Digital Frontiers

I first signed up for this class because I accidentally thought I had to take another honors class for my honors requirements, then found out that wasn’t the case.  But I kept the class anyway because the first day Adam and Nikolai certainly made the class seem intriguing.  Several weeks later, looking back, I can say that this was one of the most interesting classes I’ve taken at UF.  Not because I learned a great deal in an academic sense; because honestly I haven’t.  But I don’t think I was supposed to, because this class was supposed to be different.  So what exactly did I get out of this class?

For one, this class was pretty inspiring.  Each time I left class I had the feeling that I could conquer the social media world, until about a day later when college apathy caught up to me.  But nonetheless twice a week, I got something more than what I got from any other class I’ve taken at UF: a sense that what I’m learning is useful (unlike Man3025).

But I already mentioned that I didn’t learn that many tangible facts.  I mean, I learned how to make Facebook fan pages, but I could have learned that on my own time.  What I did learn was that as technology changes, I have a unique opportunity to take advantage of that.  I already know that I can navigate Facebook well, but it dawned on me how poorly other people, particularly businesses, do.  And its more than Facebook; thinking outside the box is something that our society, especially corporate society, sometimes lack, despite the fact we’ve been pounded over the head with the idea since childhood.

And that’s what’s so surprising.  I always assumed that I would not come up with the best ideas, because everyone was trying to be daring and creative and as a result there wouldn’t be any opportunity except for the extremely lucky ones.  But after taking this class I realize this is not the case.  As shown by the principles of crowd-sourcing and wikinomics, the best ideas come from anyone who bothers to come up with them.  You don’t have to have an ivy-league educations or be a millionaire in order to do it.  A regular Joe can have better ideas than a large corporation, and that is probably pretty common.

So in summary, this class was pretty successful in what it set out to do.  It was meant to be an “outside the box” class that did things differently than most courses.  And it did.  I wasn’t taught too many facts (nice change), but more importantly I was taught different ways of thinking about the facts I already knew.  So bravo Adam and Nikolai.  Now let’s hope I remember the lessons of the class past the next couple weeks.

For my last picture I will post Hugo Ball dressed up as a Magic Bishop.  It has nothing to do with the Digital Frontiers, except that Hugo Ball is awesome, and so was the class.

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Has the Internet stifled creativity?  I think the answer is a resounding “No”, and I’d like to comment on the the piece that inspired this question, from the Op-Ed section of the Wall Street Journal.

Jaron Lanier’s article “Worldwide Mush” is an appallingly elitist and hyper-capitalist piece of drivel.  I had to double take after reading it to make sure “Gordon Gekko” wasn’t the author.  His argument that “internet collectivization” has stifled creativity and innovation on the Internet is chock full of so many loaded statements and false analogies that I’m surprised it got run in an esteemed publication.  Oh wait, nevermind that publication was the Wall Street Journal.  He points out that collectivizing Silicon Valley would be a bad thing, and then implies that the same conclusion holds true for certain things on the internet.  But it doesn’t.  He takes shots at Wikipedia; but here’s the irony: if you want to know who Jaron Lanier is you’re better off looking him up on the open Wikipedia rather than the closed Britannica.  So the man who proclaims, “Most people know me as the “father of Virtual Reality technology”, isn’t even known by the most well known private encyclopedia.

Lanier makes the claim “There’s a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn’t proven to be true.”  He then uses Flash and the iPhone as disproof.  Well Mr Lanier you are an electronic musician, so please explain to me how the monome, an open source interface made by a couple in New York, is one of the most sought after and innovative digital controller on the market.  Explain to me why the open source Nexus One phone is just as well rated as the iPhone.

Lanier then claims that “There are only a tiny handful of writers or musicians who actually make a living in the new utopia [of demonetized sharing].”   I once did a study a year or so where I found that there were more albums released by artists that were available in 2008, than in all of the 1960’s.  So much for a handful.  The internet has created an open environment where anyone can release music not just the handful that record execs deem good enough.  Creativity has been encouraged, not stifled.  Perhaps, Jaron is just bitter than his own albums don’t seem to sell so hot.

