Yesterday, as the day wound down, many of us were preparing for the evening’s watch of the final episode of House.  The episode was a huge disappointment, and a Hollywood cop-out, but that’s another story.  What interested me that afternoon was when I mentioned to a colleague – whom I love – that I identified with the character of Gregory House.  She replied “Why?  You’re not an addict”.

True.  But I do have an unquiet mind.

Borrowing from mental health researcher Kay Redfield Jamison, an unquiet mind is her term for how her mind felt as she struggled with bipolar disorder.  I’ve commandeered these words as a general catch all for brains that don’t quite behave as they should, or as you would like for them to.

Observing the Gregory House character is like feasting at a smorgasbord of mental health disorders.  Among his general pathos displayed have been instances of psychopathy, bipolar behavior, addiction, and depression among many others.  I’m sure a true mental health professional could create a catalogue raisonne of the different episodes over time as illustrations of abnormal psychology.  If it were a magazine, it would be entitled Suffering and Brilliance Illustrated.  For those of us who have known this world personally, that was part of the magic of House.  We could see the pain, the uncontrollable urges, and our abnormal instincts personified.

To me (and for those of you that don’t know) the pain is not that of a crippling leg injury (which, coincidently, Gregory House also featured and wore as an interesting surface symbol); rather, it is a much more desperate ache.  It is also one that you strangely embrace, even though you know it is not the best thing culturally or socially. Often there is a brilliance or a clarity that is unsurpassed.  That is part of the deadliness within our suffering.  How can it be so bad when sometimes it is so good?  It is Poe’s Abyss, or much more simply, a whirlpool in which you know will feed some part of your desperate hunger as you swirl downward, damaging the rest of your soul.

I began The Giant Thumb partly as a class assignment a year ago, and also to unleash a desire to write in a manner that illustrates the pain of mental illness and the subsequent struggle to be like everyone else – to “pass” as they would say in the old days.  The term of “The Giant Thumb” is a metaphor that illustrates, to me, how mental health challenges can seemingly oppress you.  An unknown force pushes you down and keeps you down.  Ultimately, it creates a squishy, unquiet mind that travels brilliantly and desperately to find comfort, inspiration, and solace.

Okay, I saw a tornado last night.  And 18 hours later, I'm still trying to calm myself a bit.  As always, I think of words.  “Here comes a twister” has come to mind, as I wonder if David Byrne ever saw a tornado, of if he was referring to the game or the dance.

I'm driving southwest on I-35 from suburban Kansas City toward Emporia.  As I leave Johnson County, it is roughly 7:30.  I have my eye on a storm, yes, but it is one heading toward KCK and environs north.  As I drive down 35, sometimes west, sometimes south, sometimes southwest – just following the road – I begin to watch a storm build up ahead of me.  With the sun saying goodbye for the day, I'm just simply in awe of the beauty of the storm clouds filtering the rays on the horizon.  I think about how much I love sunsets, especially as I treasure a midwinter Arizona version from the patio of our home in Phoenix, seeing it disappear over the mountains as it throws color at us, filtered by the sand to show us purple and pink, orange and blue.

I think of Thomas Kinkade, wondering if this sort of vision is where he first decided he was “The Master of Light”.  It is a slow empty evening, and I actually think of Kinkade here.  Sometimes pop culture is a curse..

Before long, I start to figure out I'm going to catch the back end of the storm as I continue my drive toward Emporia.  If you're a native Kansan, you know that it is the back end of the storm where a lot of the fun stuff happens.  After this evening, I now think of it as the scary stuff.

As I drive past Lebo (Lebo's Youth Welcomes You), I can see the strands of rain on the horizon helping to form a wall cloud.  Moving toward Emporia, I see a section of the clouds – somehow separate from the others – that is hanging low.  The sky is getting darker as I approach the storm and as night falls.

I'm wondering about a stop in Emporia, and contemplate the options.  Sixth Street?  Twelfth Street?  The world continues to darken, and then suddenly on my right I see it.  That low-hanging cloud is now a full-blow tornado.  Surreal definitely, and while bigger than a rope it still has to be seen as a “skinny tornado”.  

That does it, I've made my decision:  I must stop at Merchant Street (having passed the two aforementioned exits) and get out of the car to photograph it.  I'm a Kansan, after all.

Thanks to ChaseTheSky for the footage, and to Steve Dahlberg for finding it for me.  You can access it either through "I'm a Kansan" or by clicking on the provided link.

Weather historians can probably find data pointing to a Saturday afternoon in the early 70s.  While I don't remember rain, I do remember about nine tornadoes dancing around Wichita one Saturday afternoon.   Again, being a Kansan, I then listened to the Magnavox when the sirens first went off.  I learned that I wasn't danger.  So of course I then head outside with a transistor radio.  All the neighborhood is out in the street looking toward the sky.  On the horizon, between the Farrow's and the Lawyer's, I see a rope tornado dancing on the horizon, visable between the two aformentioned family homes.  Then I walk about 40 yards north, to the intersection of 27^th and Richmond, and look west.  And there's the big one.  Huge.  It was angling down out of the clouds, straight west on 27^th, on the other side of the Big Ditch and moving downward slowly.  And just as it slowly came down from the clouds, it then slowly moved back up.  A tease of nature.  As the young teen I was then, I was in awe.

Now, at 48, I'm a bit more easy to frighten as mortality becomes a daily issue in life.  I learn this rapidly as I exit I-35 and get out of my car at the top of the exit ramp at Merchant Street in Emporia.  I grab my camera and am able to one pic snapped, then I quickly learn that it is too dark to take any snapshot without any sort of calm mind to figure out the lighting.  I'm envious of those that were able to get the photo and especially the video – they kept a calmer head than I did.

Intellectually, I know tornadoes move from southwest to northeast, and I am definitely south of the tornado.  But not by much – maybe by a mile or so.  Part of me is going “watch, watch”, but that part was quickly overruled.  I couldn't get any good pics with my current state of mind, and I knew that somehow others would.  So why stick around?  Hurredly, I get in the car and immediately continue my trek around Emporia to catch the Kansas Turnpike.  The funny thing on this journey was seeing all the cars on the other side of the road, heading toward the tornado.  They had all stopped.  No one was moving that direction, and everyone had pulled over – some with cameras at the ready, too.  But certainly nothing was passing me in the other direction. There was respect, and likely fear.

When I was back near Lebo, I had picked up KVOE-FM.  The radio station did a nice job of play by play for the storm, though they seemed a bit hamstrung at times trying to negotiate the Wichita bureau of the National Weather Service's lack of interest, and the Topeka bureau's self-interest in what was going to happen beyond Emporia as the storm moved northeast.  KVOE did an extraordinar job of alerting everyone to what was happening.  It was only a matter of seconds after I saw the tornado that they reported it, while it took a few more minutes for the local tornado sirens to sounds.  Perhaps more importantly, the radio jocks said pretty early that the tornado was on a straight line toward Reading, Kansas.  This probably saved many lives, as they were dead on with their navigation.

Having left Emporia and driving southwest on the Kansas Turnpike, I contemplate words and the tornado.  Not once did I think about calling it a twister, or even the Finger of God – especially on this day of the supposed Rapture.  All I could do was respect the tornado.  I wanted to call it Mr. Tornado, or even Sir Tornado.  This was not a time for nicknames, but rather for respect and the business of staying alive – even though I was never really in danger.  Probably.

Half an hour later, I'm at the Matfield Green turnpike stop.  All is calm, save for me.  I check out my cameras (SLR and the cell phone), and I'm not thrilled that I didn't really get a good shot.  But by this time, KVOE has reported that Reading has been hit squarely.  I'm grateful that I'm in Kansas, both because of the majestic weather and because of our culture that works hard to prepare for and protect from these storms.  KVOE-FM, small though it is (I couldn't help but notice they had Mobile One and Mobile Two, as opposed to KFDI's Mobile 24, etc.) was invaluable.

