: people/agencies try to shoehorn Twitter into something it isn't. If you monitor, you can find out if your demographic is present and detail out the next steps. Before you get there, realize Twitter is not a solution for every brand. If you can get past that, you're one step closer to finding a medium you can exploit to your (brand) benefit. 

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b

Howard Stern schools digital agencies w/ facebook

by Jason

 If you work at a digital agency--especially a big one--a consider yourself warned. By none other than Howard Stern.
 
I’m a proud Howard Stern fan, and wanted to share an insight I got from the show a few weeks back. An incident on the show illustrated exactly what’s wrong with digital agencies that get too big to get out of the way.

He  (the “client”) had a relatively simple request for the folks who run his website (his “digital agency”). He wanted to post a video to his site. He made the request live on the air, and waited.

After a few minutes, his producer claimed “they—the guys who run the site—can’t post a video on the site.” In other words, the “agency” told the “client” that it wasn’t possible to do what he wanted to do with his site.

What did Howard say?

 “Get back to me with a plan?” No.
“Let me know when that’s possible?” No.
“Can you explain why we can’t?” Nope.

He didn’t ask them anything. He solved the problem himself.

His solution? Forget the website, then. Create a Stern Show page on Facebook and post the video. “We’ll have it up in less than 5 minutes.” That would be a CLIENT END-AROUND AN AGENCY BOTTLENECK. That’s what they did.

Now, I have no idea whether his site, HowardStern.com, is run by an agency or an in-house team at Sirius, but the lesson is clear. The ability to post media and solve problems at your own pace in the digital space isn’t enough to make you valuable to your clients. In fact, if your process is bloated and bureaucratic, you end up impeding the client. You're slower than your clients are.

So the question for digital agencies and the people who work at them is…what do you offer your clients that they can’t do themselves with 15 minutes and a Wi-Fi connection?

If you don’t have an answer, you have a huuuuuuge problem.

Oh, and a few days later they joined twitter, so follow @sternshow

Follow me @bender00

Government knows social media better than most businesses

I've been doing swine flu research and am noticing how well the US Government is ahead of the the private sector (read brand marketing) in social media use. I was sitting down to celebrate the whole 100-post thing on this blog and decided to write about the swine flu/social media aspect instead. I am astonished at how well the government is disseminating information through social media. Businesses should be shaking in their boots AND taking notes about how our government is moving faster than them, albeit with good purpose.

Let's just explore what our government is doing well:

- Twitter: You can follow the CDC on Twitter @cdcmegency
- They are using RSS feeds, Podcasting, shared bookmarking services and providing regular updates to a centralized location.
- Don't forget email, it's there. Just sign up.
- When I say they have invested in RSS technology, this isn't to be taken lightly. Just visit this page, http://www2a.cdc.gov/podcasts/rss.asp and look at over 26 RSS feeds available.
- Facebook groups can be found with some of the subgroups, such as Friends of Environmental Public Health Tracking.
- They have a widget they are encouraging individuals to use and post the content on their blogs, providing a single source of authoritative content.
- There's also a great YouTube piece as well. See below.

Probably one of the most important things that they can do is provide a consistent message from site to site, alleviating misinformation. From what I can see, they seem to be using a single data service that shares the total number of cases and so forth. This is provided by GovDelivery.com to power data services. To keep the interpretation and content consistent, the links between sites seem to be pointing back to a select few pages at the CDC, NIH and/or PandemicFlu.gov.  Notice if you visit any of these sites, they are encouraging the adoption of social media and adding the widget to your site. A smart, straightforward strategy creating the government as the source of credentialed content. See below for widget content or to take it to your blog.

Here's a couple ideas to help spread the word, inspired by Marketing with Meaning:

- Ashton and CNN, why not auto-retweet everything the @cdcemergency tweets? If you do that, we should begin to approach quite a bit of reach within the US.
- Lamar billboards, go ahead and put the CDC Twitter address on the billboard? Let's do something meaningful instead of just a contest with a less admirable purpose (not that it wasn't interesting, but this is more important).

Sorry to go astray there, I thought it was worth sharing those ideas.

The government is doing a stellar job in the digital space from everything that I can see to help spread the word. I'm more concerned about it now before doing any research. Quite frankly, there has to be some fairly high stakes probability of this thing being a big epidemic or this type of organized assault would not occur. Businesses, take note our government knows social media has a right to win in rapid dissemination of meaningful information and YOU should be taking notes.  

I'm encouraged this type of digital program is serving a meaningful purpose of spreading the word on swine flu. Meanwhile, I'm flummoxed (ode to David Rose wherever you are) that many and most brands treat social media like barbed wire. If the government is putting out content this important, it's pretty well equipped to handle most packaged goods/service needs.

~marty follow me on twitter @marty_b
#swineflu