The author seems aware that his argument will be taken as hyper-capitalist, because he does his best to spin it to seem like he’s for the little guy.  He even throws an anecdote about he dabbled in collectivism (how cute.)  I love his statement “One of the bright spots in the employment picture for the U.S. is in health-care jobs. But the Japanese are developing health-care robots to anticipate the needs of their aging population. When those robots get good and cheap… a lot of health-care jobs in the U.S. will either go away.”  Ya, sure, and the industrial revolution ruined the world economy.

Rather than have the best ideas contributed by anyone in society who feels like speaking up, he prefers those ideas be contributed by teams in privacy.  Rather than have things be on a level playing fields, with no barriers to entry, and perfectly competitive, he wants the opposite.  A world dominated by the elite.  After all it would terrible if people did things for kudos, instead of PROFIT!!!! in Lanier’s world.  The internet should be controlled by for profit teams of elites who of course have all our best interests in heart.  This kind of Internet totalitarianism, this capitalist Stalinism, would be the biggest stifling of creativity.

Now, if I have a great idea, I can post it online for anyone to see, and I can CHOOSE to do it for free.   I can also choose to make others pay.  In fact I can choose to do whatever I want, and if it’s really good, and works, then the idea will spread.  That my friends is creativity, and that is exactly what the Internet encourages.

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Well this is a very relevant blog topic for me, because, well, I have no idea what I want to do when I graduate, which isn’t too far off.  Luckily, even with no proper job prospects I can always employ entrepreneurial skills.  Many of the best breakthrough ideas come from realizing what is bad around in the world and how to fix it and create a business on that.  So there are many shitty things in the world that need fixing: pickup trucks, iTunes, parking decals, Justin Bieber, etc.  But one thing that really grinds my gears is cable TV.  I pay 50 bucks  a month for many channels I don’t want, and the only ones I do (theres about 5) end up costing me 10 bucks each a month because I have get all the other nonsense with it (seriously who watches the Golf Channel).

So my idea is: pay per channel internet tv.  Not like Hulu which is offering past programming already shown on TV, but the actual ability to stream all the TV channels you would want to watch but not the ones you don’t.  Let’s say the cost per channel is $1 per channel.  Now it is true with my cable bill i get more than 50 channels for my 50 dollars but I don’t actually want all of them.  If I only watch 15, I will pay substantially less.  Also it allows me to pick channels that normally are only available in higher priced bundles.  Let’s say I like tennis; now, to get the Tennis channel I have to pay for an entire bundle that will give me access to more stuff I don’t want (NFL network, Fox Soccer, etc).  But with my idea, you would only have to pay the extra channel cost for the Tennis Channel.  This is all streamed on the internet through a device that hooks to your TV and internet source.

So if I were to rely solely on social media to market such a product (if an angel investor provided funds for product development), it would take some innovative marketing.  One effective way would be to tap into the dislike people have of their TV providers and giving them an opportunity to make satirical ads in contests alot like the Doritos ad campaign.  I could make satirical ads myself uploaded to youtube and perhaps even get one viral.  The facebook fanpage would need to be highly interactive with polls etc about new ways to improve the service.  Also I would have an app on the website/facebook page that would calculate savings from using my service vs normal TV providers, similar to how Vonage is able to really hammer home the savings they can give vs traditional phone providers.  If that all works, I could successfully take over the TV world.  So watch out.