Mike Roach knows something or two about business.  Now 63, Roach has spent more than 30 years as an attorney in Wichita with a significant corporate practice.   Roughly a decade ago, events conspired to bring his attention to art.  Always a voracious amateur photographer, Roach began to more working toward a more serious approach to fine art photography.  Roach has now had his work exhibited in several local galleries

“Sales are important, not just for cash flow, but for validation as an artist,” said Roach.  He’s curious about the future for marketing his art via the Internet.

Tim Pett is the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship within the Barton School of Business at Wichita State, and seems to have a special interest in how artists commercialize.

“Artists are natural entrepreneurs.  They may just not realize it.  And some struggle with the idea, too, as they often create for reasons beyond or even in contrast to the marketplace.”

 A Digital Sweetspot

Is there a natural intersection on the Internet – a digital sweetspot, if you will – where artists can bring themselves to the public to build their reputations and to fuel the marketing of their work?  Certainly there are efforts to make this happen.  Etsy might come the closest.  Etsy has been described as a “crafty cross between EBay and Amazon” and has the right geographic, being physically located in the artist district of DUMBO, Brooklyn, just across the river from Manhattan.  It gives artists and artisans the ability to establish virtual storefronts themselves, and to be part of the larger Etsy community, which includes chat opportunities and blogs.

But Etsy seems to be a very crowded place.  For me, as someone only modestly familiar with its neighborhood, I find it a hard place to get my bearings.    

Bridgit Yinger is certainly part of the Wichita art scene, and is committed to local artists and artisans.  Her retail effort known as The Onion Tree has inventory made primarily of local contributors.

It doesn’t take long for the conversation to evolve to what Yinger calls her aesthetic.  Depending on your background, you could easily substitute “discourse” or “brand” for “aesthetic”.  Yinger uses the word to describe the store, the artists, the art, and generally her life – which is often interchangeable with The Onion Tree, as it is with many entrepreneurs. 

Her own background includes art school, attending the Savannah College of Art & Design, where she studied furniture design.  But her time in Savannah got her involved in the business of art, working in enterprises similar to The Onion Tree along with more classic art galleries. 

While not a native of Wichita, Yinger has deep ties to the area.  Her grandparents are long-time residents, and she visited the town throughout her life.   Over time, she began to attend Wichita State, and eventually earned a degree in entrepreneurship. 

Yinger thinks Wichita has a virtually untapped resource among its artists.  “Most places known for their local art are also tourist towns.  For whatever reason, Wichita has a number of artists, many of them significant, that have chosen our town as their muse.  Now, as in many other cities, Wichita has economic development being driven by art and artists, whether it is down on Commerce St. or through commercial venues like The Onion Tree.”

Yinger claims to be comparatively naïve about social media, but as she works to promote her business and her artists she is learning certain tricks as she moves forward.  She uses both Twitter and Facebook, but in two completely different manners.

“Twitter has a greater immediacy for those that subscribe, and I use it to announce daily activities.  Someday, I hope I can turn Twitter to a virtual Blue Light Special,” said Yinger.  “Facebook, on the other hand, involves ongoing conversations and offers a chance to highlight new work and work of specific artists through photographs posted on The Onion Tree’s page.”

“My dirty secret is that I use a personal page on Facebook, rather than a business page, as the business page doesn’t allow the ongoing conversations that add to the aesthetic of The Onion Tree”.

This actually may not be that big of a secret.  One of my new Facebook friends is a chap named Kirby B. Store.  It appears that the Facebook users – business users – are forcing the service to evolve in a certain way.   Social media works best when outlets are monitored and regular conversations are ongoing.  Bridgit Yinger and The Onion Tree are very good at this.

Can Facebook be a player?

A decade ago, the initial Internet boom caused soaring stock prices that were based on the idea that the Internet had somehow changed the basic rules of business.  As with all booms, a bust followed with the sobering consensus that nothing had changed beyond adding another delivery channel. 

Pett returns to this idea, offering that Facebook might after all be precisely such a game changer.  He envisions Facebook as a backbone (to use old, mainframe language) that supports both communication and commerce, allowing artists to monetize both their work and their identity.  “Think of what EBay has done for garage sales and antiques.  What makes Facebook’s potential for artists so grand is that it allows both their work and their inspiration to come through.  It gives them presence.” 

Yinger concurs with this.   “What I really would like is a platform that will allow me to sell from Facebook.  I don’t want to use Etsy, as many of my artists use it and I don’t want to compete with them.  My job is to promote them.  And I just don’t have the time to be able to direct traffic to a stand-alone site.  I can do bricks and mortar and use social media to promote it, but doing both a retail location and a virtual outlet is simply too much for me right now.”

Going alone . . .

At other points in recent weeks, I’ve used Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com (www.dooce.com) as a holy grail of sorts.  It is a blog that makes money, first and foremost.  But more importantly, it is a lesson in creating an identity and an audience. 

Andrew Thornton (www.andrew-thornton.blogspot.com)  is an artist/writer and jewelry designer, based not far from Pittsburgh, who has done similarly well in creating an online identity.  His website, evolved from a blog, features his own work for sale, along with modest monetization efforts using Amazon.com and Google Ads.

The Shutter Sisters (www.shuttersisters.com) is a group of 14 women photographers who have created their own community blog and use this vehicle to connect to their own businesses and creative work.

Art and Commerce

Going back to Pett’s earlier comment that artists are natural entrepreneurs, many artists have instinctively realized the Internet has vast potential for a system of delivery – for commerce – that sidesteps traditional art venues and connects directly with potential customers.  But of course it is never just that simple.

Pett pointed out Wichita State’s involvement with Artist, INC, a seminar held Saturday mornings on campus, is designed specifically to help artists learn business skills specific to their art practice.   The artists develop tools and skills in planning, marketing, finance, law and technology, and gain increased knowledge of and ability to access local and national arts business resources.  An end goal is for the artists to create a strategic plan for pursuing, marketing and sustaining their art.

Artists, INC, though, is on fragile footing for the time being.  In addition to Wichita State, KC ArtistLink in a partner in the program; however, the primary driver is the Kansas Arts Commission, whose very survival is threatened by ongoing budget cuts and political machinations.

And artists, being natural entrepreneurs, have recognized both the need for expertise as well as the market that exists for it.  Books and websites offering coaching to artists are, while not limitless, certainly no longer infrequent treasures.  There are ideas, communities supporting the ideas, and many public and private ventures to help artists move forward.

In search of . . .

So is there a formula?  A recipe?  A chartered path for artists to pursue remuneration via digital means?   Commercialization is something which formal schooling hasn’t necessarily done a good job with over the years.  Lawyers don’t necessarily learn rainmaking in law school (though that is changing) and artists certainly haven’t been taught how to market themselves.  Some survive and even thrive.  Many, if not most, are lost in the marketplace.  But there does seem to be three strategies that artists can pursue and know that these approaches will aid them in the direction of more sales.

First of all, the artist needs to make sure to have a well-developed identity.  As an artist, know what your art is about, and know how to position it vis-à-vis other similar work in the larger cultural oeuvre, whether current or historical.   This should be instinctual for most artists, as artists desire to be unique – or if not unique, certainly distinctive.  A starting point can be your own inspirations as an artist, and then offering inspirations/translations for your own work via your cyberspace portal. 

The primary vehicle should be your own blog or website.  Given the milieu of the day, it is hard to image being an artist at all interested in self-promotion and self-marketing without such a key branding venue.   While the temptation is to think about this effort being about your art, it is really about you.  As Yinger framed the issue, let people know about your aesthetic, your foundations, your history, your work, and your dreams.  Even though this is art, and you’re operating in the digital marketplace, remember that people buy from people.  Being aloof is often the coin of the realm for the artist;  just don’t be virtually aloof.

Next, find community.  I speak of this first and foremost conceptually, rather than as a specific place.  Find that place – in cyberspace – where there are people who share similar interests, who have more than just a passing fancy in you and your work, and who can offer you support.

Community is really the magic behind Facebook.  It is less a networking site (such as LinkedIn) and more a re-linking concept.  Its foundational concept is helping those who already know each other communicate, bond, and re-bond.  Meeting others who are similar is secondary, and almost always comes through a Facebook sort of referral – the digital version of “a friend of a friend.” 

But there are other possibilities beyond Facebook, depending on your interests.  Digital Wichita might be a local group that could prove to be helpful as you endeavor to figure out how to position yourself on the Internet.  And there surely will be, somewhere on the net, groups that will help you build confidence in your artistic realm – a virtual neighborhood of painters or jewelry makers, as an example.  Actually, there are so many artist blogs out there already that you can create your own neighborhood simply by building relationships with those promoting themselves.

Finally, remember your end goal – in this case, monetization and/or  commercialization.   No one is asking you to become Thomas Kinkade, or even Jeff Koons or RC Gorman.   But if selling is your goal, remember to sell.  There’s no single best platform for doing this yet, so it seems to make sense to hedge your bets.

Etsy does seem like a logical starting place.  It may be a bit down market for what you envision, but it doesn’t mean you have to stay there forever (unless your art, of course, sells like hotcakes).  But Etsy seems to be an excellent place to learn the necessary commerce, and to do so with a monetizing system already built in.

By no means should you wait for ways to sell online that seem effortless.  You get paid, in part, for that effort.  I once bought a painting online directly from an artist named Bill Goffrier.  Now I knew him a bit from college, and we certainly had friends in common even though he had long ago decamped to Boston.  But through www.goffrier.com  I was able to purchase a work that particularly caught me eye. 

Then, as now, Bill Goffrier had his portfolio pictured on the website, and had a tab labeled “purchase.”  When you hit purchase, the website suggests you email Goffrier directly with any questions you may have (is the work framed, as an example) and thereby the door is opened for purchasing conversations, including negotiation and method of payment.  In my experience with Goffrier, I sent him a check, and about a week later I received the work of art I purchased.

The Killer App

Both Tim Pett and Bridgit Yinger hinted at (and pleaded for) the possibility of the killer app – the software tool that makes commerce via Facebook ubiquitous.  This will surely happen, and if for some unfathomable reason no one has yet begun to work on it – well, 1% of the stock in the company developed surrounding this killer app will be my finder’s fee.

Anyway, the truth of the matter is that for the artist, the killer app is really the artist himself (or herself).   If you think about the history of killer apps in the digital world, whether it was something early like Lotus 1-2-3 or something more recent like Microsoft Office, all killer apps seem to conglomerate and compile, taking really interesting things, putting them together, and making them easier to use. 

The artist already has the work, and given the narrative above, can focus on creating identity, building community, and monetizing the results.  Yes, someday there will be a monumental app for Facebook with the influence, decades later, of Lotus 1-2-3 as Facebook evolves to a backbone sort of structure for our culture and our lives.  But in the meantime, you as the artist are your own killer app.

Our oft-transient class in Media Transition stayed home this week to do some navel-gazing about Facebook and privacy issues.

Generally speaking, we’re all for it.

Facebook, that is.  Our class discussion shows that not everyone agrees with my thoughts that privacy doesn’t exist, and that there’s nothing to worry about regarding the Dark Side.

But of course, I don’t believe in heaven and hell, either.

Nonetheless, we’ve been spurred to contemplate the dark side of new media, and to think about the Ghosts of Facebook Future, Present, and Past.  What happens when Mark Zuckerberg, has his Marley-like nightmare and has to deal with these Dickensian images.

Given this, let’s deal with the Ghost of Facebook Past by considering a metaphor connecting the future to the past.  

The Ghost of Facebook Past

Facebook is a phonebook. 

If you want to connect with individuals, you start up front in the book.  For companies, you go to the middle, where there are businesses without persuasive listings, or you go to the back where the Yellow Pages allow freedom of expression for a price.

Now, from this point lets see how you use Facebook.  You can “friend” someone, which is like making a phone call, and when that person friends you back, you have a completed connection.  Or if you like, you can “like” a business, which is tantamount to giving them permission to market directly to you, rather than having to rely on direct marketing of yore – junk mail, phone calls, etc.  The Facebook way is simply a little more personal and consequently appears that it will have quite a future.

The L.M. Berry Companies of Dayton used to have quite a future.  Very quietly, this company created and maintained the Yellow Pages for years, since 1910 in fact.  Berry serves 240,000 advertisers in 42 states, publishing 850 Yellow Pages directories for phone companies. Berry’s Yellow Pages directories were hugely successful, especially in the days before telephone company deregulation. After the breakup of AT&T in 1984, Berry began facing competition in the form of similar directories published by others.  And then came the Internet, and ultimately social media.  Now, L.M. Berry is in Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Think about this:  850 Yellow Pages directories, averaging (pick a number) 50,000 listings, means they had more than 42 million users.  And of course, they sold that information, as did the local publishers of white pages.  Our data – our identities – have been manipulated, bought, and sold for decades all without our permission.    So what does this mean?

We haven’t had privacy for decades.

But here’s the difference.  The data today are much richer, and much more personal because the technology (in this case, social media programs like Facebook) are much better at pulling from each us more than name, rank, and serial number.  This I understand causes some Nellies to be nervous.  But to borrow a phrase from the gun lobby, the Internet doesn’t violate your privacy;  people do. 

This is Facebook Present.

Paul Levinson, as he writes about The Dark Side of New New Media in his book entitled (coincidently) New New Media, talks of a lecture he delivers to students in his classroom at Fordham.   In “Guns, Knives, and Pillows” he discusses whether some items are inherently good or bad.  Do guns kill, or protect?  Does a pillow provide comfort, or is it a murder weapon used for suffocation.

With an ease that I wish he would somehow share with the masses, Levinson makes the point that there is nothing inherently good or bad about technology or media.  The key is the use.  Now I’m typically among the first to talk about gun control, or even a gun ban – to me, like cigarettes, guns are a product that, when used properly, result in death.  Levinson infers the question “is all death bad”?  To me, unfortunately, I have to admit there is “good death”.  But not in defense of country or in self-defense, but rather euthanasia, is where I would go with the concept of “good death”.   Outside of horses, guns aren’t often used for euthanasia (inside of horses, it’s too dark).

So really, when I beg for gun control, I’m asking for a societal control, right Dr. Levinson?  Well played.

But do we need Facebook control?

So we’ve dealt with privacy and issues of use so far.  Now let’s talk of Fear of Facebook – not the software or the application, but rather the company.  Are they too big?  Will they have too much power?  Can they be trusted?  Should we break up Facebook?

The answers, in order, are yes, yes, no, and no.  But really all I’m doing here is making fun of my rhetorical questions.

First of all, this same question might have been asked (or at least predicted) just a handful of years ago about MySpace, which is working hard to prove that there is no Ghost of MySpace Future. In other words, there’s no guarantee that Facebook won’t be usurped by The Next Big Thing.  Compared to Microsoft, Facebook doesn’t appear to have the ubiquity that forces us to use it everyday.  It isn’t an operating system (at least not yet).   Is it addictive?  Yes, but so far we haven’t developed chewing gums and patches that give us some sort of alternative fix.

The Ghost of Facebook Future?

Is Facebook too big?  Well, it depends what sort of capitalist you might be, if at all.  If you’re a “Buy Local” sort, well then, yes, they’re pretty monstrous.  If you wear a tie to work, you probably think that as they get bigger, they’ll get better.

Can they be trusted?  Only the bottom line can be trusted.

Should we break them up?  Into what, Facechapters?  Facepamphlets?  The Standard Oil and Bell System antitrust actions only empowered smaller companies to grow and eventually eat their siblings and parents, like Pac-Man.

So, yes, I think this whole proposition is silly.  Facebook is the coin the realm.  Deal with it. Exploit it.  Everything is just conspiracy-theorist masturbation.

So now that I’ve worked to say evil doesn’t exist, or if it does, it is only because it has too much power, let’s move to the good in Facebook.  Well, if The Social Network taught us anything, it is that the anti-social nerd defeats the anti-Christs (Winkelvii).  Defeating tall, wealthy, Olympian athletes seems to be a good in itself.