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User generated content really isn’t the future of the internet.  It’s already the present.  We focus much on facebook, twitter, digg, etc. but UCG is everywhere; it’s these blog posts, it’s reviews on Amazon, it’s every comment on every site.  The majority of major website have a substantial element of UGC and some are primarily driven by that (eg. twitter).  I often like UGC to open source: it is the quality and quantity of the users that creates the content and appeal of both concepts.  What I like about both UGC and open source the most is that it opens up information and communication between people, rather than having it be controlled by companies.  While I understand the power a good facebook page can have for marketing a company, I get a bit nauseous watching pages of pages of corporate fan pages on facebook from class.  I in part visit UGC pages like facebook and wikipedia to AVOID being blatantly marketed too in a cool new! ways.  I don’t want twitter to be the tool of marketers, I want it to be the tool of people.  I would rather become a fan of “Texting the person next to you stuff you cant say out loud” than McDonald’s when on facebook (admittedly I am a fan of neither).  My point is that the pro of UGC is that offers the both the best and largest amount of information to any one person.  However the con is that this benefit can also be muted once companies try to use every UGC channel as a marketing opportunity.

So I will use a case study of a real person.  A person who became irrelevant over 6 years ago but has recently found a rennaisance in the public eye via twitter (amongst other things).  A person who just wants to party hard.  I’m talking of course about Andrew W.K. To say he’s the coolest person ever, would be to state the obvious.  But how does a one hit wonder maintain relevance years later?  The answer is the internet.  He is, as the NBC link stated, “Twitter’s resident PARTY HARD guru” and his tweets are often reposted on other sites.  Where his music may have fizzled out, the personality he created lives on.  He offers party tips (“PARTY TIP: Don’t feel the need to invite me to your party – I’m already coming! In fact, I’m already there! And I’m puking!”)  and interactive offers (“TWEET YOUR FAVORITE PARTY LYRICS for a chance to win an personalized signed poster and prize pack!”).  All in all his presence on the internet has led to a resurgence in a popularity and a totally awesome show coming soon to adult swim.  The lesson here: type in all caps on twitter and you might get a tv show.  The other lesson: it’s TIME TO PARTY!

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How we can we create more word-of-mouth for our local businesses?

I have an answer, but I want to see if you can figure it out on your own. To help you do this,  I’m going to present a quick case study which will allow us to see why certain forms of advertising work better than others. My goal is for you to read this post and to come out with knowledge applicable towards improving the marketing plan of your local business.

I formed this idea after reading the post by Matt Garrett about Leonardo’s Pizza’s presence in Gainesville.

This picture is a link to Matt’s post (you can click it) and within the second paragraph, Matt presents some digital marketing strategies of Upper Crust, Burrito Brothers, and Leonardo’s Pizza. To begin this exercise, I want you to look over the following three web pages, spending as much time as you need to form an opinion about them. (please take this seriously!)

1. Facebook page of Upper Crust
2. Twitter page of Burrito Brothers.
3. Facebook page of Leonardo’s 706.

Now that you have your opinion, see how your experience compares to mine:

When I glanced over these pages, I first noticed they were covered with blurbs that looked like they came straight off the “specials of the day” chalkboards. I then clicked on the miscellaneous Facebook tabs to make sure their wasn’t anything important there and then hit the back key to continue reading this post. In other words, they were extremely boring, and I just wanted to get back to my own business.

This leaves us with the question: Why were these pages so boring?

To get the answer, lets compare these websites from above to a website I find to be much more interesting. This website is the facebook page of Burrito Brothers. (FYI, I had no intention of selling the success of my local business’s web page. Remember, this is merely a case study which I want us all to learn from).

Now, I’m guessing most of you looked at this Facebook page and didn’t find anything different about it. It has the same pictures and the same info about the soup and guacamole. Why did I find this  Facebook page more interesting than the others?

You will find the answer by asking yourself, What Would Google Do?

If you read the book, the answer should come instantly. This Facebook page was successful in catching  my interest because it allowed me to see the word-of-mouth of Burrito Brother’s customers and it invited me to participate in the discussion. If you can’t see what about this web page I’m talking about, click on the “discussion” tab or click here.  This discussion section serves as a platform that enables its fans to create their own conversation and to, unknowingly, create positive word-of-mouth.