But lets talk about everyday use.  First of all, it seems to limit if not squash anonymity, which makes Stanley “I’m America’s gift to French literary theory” Fish happy.  Fish, in his article “Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet” would vote for the abolition of anonymity. 

At least this assures a byline.

Fish has actually had a fascinating career with tremendous success and huge failures that gave him enough cred and social capital to become a public intellectual of some import.  Important enough, anyway, for another public intellectual, Camille Paglia, to take issue with him and call him a “totalitarian Tinkerbell”.

Can’t we all just get along?

Anyway, Fish would likely embrace Facebook; however, it is hard to see if he has any presence or identity in the medium.  There are a handful of people named Stanley Fish as members of Facebook, and most use some sort of aquatic avatar as their identity (none, interestingly enough, use Abe Vigoda).

Anyway, the good of Facebook:  Well, we can show how popular we are by how many friends we can list, not unlike in high school.  Facebook can help improve communication between families both near and far, not unlike therapy.  Facebook seems to have empowered atheists to come forward and testify, not unlike Church.  And Facebook gives license to blowhards to spout off about closely-held believes which are ultimately divisive, not unlike Congress.

So in an amazingly short time period, Facebook has become a part of our social fabric not unlike high school, therapy, Church, and Congress.  Bravo!  It’s really an impressive accomplishment.  And more to the point, all this connectedness and reconnectedness might just make high school reunions obsolete!

Facebook is good.

It’s merely advertising

The year is 1940, and the twentieth century is four decades old, but it feels like it’s only begun.  You’re living in St. Louis, Missouri with a beautiful new wife.  Your favorite meal is steak. You walk to work at the university to teach, and you see billboards selling crap:  tires, nylons, paint, soup, golf balls, bacon – anything.  Yet it’s all a bit seductive:  the breasts of the women never sag, and the men have boxers’ torsos, and the otherworldly properties of the products are simply not to be believed.  You want to point out some of the absurdities of these Technicolor pimpings, but you can’t because people in schools don’t discuss mass culture, and students don’t care, because, Why bother?  It’s merely advertising. 

Marshall McLuhan:  You Know Nothing of My Work!

 Douglas Coupland

 2010

Douglas Coupland, in his recent biography of Marshall McLuhan, envisions the moment where we as a society (or Marshall McLuhan, anyway) became aware of advertising in a more conscious manner.  We then dissected it, applied academic theory to it, created drama about it, and came up with one definite conclusion.

Advertising’s cool.

On a regular basis, popular culture reminds us that advertising is full of cool people working in cool settings.  Most recently, we’ve had Mad Men.  Going back over time a bit, we’ve had Bewitched, thirtysomething, and Cary Grant in North by Northwest.

Yep, advertising’s cool.  Well, except for account executives.  Just think about Larry Tate on Bewitched.  He swings whichever way the wind blows, all in the name of keeping the account.   Never mind the responsibility he holds in keeping all the cool people employed.   But that’s the hairshirt the boss has to wear.  The boss is seldom cool.  But the boss definitely needs to know which way the wind blows.

You don’t need a weatherman . . .

The trouble, though, is that in advertising the wind has changed to gale force.  In the old days, navigating this storm might have been as simple as saying “let’s put up the sails and ride the wind”.  But now – even though these are gale force winds – it is increasingly difficult to know which way the wind blows.  Dylan said “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”; however, a new media consultant might have some value to old line ad execs trying to figure out their own forecasts.

Our Media Transformation class recently held our regular Tuesday night session at Sullivan Higdon Sink (SHS) in Wichita’s Old Town.  Their offices are in an old Coleman foundry, and there is exposed brick and heavy steel doors everywhere.

Cool, right?

Well, they work very hard at being cool.  Along with Associated, SHS would have to be considered one of the Establishment advertising agencies in Wichita.  And that’s not a very good thing to be when new media is the coin of the realm.

The Land of Hip and Trendy

Danielle Sacks, in her FastCompany article on The Future of Advertising (November 17, 2010) describes the former state-of-the-art assembly line advertising world where copywriters, designers, and media buyers would pretty much work independent of each other.   SHS abandoned this world long ago, developing a team concept where creative types would work together as a group on a small handful of clients at a time.  Tom Bertels, one of the managing partners at SHS, declared this approach to be one of the agency’s competitive advantages. 

For the most part, Bertels was a bystander during our evening visit to the Land of Hip and Trendy.  He was the older yet still cool hipster in the corner ready to tell you about his cover band as well as talk about the time he helped take over Main Hall on campus.  He was there to teach and guide.  As our visit was obstensibly about the future, the new generation led our conversation.  Lathi DeSilva is a vice president of brand reputation, and Greg Standifer is a manager of brand reputation, and their thirtyish selves oozed confidence and ambition for our group of students. 

DeSilva led with their philosophy regarding new media by saying “we don’t do something just because it’s cool”.   While this is a good paradigm within which to operate, I don’t really believe her too much.   Hopefully, SHS does something because it advances the brand they are charged with defining.  And cool can definitely help.

One advantage an old line ad agency can have in this new media world is they can afford to be an experimental laboratory of sorts for media and promotional innovation with their reliable client base.  To their credit, SHS seems to gorge themselves on data, whether created from their work or via commissioned market research.  They appear to be very good about having their work being directed by the data.

DeSilva and Standifer showed us some examples that seemed to be in the marketing mix just for the cool of it (augmented reality hoops for those playing with their PDA’s at the local pub) and a situation (Meyer Natural Angus) where new media helped define the audience, the brand, and the point-of-sale strategies in with quick and strategic direction on their part.  This latter instance was a strong example of competent and strategic use of new media.

Bertels did make an effort to discuss their pro bono and community-focused work, but by the time this was brought to the forefront the evening was winding down.  I do wish we could have learned more about this work, as again this is usually where ad agencies do some of their most creative and cutting edge work.

The zeitgeist according to SHS

A downside to the visit was that our reading material, specifically Sacks piece on the future of advertising, was not a point for discussion.  I compare this to Sherry Chisenhall’s familiarity with and willingness to ground the conversation in the Medill School’s Six Compentencies of the Next Generation News Organization during our visit to Kansas.com/The Wichita Eagle.   My expectations may not have been realistic, as it may simply not be in the DNA of an ad agency to have anything but to display the best public face for an audience, and it could have been that the way cool visual culture thrown at us by SHS’s facilities distracted us from pushing the harder questions.  Likely, it was some of both.

Nonetheless, there are several issues for which I would have enjoyed hearing the viewpoint of the ad professionals.  SHS is nothing if not aware of the cultural and professional zeitgeist of their world, and it would have been interesting to learn their thoughts about the smaller new media shops.  Are they serious competition?  Do they ever partner with them?  Is there a freshness and a nimbleness that SHS envies?  After all, it wasn’t that long ago that three guys walked away from their careers promoting general aviation knowing they could do it better on their own than the establishment.

"There's never been a better time to be in advertising," said Aaron Reitkopf, North American CEO of digital agency Profero, referring to the unbound possibilities of digital, "and there's never been a worse time."   This quote is perhaps the most telling of any information in Sacks’ article on the future of advertising.  People are both excited and frightened simultaneously.  Will SHS consider creative destruction if the marketplace demands it, as they once did when staking the future of their firm on the idea of teamwork? 

All in all, it appears that SHS has been unfailingly smart about their future over the years.  Al Higdon and Vaughn Sink (Wendell Sullivan passed away several years before) developed a leadership transition strategy that surely allowed them to cash out while also continuing the brand and the agency they built.  They avoided the journey into holding company hell that has killed so many of the brands/agencies that built the world of advertising. 

Can ad men (and women) kvetch for the common good?

Will individual creative talent, and building around that talent, become the wave of the future?  On their website, SHS already gives room for employee blogs and other individual creative activity.  Would SHS amputate a segment of their firm if it meant more nimbleness, and especially, more billings? 

Within the Sacks’ piece, the Swedes of Hyper Island created “either a communal hazing or a primer on today’s rules of marketing.”  For the students at Wichita State, will there be an opportunity to learn from fear and loathing of the advertising professionals both young and old.  Can they kvetch in public for the sake of education and the common good?  Such a kvetching could create either an excellent topic for Communication Week or the basis for professional education courses at the Elliott School.

To paraphrase Reitkopf (and well, Dickens, for that matter), it is the best of times and the worst of times.  I’m going to bet, with their strong current and future leadership, that Sullivan Higdon Sink will figure it out.

This past Tuesday, our transient class studying media transformation visited KWCH-TV, the primary broadcasting unit of Sunflower Broadcasting  As a native Wichitan, albeit one who left in 1986 and just returned last year, I was eager to see how things on 37^th St. had changed since my childhood. 

When I was young, the station then known as KTVH (a CBS affiliate then and now) was strangely located out in the middle of nowhere, which also reflected their station's standing in the ratings.   Their broadcasts, with the legendary (on radio, anyway) Gus Grebe on sports, Bob Scofield with weather, and an always rotating cast of anchors (including a perky young woman named Andi Joyce, who would later become a well known national sportscaster named Andrea Joyce) worked in what to me appeared to be a too-dark set and their slumped shoulders seemed to indicate that they realized no one was watching.

These were also the darker days of CBS, with whom KTVH was affiliated.  The Tiffany Network was tarnished, ABC and NBC ruled the roost during prime time, and CBS's demographics looked just like the aging Bill Paley.

Roughly the time I left town, the station changed ownership (as stations often do) and call letters, becoming KWCH.  This was also roughly the time the station began to rocket up the local ratings book, and has been the highest ranked station ever since.

Certainly a prosperous local television station, particular one that is at the top of the ratings, can be a cash cow for its owners.  Walking into KWCH some 25 years later, this is clearly a successful business.  And it is one that has reinvested in itself as well as diving into new media and additional broadcast outlets.

Brian McDonough, the outgoing general sales manager (he is on his way to be the station manager at KY-3, a Springfield, Missouri outlet also owned by the same parent – Schurz Communications – as KWCH) and Shawn Hilferty, the director of marketing and digital media, gave us an outline of the investments into new media by Sunflower Broadcasting.  During a tour they provided, they showed us evidence of their success and talked about how they are envisioning the future.

As you walk into the station, there is a wall of monitors displaying the feeds of all their broadcasting outlets, from the primary business of the CBS affiliate to the CW Network and the Wichita affiliate of Univision.  A tour of the station finds a shiny and well-staffed newsroom, added during a recent renovation, and a superbly renovated sales bullpen with many more sales staff than just a few years ago – led in part by a group committed to new media.  There is confidence all around.  And the core business, KWCH, is proving to be that cash cow and Sunflower Broadcasting leadership is using this cash flow to attempt to win the future.  But what is that future?

Will Content Always Be King?

Sunflower Broadcasting seems to be determined to be in the lead in aggregating content for distribution via a variety of avenues within their control.  Mark Suster, in his Fast Company piece The Future of Television and the Digital Living Room, believes the future of successful distribution of video content will be via the interoperating of PCs, mobile devices, and traditional television.  He makes a special note to point out that he didn't say total convergence, but interoperating. 

So why was Suster so picky about word choice here?  In an online discussion from Stanford University, the definition put forth of convergence – at least in this discussion – is that media hardware display the same content.  Suster is envisioning content producers creating material for different media by being cognizant of how each medium can best utilize the content, and how the consumer might prefer to consume the content.  Using Sunflower Broadcasting as an example, I can learn about the latest in high sports by watching the evening news on KWCH or going to their online presence, but my most effect and most rich experience will likely be via CatchitKansas.com, where I can access the data I want without sifting through other information, and can likely find other interesting material to support my original search.

Suster, in his Fast Company piece, identities ten subjects that he anticipates being of discussion:

1)    “Over the Top” video distribution

2)    Attempts at “moving up the stack”

3)    The “second screen”

4)    Content bundling

5)    Torso TV

6)    YouTube meets the television

7)    Content discovery – new metaphors

8)    Gaming & TV

9)    Social media meets digital content, and

10) The changing nature of content & the role of the narrative

To me, as a middle-aged child who grew up with “appointment TV” as a way of life, some of these concepts are a bit foreign.  Sometimes reading the back page first, like a sports fan would do when reading a tabloid, can help you understand the greater whole in a better fashion.  Suster concludes his piece with two key ideas:  a) that he is a big believer in the power of writing, editing, and producing (content, in other words), and b) that democratization of production and distribution will clearly change the world.  With this perspective, I have to look toward these ten concepts for discussion with Suster's perspective that content will incorporate these new opportunities into their concepts and entertainment propositions, and that distribution may hold a key toward more effective monetization.

Is Interoperating New?

Big Budget Hollywood has been showing us this for years.  As the money involved gets larger, the game changes from creating the new to recreating the old and getting the most from it in various channels.  There is a certain threshold where creating content ceases to be art and becomes an exercise in commerce. Think of Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000). 

This big budget movie takes a cult classic from 1974, repackages it with bankable movie stars (Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie) to get the attention of the masses, and then recreates a movie with a similar, though not exact, storyline.  But distribution was the key here, and not in the old fashioned “selling to Europe and Asia” sort of way.  Marketing tie-ins were in place, of course, but the content now lives on in video games.  So in effect, an idea from the early 70s continues to regenerate itself, in part because of advances in technology and hardware, to something that still makes money for the creators and owners today.

This is an example of how content may morph itself as a regular course of action.  If only McLuhan could see how the medium becomes part of the message these days.

Running with an Idea

As this postmodern era continues where there are no new ideas, only repackaged old ones, the democratization of production and distribution could lead to smaller, UGC productions on YouTube where the car chases and “boosts” from around Wichita are recreated and posted on YouTube, or an independent filmmaker from Dodge City creates a version using horses and works via Filmaka to find an audience.  KWCH reports on these activities in its own backyard, and somewhere – through product placement or clickthroughs – new producers make new money in new ways.

As I look at Suster's ten items for discussion, it seems to me that where he sees the action right now is with aggregators of once type or another.  This is endlessly fascinating to me, as it becomes the same thing in a new, postmodern way.  As an example, if you think about the trinity of CBS, NBC, and ABC these companies have always been content aggregators, distributing content produced by groups such as MTM Enterprises or Steven Bochco Productions.   There was a direct relationship with these producers, but they were not formally owned by the networks.  The networks, though, through their monopoly on distribution, made everything possible.

As in many forms of commerce, control seems to be a concept that developers want to use for monetization.  Over the Top video distribution is a way wrestle control from cable systems and the broadcast networks by taking advantage of new habits created from video and digital recording.  These new habits have squelched “appointment TV” and now put the decision to the consumer on when and what they will pull from the media cloud to view.  “Moving up the stack” is less possible now because of the commoditization of hardware (who even knows the brand of their TV anymore) and the knowledge of viewers that interesting and entertaining content doesn't just come anymore from a small handful of aggregators holding distribution monopolies.  This is also killing content bundling as consumers realize they can access pieces of the bundle on their own, but so far to a lesser extent because the Over the Top distribution has barriers in cost and technology sophistication.  Many folks just don’t have the patience, knowledge, or cash flow necessary to advance to this stage of selective viewership.

Opportunity Waits

For the content producer with talent and vision, the added distribution channels simply mean more opportunity.  This seems to be how Sunflower Broadcasting (and Shawn Hilferty, in particular) seem be looking at the uncharted territory before them.  The experience that the personnel of KWCH have will be very helpful, as many of the new opportunities are simply a differing perspective – a new channel of distribution, perhaps – for their content.  But no one is quite sure.  As was also said during our visit with The Wichita Eagle, there will be things done now that will be determined to be wrong in a matter of months, and yet-to-be-envisioned things may ultimately prove to be the best way.  Not to be patriotic here, but American business has always been a wonderful laboratory for this sort of development.  There is money to be made, somewhere somehow.  Our larger culture has a pioneering spirit to it that can lead to many unforeseen things, as long the leadership at media companies gives them permission to fail along the way.

Postmodern Vertigo and the News Organization

It’s no secret that what used to be known as the newspaper business is in the throes of a huge transition.