Isn’t it interesting to see how we can apply the perpetual words of Jeff Jarvis?

Now that you’ve made it through my case study, I hope you take the time to come up with your own idea for optimizing the word-of-mouth about your local business. Please feel free to create your own discussion below.

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In many ways Leonardo’s Restaurants represent Gainesville pretty well:  there’s a branch to serve the needs of the poor college student with afternoon munchies (the pizza place) and also a branch that would impress your parents when they come to take you out for graduation dinner (Leonardo’s 706).  If you really think about, one wouldn’t really need to eat out at any other restaurant chain the entire time they lived in Gainesville and they would still have basic restauranting needs met.  In many ways that makes Leonardo’s a lot like Google (side note: the head chef for Google was also chef for… the Grateful dead?!)

There was a Google ad during the Superbowl today that illustrated this: the ad simply features someone typing in searches into the search-bar and from that we can deduce a whole backstory of someone’s life.  Google shows itself as an integral part of everyday life… something we interact with everyday.  When marketing for Leonardo’s, this same kind of concept can be used.  Make customers feel not just like Leonardo restaurants are an eating option, but that they are a part of Gainesville life.  And to be fair there is already some of that mystique in Leonardo’s anyway.  This can be taken further though; the company has virtually no substantive presence on social networks.  For example Facebook pages can be used to increase visibility and also broadcast specials to customers, like Uppercrust does (best bakery in town!).  The transition to customer interactivity is the next logical step for Leonardo’s. If Burrito Brothers can have a Twitter for guac availability, shouldn’t Leo’s have one for pizza specials.  Google may be the global homepage, but Leonardo’s should be the Gainesville one.

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It’s been 200 years since the golden age of piracy.  And if that’s the case we may very well be in the platinum age.  Piracy is more widespread and prevalent than ever before (though, Somalia withstanding, it’s mostly on the internet).  Hell, the Pirate Party holds two seats in the European Parliament.  The explosion of the internet has forced the music industry to try and come up with business models that can adapt to the change in music distribution.  As of now, there have been no viable solutions.  Sure some companies have found one a way to profit big of the anarchic music environment; Apple, evil bastards they are, offers products (music through iTunes) they neither make, nor can claim any natural right to distribute, all the while restricting its use to fit its own business model. But this kind of thing is not long term.  The tension in the industry will only balloon as not only record companies cash in on others intellectual property, but now digital distrutors do as well.

The solution?  F*** ‘em all.  And that’s what starting to happen.  Bands like Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, and the Smashin Pumpkins have all foregone labels, and distributors to offer music for free to their audience.  And money is still made.  Some point out that perhaps only huge bands with established bases can pull that kind of thing off.  That’s what makes the music industry so exciting… perceptions of it are so close-minded, stifling, and ass backwards, that it’s just begging for a major breakthrough.  There will be innovative experiments and failures.  No one has found the magic bullet, but who knows?  Maybe one of us will.

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This week in class we were given Post-It notes (about 400 to be exact) and asked to go around campus and create value with them.  It was a pretty vague set of instuctions which cause me to WTF for a second.  My first ideas were mostly radical: get naked and cover myself in post-its (glad to see someone did this!) and chase down a Turlington preacher and plaster him with Post-its.  A few others may have toed the lines of legality (can you stick Post-It notes on private property?).  Covering a wall entire with Post-It notes would would have been cool, although I wouldn’t have done it nearly as cool (and random) as this guy

Finally, like a couple other groups, ours decided to focus on raising awareness in the situation in Haiti.  I think if anything this made the Post-it note exercise even more effective in a collective sense.  While my group was post-it’ing messages on the Yulee walkway, others were in Turlington and elsewhere trying to raise awareness about the same thing.  To a traveler on UF’s campus, the recurrence of this admittedly strange theme (post it notes and Haiti) would have definitely made an impact.  As we’ve seen recently, when everyone converges to raise awareness, the results can be stunning.  If anything there’s a good chance that this project did encourage some people on campus to donate to a humanitarian effort and that is pretty impressive.  Seeing the ideas that I and others had I can definitely appreciate the kind of ingenuity you can come up with with just limited supplies in order to raise awareness for things, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that for Leonardo’s later this semester.