“Used to be known” is certainly a key phrase, and might set off alarmists that I’m about to write about the death of the daily.   But I had a chance to see an organization navigating this change, and they’re doing really well – all things considered.  But they do suffer from postmodern vertigo, and with a simple yet significant change they might be ready to excel. 

Recently, I had the chance to be a part of a transient classroom located for the evening in the newsroom of The Wichita Eagle.   Sherry Chisenhall was the maven of the class for the evening, as the executive editor of the organization best described as the Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company.  Her colleagues, Jason Schlitz (overseeing the online advertising of their business) and John Boogert (who governs the interactive news team), also participated.

The leaders of the Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company illustrated for us the challenges they know they face, and perhaps unwittingly some of the challenges for which they are not quite as cognizant, or at least have put on the backburner for now.

All I could think of was Donald Rumsfeld, a postmodern poet if there ever was one, and his concepts of known and unknown unknowns.

Defining Postmodernism and Setting the Ground Rules

Before we go much further, we should define postmodernism to help guide with digesting this tome and the concept of postmodern vertigo.  The concept, in a very postmodern way, surely has hundreds of definitions depending on its situated identity.  Jean-Francois Lyotard defined it as incredulity toward metanarratives.   He also suggested that postmodernism continually redefines itself.  Jurgen Habermas suggested that it undermines, contradicts, and then embraces itself via self-referentialism in the manner that an Escher drawing might lead you somewhere and nowhere.   I might add the postmodern condition includes the acceptance of change as the norm and features instability as the platform.

Finally, like Justice Potter Stewart, I know it when I see it.  Postmodern destabilizes, and it explodes with the new and implodes the old.  Simultaneously.  One of the primary challenges of the postmodern condition is recognizing what is new and what is old.  Here’s a hint:  sometimes they’re one and the same.

On that night in the newsroom, we as students saw organizational postmodern vertigo.

The Classroom Assignment Within

Now, let’s set the ground rules.  Or perhaps, the grounding rules.  In scholarly writing, you always have a work of scholarship that grounds, informs, and guides your new creation.  The catalyst for this bit of writing is a classroom assignment, and there are two works asking to inform my perspective: 

• Life Beyond print;  Newspaper journalists’ digital appetite, issued by the Media Management Center
• Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization, a November 2008 production also of the Media Management Center.

The Media Management Center is an interdisciplinary platform of the Medill School of Journalism and the Kellogg School of Management, both at Northwestern University. 

The first document, Life Beyond Print, might already be considered a historical piece as it reminds us of journalists who considered themselves newspapermen first and foremost (my gender specificity here is both purposeful and a social construct).   As Chisenhall noted during our discussion, those people are already out of the business.  Hopefully, they’re drinking one for all of us at the Billy Goat Tavern, or wherever the newspapermen drank in their own locale.

The second document, Six Competencies of the Next Generation News Organization, is a document that does a very good job of defining key desired capabilities of new s organizations.  Those within the organization must be platform strategists, they must understand how to be marketers, they must build community, they must embrace and leverage data, they must tell stories, and they know how to identify and run with new models in the fashion of entrepreneurship.

This piece, already two years old and thus worth a skeptical eye in this time of change, seems like it might be lasting and classic, like the Jerome McCarthy’s Four P’s of Marketing.  But there is potentially one flaw in their paradigm.  They use the term “news organization”.  A worthy question is whether “news organizations” will continue to exist.  John Kotter, a Harvard organizational theorist, suggests that revenue dependency leads organizations to survive, but leads to change as they seek new sources of revenue as previous ones decline.  The classic example of this is The March of Dimes.  But this might be how and why news organizations evolve.

If Kotter is a seer, the Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company will continue, but it will likely look very different than it does now.

The Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company and the Future.

The aforementioned conversation with the leaders what we still know as The Wichita Eagle, and might know in the future as Kansas.com, and certainly existing as the Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company, are in the midst of postmodern vertigo as an organization.   Their world is destabilized, their metanarrative of news and reporting has been bombarded with change, and they’re trying to monetize the new to ensure their survival.  In short, everything that was News is now old.

And all things considered, I think they’re doing a pretty good job of managing a transition to the unknown.  If you look at the Six Competencies article mentioned a few paragraphs above, they’ve embraced this as a roadmap in a time when few know the direction of the future.   In the spirit of postmodern vertigo, let’s look at how the Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company is strategizing their future, starting with #6 and ending with #1.

They are absolutely entrepreneurial, preaching to their faithful about monetizing and the value of numbers in a precise, click-driven world.   They’re cognizant that their cash cow of old, print advertising, is declining and the online advertising is growing rapidly.  They know this, but they also know that the numbers still gap.  Schlitz and Chisenhall said that online advertising is still only about 25% of print revenue.  As the Six Competencies piece suggested, the prosperous future here might grow from partnerships.

They have a history of storytelling, and more importantly embrace new ways of presenting good work.  The illustration that Chisenhall and Boogart provided with deserializing Promise Not to Tell because they knew they had something good and they recognized the value of immediacy is quite promising for their future.

Chisenhall acknowledged that data, specifically the morgue of the Eagle (and Beacon), could be a competitive advantage for them.   As life destabilizes, there will likely be a turn toward the nostalgic, when the known was known.  No news organization is yet doing this well, though The New York Times has made some headway.  There might just be a significant role for an information librarian in the future of online content.

Chisenhall, Schlitz, and Boogart are all very aware of Wichita as their market, and are proud both of their service to the community as well as their media dominance in this segment.  But this focus might be their Achilles’ heel, as expanded networks of communication will change the nature of community and communities.  They will likely realize that Kansas.com might be their best bet, sooner rather than later.

As marketers, they’re doing their best in the definition of the world in which they know it – selling advertising and being representative of Wichita.   If you think about the McCarthy’s Four P’s of Marketing (price, product, place, and promotion), they may be most baffled by product issues.  I’m not really sure they know who they are anymore as an organization or a product.  More on this soon.

As platform strategists, the Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company are doing quite well.  They’re embracing new platforms and seem to be without initial prejudice in moving forward.  Revenue is the ultimate judgment, of course.  As Chisenhall noted, they’ve become very good in recognizing opportunity and moving forward. 

But I see one failing that may trump all their successes, particularly as time and technology march forward.

Organizational Identity

The Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company has an identity issue.  Their identity is both in flux and multiplying simultaneously.   The key to their success will be knowing who they are, and then committing to that identity.

Right now, the temptation is to continue to be both The Wichita Eagle and Kansas.com, creating one publication under two flags. 

Think how well this worked for General Motors over the years.

There is an obligation within the organization to those that still read print, and to the revenue the print version produces.  This is okay, and a good thing.  Print as we know it will still be around for at least another couple of decades, as we wait for the ubiquity of new platforms to accelerate print’s obsolescence and for the readers to die off.

The building of a good brand is a superb strategy, provided there is the requisite depth.  Here that depth is content, and content is a strength of this organization.  The time has come to phase out the brand of The Wichita Eagle, albeit over an extended time period.  This does not mean the print version disappears;  rather, it means that the flag changes to the print version of Kansas.com, and The Wichita Eagle becomes a historical (yet perhaps meaningful) identity and begins to fulfill a role of providing data for reference and grounding for new content. 

Kansas.com’s brand possibilities far outweigh the tradition of The Wichita Eagle.  As a sense of community becomes more important for revenue, Kansas.com expands the market beyond SouthCentral Kansas and labels the publication as the go-to point on the Internet for all things Kansas.   The print version continues as a significant source of revenue in its new brand, rooted in history.  The sub-versions of the brand, which are the manifestation of market segmentation strategies, also develop a stronger brand presence rather than simply a diffusion of the confusion of brand identity (which I believe they are now).

Other smaller items that will help with identity, such as replacing the large desktop monitors (used originally for games of Pong) with mobile laptops and other devices will help further this identity amongst a group of employees whose very being has been destabilized over the past decade. 

The Wichita Division of the McClatchy Company is doing quite well with the grand change in the coin of the realm, despite struggling with postmodern vertigo.  And once they commit to an identity that will allow them to embrace the possibilities of the future, they will excel.

Yeah, I’m an old man – 47, if you’re counting.  And maybe that’s why I’m still skeptical about YouTube’s value in the greater public relations game – though I am in awe of the possibilities.

How’s that for playing both sides?  That’s a gift you get with age.

There’s no doubt that we’re in the early stages of YouTube’s possibilities as a promotional tool.  The magic so far has mostly been as a highly democratized tool communicating “fun stuff” and for preaching to the converted. 

Paul Levinson, the author of New New Media, and an experienced hand at new new media commits an entire chapter to YouTube, which at the time of publication (2009) was a comparatively new medium.  He gives plenty of ink to the fun side of YouTube (old music videos,  Obama Girl) but not nearly so much to the public relations possibilities present in this new tool.  He mentions Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, which is obvious – the use of new new media for this large and demanding cause (Obama's campaign) was brilliant, especially considering there was no manual.  And this is my point – in 2009, there was no handbook for using YouTube in a promotional effort.  Here in 2011, there have been plenty of tries now, inspired by Obama’s success.  But are there any successes?

I see three challenges that stand in the way of YouTube’s coming ubiquity:  a) technological challenges, b) attention spans, and c) the push/pull conundrum.

Let’s first start with the good news:  YouTube is barely five years old.  Think back, if you can (youngsters!) to what your cell phone was like in 1990:

I do remember smaller phones – Motorola was way out in front with its flip phones, which were about the size of a small brick – but that a major corporation was promoting the availability of this tool is telling.  YouTube is going to mature, but with new uses, and with advanced technology.

Regarding technology, a major challenge for the maturity of YouTube is the availability of bandwidth.  Video streaming gobbles up the stuff, and for the most part you have to have the benefits of a cable modem in your home or the luxuries of an employer or university network to use YouTube in the way it was intended – watching videos without interruption.  In my home right now, I’m using a Sierra Wireless mobile hotspot and I average 30 minutes of downloading for five minutes of video on YouTube.

They tell me that 4G will be better.  One can only hope.

One of our paradigms for the pervasiveness of mature technology is “telephone quality”, referencing the smoothness of the land line, the ease of use, and complete lack of failure (even though it is obsolescing with each passing minute) of the object of which we're speaking.  If we were to compare YouTube’s technological maturity with the concept of landline, we might need to bring the telephone back to this stage for comparison's sake:

Now, for the second challenge:  attention spans.  There’s a reason that ten and thirty second commercial advertising spots on what we now call television are so popular.  We’ll watch them without much complaint .   Even if you have great technology – plenty of bandwidth – watching a YouTube spot takes real commitment.  You have to give up at least three or four minutes of your life in many circumstances, and in some instances much longer.   I myself have been trying to watch YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens as often as I can during his illness, somehow having an urgency brought along by his illness (Hitchens is quite ill with esophageal cancer).  But maybe once a month do I keep this commitment.  Instead, I simply grow my hair longer to attempt to look a bit like him, in salute.  It is much easier.

There are certainly circumstances where YouTube’s need of a more significant viewer commitment is ideal.   When one is preaching to the converted, the viewers are much more likely to watch the multi-minute video of Barack Obama, or the Pope if they’re eager to hear what they have to say.  Too, the entertainment element of YouTube has proven successful, as well, whether it is spending time watching old music videos or the latest Funny or Die posting.  As Levinson states, YouTube has given music videos new life.  As one who came of age with the birth of MTV (no causality here, simply a chronological coincidence), being able to pull once treasured videos which were at one point consigned to the dust bin is of high value.  Watching Classix Nouveau gives my life added meaning.

Now the third issue:  the push/pull conundrum.  YouTube is an excellent pull technology.  If I want to watch a Classix Nouveau video, I just pull it up through the search engine.  But the real challenge for YouTube as a promotional tool is getting people to the YouTube production in the first place.  Think about promotional advertising via push technologies, if you will.

We watch television (in the old-fashioned appointment format) and a commercial promoting a product, service, or happening is pushed to us.  To avoid it, we have to turn off the media, leave the room, or change the channel.   While watching television, we see a report on CNN about the new IPad – pushed at us because the product earned the media, with the help of a public relations strategy.   Continuing, we drive down the street and see a billboard promoting something.  It is hard to avoid, once we made the commitment to drive down the street.

An argument can be made that all media is a pull technology, as we have to make a decision somehow to be exposed to the message, whether by turning on the television, reading the newspaper, or driving down a particular street.  Push and pull, then, are really matters of degree.  If I’m online, I have to ask to see the new four door Porsche’s handling displayed for me in a YouTube video.  But when I’m done, I’ll almost certainly be pushed a pop-up (which somehow got through the pop-up blocker) telling me which car insurance to buy (especially, seemingly, if I have a bad driving record).

Given these three challenges (technology, attention spans, and the push/pull conundrum), there are certainly examples out there that can serve as models of how YouTube can be used as a promotional or public relations tool at this point in its lifespan.  One I noticed in this past week, and granted I’m both a higher education administrator and a former employee of this university, was an email that I received from The Ohio State University.  It is precisely my background that both led to me receiving this email, and then ultimately opening it. 

I opened the email, and I’m brought to what on the surface seems to be a weekly newsletter promoting whatever is happening on the Oval.  Go ahead, you should have the same experience I had in seeing the whole look presented in the email -- hit the link:

http://www.osu.edu/connect/

Ohio State chooses to take an opportunity to preach to the converted.  Now as I mentioned earlier, I’m a lapsed Buckeye.  I’ve been an employee at two different intervals (with six years between stays), and just as importantly (for this tome) I’ve left two different times on my own for what I thought what were greener pastures.

And for issues of full disclosure, I must mention that Ohio State’s president, Gordon Gee, is the subject of my PhD dissertation being completed through Michigan State University.  The man has had a remarkable career, and he has never met a promotional opportunity which he didn’t embrace.

I watched Ohio State's YouTube video, embedded at the top of the email.

Wow. 

 Now I’m not sure exactly what is the purpose of this video.  Do they want me to become a student?  To give money to the university?  All I know is that they’ve taken an opportunity where I’ve pulled them to my attention and given me a huge warm fuzzy – which may be the point of the video after all.

After watching this, I’m ready to send my daughter to Columbus.   What do I care that it is a 1000 miles away, cold, gray, and huge (roughly 60,000 students).  I just saw a video where there is nothing but blue sky (quite literally – try and find an overcast setting here), a diverse student body, incredible facilities, and interesting traditions.

More importantly, after I finished the video, the website offered me the opportunity to watch many more videos about the university.  Some are testimonials, some are out and out promotional flicks, and some are pieces of old football games and loved one’s Dotting the “I” (a distinctive university tradition).   There is one thing for certain after watching this, as the song says, “I wanna go back to Ohio State, to old Columbus town”.

OK, so maybe there is something to the public relations potential of YouTube.   Yes, there are challenges, and it is a maturing medium that will only get better as technology advances.  But as I mentioned up front, I am in awe of its potential.  I’ve tried to give you an example how it can work here, as long as you make the choice to pull the content.  Is it the perfect tool for all circumstances?  I don’t know about that at all.  But here’s what I do know – without YouTube and Ohio State’s effort to market toward me, I’d never gotten to see this:

And of course, there’s Gordon Gee,  loving these new things called Flash Mobs and YouTube.  That, along with the more than two million view of this video.

10.          Kansas!  Still relatively empty.

9.            We’re next to Colorado.

8.            Our sunflowers face the sun 24/7.

7.            Kansas – where there’s a meth lab in every trailer.

6.            Visit Wichita – home of the 2022 Winter Olympics.

5.            Kansas – Don’t even think about being liberal.

4.            Kansas – Where everything is still in Black & White.

3.            Our interstate highways are the straightest in the country.

2.            Our Amish are better than yours.

And the Number 1 rejected slogan celebrating Kansas’s 150^th Birthday:

1.            We’re really tired of your Dorothy jokes.

Art vs. Commerce

Art vs. Commerce is an age-old argument made by the unfulfilled over and over, and thus similarly heard over and over like the drone of the final chord of the Beatles’ A Day in the Life.  It is there. It is interesting (for awhile), and perhaps different than other noises. 