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It’s become a recurring joke when discussing businesses and the use of social media: “we need a Twitter!”…. “but what for?”  In the past few years social media has exploded as a form of connection and communication between people, and inevitably that means businesses are incredibly eager to capitalize on this in order to market to customers.  Unfortunately as with every fad and frenzy, sometimes the “how” on  using technology overshadows the “why”.  This presents an interesting place for growth, however; companies can use social media for marketing, but it requires a new way of thinking in order for it to succeed.  There needs to be interaction and feedback between customers and businesses; simply updating a Twitter account will not suffice.   Engaging consumers, however, is not the only necessary tool to effective marketing in social media.

Steve Jobs, though his presentation style is not my cup of tea, is admittedly very effective.  And this is because Jobs plays to his audience and works to build anticipation.  While I may find his black turtlenecks obnoxious, they give  of casual “cool” and it compliments the Apple brand perfectly.  Furthermore, Jobs gives his audience what it wants most: cool technology.  We don’t want specs, we don’t want explanations, we wants awesome pictures and ideas of grandeur, whether or not they are warranted.  When Steve Jobs shows us the MacBook Air we salivate, regardless of the the fact that a few months later no one was buying it. It wasn’t Steve Jobs fault that the MacBook Air wasn’t all it was cracked up to be; he did the most important aspect… making people think it was great.

So imagine the possibilities… if you could combine the marketing potential of social media with the marketing genius of Steve Jobs, you could very well become a millionaire selling trash.  My group will be working with the esteemed Leonardo’s restaurant chain.  Hopefully we will be able to use all the lessons in class to effectively market Leonardo’s.  I’m very happy about the prospect of working with Leo’s because, not only is the food awesome, but so is the aesthetic and image of Leonardo’s, and hopefully that will make this project very entertaining.

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Hey all my name is Matt Garrett.  I am a third year Economics major through the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  I also minor in European Union Studies and Business.  As far as interests, I am big into graphic design and music production.  I’ve worked as graphic designer for the Office of the Vice President and also for various Student Government political parties.  As for music, I listen to every genre o music from minimal house to death metal to rap to French pop.  I play guitar (mostly acoustic) and as for the computer I generally make some sort of chillout electronica (like the Field or Radiohead w/o the vocals).

I’m a pretty big fiend when it comes to technology.  I use Windows, although I’m just as fine with Macs and with most normal Linux variations.  The two programs I use most are Adobe Photoshop (for graphic design) and Ableton Live 8 (for musicmakin’).  Both are pretty straightforward, although I’ve been using each for several years and still find new things each time I use them.  And that’s how technology should be.  There’s always something new, something you’ve never used.  Outside of computers, I’ve used basically every iteration of an iPod but they irritate me a bit because iTunes may be the suckiest program I’ve ever had the misfortune of using (yes even worse than Internet Explorer).  I have a facebook (duh) and would never consider using a twitter, because the only interesting things on twitter are written by Soulja Boy and Andrew W.K.

I’m hoping this class will break the mold of other business classes.  The world today can’t be encapsulated in books, lectures, slides, and other bullshit because by the time you finish talking the rules have changed.  Technology today is about collaboration and discussion and I hope this class reflects that.  Most of the greatest sites on the web today operate on a principle of massive user contribution and interactivity, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, even Gainesville’s own Grooveshark.  (For now) that’s the future… it’s not just social media (buzzword!), it’s massive collaboration and democratization of information and ideas and that’s sexy as hell.

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