I’ve struggled with this debate throughout my life.  

Eventually, you have to do something about this Battle Royal.  In the preceding metaphor, you simply switch the record (I say this, knowing I am showing my age).  Fully immersed in the debate of Art vs. Commerce, you sit and grind your teeth believing that you have to pick one or the other.  Perhaps the teeth-grinding is because you believe the debate is really starvation vs. food. 

Inspired by the proof provided by Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, one must ask whether is it really necessary these days to make this choice.  Can you put your peanut butter in the chocolate?  With new new media, as described in the early parts of Richard Levinson’s book titled (coincidently) New New Media (2008, Allyn & Bacon), there has certainly been opportunity provided to monetize your work as a writer, especially, or perhaps at least give you different channels with which to market your work if you’re a visual artist.

Monetizing.

Isn’t that what it is all about? (By the way, my inner voices tend to speak in italics.  The unabashed capitalist inner voice demands bold type.)

Well ignoring this bit of facetiousness, let me offer another metaphor:  the fish rots from the head down.

What makes technology interesting besides the neat arrangement of 1’s and 0’s?  It is the ability to do something nifty and helpful, surely.

What else?

Perhaps the ability to help others do things nifty and helpful?

OK, how does one do this? 

Via the marketplace.

Hmmm.  Commerce.

OK, maybe I can do good and make a little money, you might ask.  So how does this happen.

Rotten fish, rotting from the head down to its rotting tail.

Excuse me?

Venture capitalists.

Oooh, people who are in it just for the money.

Well, yes, they are.  For the most part.  And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Anyway, the first question a prospective funder of new technology will ask is how the developer will monetize this nifty thing.  And the next question is surely how big the potential market might be for these distinctive 1’s and 0’s.   These capitalists will be very helpful in moving things forward for the developer, with the idea that perhaps there might be a market for someone.

Maybe for artists and writers, perhaps?

Perhaps.  But there’s one other detail.  These guys will want a piece of the action for their work, and likely it will be larger than whatever benefit they bring to the equation.  Hence, their nickname:  vulture capitalists.

But that’s our way, isn’t it?  Provide a service, get paid a fee.  And isn’t that what the artist hopes to do?  Provide inspiration, and get rewarded?  Well, these keen and smart fellas (and they usually are) have developed a few paths that can provide a little bit of money to the new new media connoisseur who savors and produces content (a blog, as an example).  And a lot of money for them, if things work out right.

Yeah, I know.  It doesn’t seem fair.  But once you know you have something, then you can go all Oprah and try to own the product, the process, and the channels of distribution.  One step at a time.  

Levinson points out five ways to monetize a blog.  Let’s look at the five, and see what the potential might be for a writer, and how realistic it might be to first utilize the resource, and secondly, whether or not there might be any real money there for you.

1.    Google AdSense

 Ahhh, Google.  A guy from East Lansing and a guy from Moscow have their Peanut Butter Cup moment in Palo Alto, and over time figure out they can develop nifty technology and monetize it.  And they’ve monetized it really well, truthfully.

With AdSense, Google will place advertisements on your blog that have the potential to successfully earn views and clicks based upon your content.   Importantly for the artist within, Google offers complete control over placement, media (video, text, etc.) and there is really very little work on your part as the writer.

And isn’t that part of why we became writers, because it didn’t seem like real work?

Google AdSense seems to be the equivalent of dipping your toe in the water of the monetizing swimming pool, to see if the temperature of this water is comfortable to your skin and your soul. 



2.    Amazon Associates



Just like AdSense, Amazon Associates is about placing advertisements on your blog.  In this case, it is for materials sold by Amazon.  So if you’re a published writer, it becomes perfectly natural to have little pictures of your books linking directly to Amazon so they can follow through with that impulse buy that is screaming to happen.

As one without a published oeuvre, to me this seems like an opportunity to share.  If I blog about how Lizzie Wurtzel has mastered the art of writing about desperation and desperateness, I can post advertisements for Prozac Nation and More Now Again. 

3.    PayPerPost



Oooh, the devil incarnate.

Not only will they tempt you to write about things strictly for profit (small as it may be), but they will shout to the world that this is essentially an advertisement – that you have SOLD OUT!

Well, an argument could be made that this is really no different than copywriting for an ad agency.  I can buy this argument, to some extent – until the voice of purity comes to remind you.

Blogs are one of the few potentially pure forms of writing left.  No editors.  No commercialization, if you choose.

Well, the interesting thing about skillful commercialization is that the act of selling seems to be without angst and full of grace (albeit grace from a different system of values, perhaps). 

PayPerPost does offer the opportunity to sell your brilliant endorsement from your blog to advertisers in a non-disclosure format, as well.  I think Spy Magazine called this Logrolling in Our Time.  Somehow, this seems more palatable. 

Yes, that Art vs. Commerce argument is an easy one in which to find convenient hiding places.  Purity, I suppose, is in the eye of the beholder.  And is there anything wrong with being 99 and 44/100% pure?

4.    PayPal donation widget

Working in the fundraising world, I’ve had many consultants tell me how successful donation widgets can be if properly framed.

Of course, they were all trying to sell me their services.

I’m eager to figure out a way to try these widgets.  My understanding is there exists an option for United Way-type progress thermometers.   Maybe it is a way for my wife and I to send our daughter to Girls Rock Camp this summer in Austin.  And then she can begin her own struggle with Art vs. Commerce.

Wonderful Dad, aren’t I.

5.    Direct Advertising Placement

This would seem to be the gold standard – The Cadillac, as it were – of income possibilities for blogs and other personal web ventures.  By no means is this a place for a newbie to start, unless you have the power of past successes behind you, as Arianna Huffington and Tina Brown each did when they established their blogs. These blogs are admittingly not solely their voices, but in effect a mix between “star blogs” and an old fashioned newspaper (The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, respectively, if you were wondering).

My favorite success story in this realm, one both to admire and to emulate, is Heather Armstrong and her blog dooce.com.  There’s nothing out-of-this world with this window onto her domestic life except good design and good writing, with seemingly at least one laugh out loud moment per day.  One cannot overlook The Daily Chuck, which features a new picture of her dog each day.  Good writing and good photography, of course, is what makes The Daily Chuck special.  And so it is with dooce.com, as well.

If you’re not familiar with Heather Armstrong and dooce.com, this is the Horatio Alger story of blogging.  At one point in the early days of blogging, Armstrong was fired from her job because of her blog, as she wrote about her colleagues in her workplace.  You can learn more about this history and the content of her efforts at http://dooce.com/about.

Several pieces of press have identified the revenue brought home by dooce.com to be between $500,000 to $1,000,000 per year.   There’s no doubt that she and her husband are now professional bloggers, and in a very Seinfeldian way they really write about nothing at all.  And they make a pretty good living from it.

Now, back to Art vs. Commerce.  Levinson addresses the issue of whether monetization is compatible to the ideals of blogging.  As with many aspects of cyberspace, the founding ideals of blogging did not incorporate commercialization.  But because of the small investment needed to pursue the virtual broadcast of your deepest meaning via the Internet, you do have your choice of forsaking commerce or embracing it. 

To me, the aforementioned monetization strategies identified by Levinson let you have your own peanut butter cup moments.  You can put your artist chocolate in the commercialized peanut butter of the Internet to the extent you wish – to the extent your artist’s soul will allow.  What I’m learning is that artists and writers have always had their own model of monetization, which may or may not include waiting tables.  What they do, in fact, is create multiple streams of revenue.  None of these streams of revenue may be breathtakingly large until one really, really makes it.  But by not selling out to any one significant stream, they keep their souls at a level of comfort until the marketplace gives them the greatest luxury of all – to create as they see fit.

The varied commercialization possibilities surrounding blogging can really be manna from heaven for the artist/writer.   For me, I now have hope that I can create art and that I can dabble in commerce, too.