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These excerpts, meant to whet your base appetites for making lots of money online, come from two ink-on-paper books by Christopher Locke. I'm reasonably sure that Mr. Locke would appreciate it if you'd buy the books from his Amazon account rather than mine, so check out his Cluetrain and Gonzo Marketing sites.
95 Theses
from Chapter One: Internet
Apocalypso
The Net grew like a weed between the cracks in the monolithic
steel-and-glass empire of traditional commerce. It was technically obscure,
impenetrable, populated by geeks and wizards, loners, misfits. ... The idea that
the Internet would someday constitute the world's largest marketplace would have
been laughable if anyone was entertaining such delusions back then. ...
The Net grew and prospered largely because it was ignored. It worked by
different rules than the rules of business. Market penetration wasn't
interesting because there was no market — unless it was a market for new
ideas. ...
The Internet attracted millions. Many millions. The interesting question to ask
is why. In the early 1990s, there was nothing like the Internet we take for
granted today. Back then, the Net was primitive, daunting, uninviting. So what
did we come for? And the answer is: each other.
The Internet became a place where people could talk to other people without
constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction — and perhaps
most significantly, without advertising.
...
So here's a little story problem for ya, class. If the Internet has 50 million
people on it, and they're not all as dumb as they look, but the corporations
trying to make a fast buck off their asses are as dumb as they look, how long
before Joe is laughing as hard as everyone else?
The correct answer of course: not long at all. And as soon as he starts
laughing, he's not Joe Six-Pack anymore. He's no longer part of some passive
couch-potato target demographic. Because the Net connects people to each other,
and impassions and empowers through those connections, the media dream of the
Web as another acquiescent mass-consumer market is a figment and a fantasy.
The Internet is inherently seditious. It undermines unthinking respect for
centralized authority, whether that "authority" is the neatly
homogenized voice of broadcast advertising or the smarmy rhetoric of the
corporate annual report.
And Internet technology has also threaded its way deep into the heart of
Corporate Empire, where once upon a time, lockstep loyalty to the chairman's
latest attempt at insight was no further away than the mimeograph machine. One
memo from Mr. Big and everyone believed (or so Mr. Big liked to think).
No more. The same kind of seditious deconstruction that's being practiced on the
Web today, just for the hell of it, is also seeping onto the company intranet.
from the Introduction
Bricolage is what tinkers do -- collecting odd bits of stuff
they think may be potentially useful, then using whatever bits seem to work in
the context of some later repair job. Simple. And yet profound. Because the bits
the bricoleur ends up using were not designed for the use they end up being put
to. Figuring out which bits to collect and how to apply them to some task at
hand requires a completely different kind of thinking than the procedural
algorithmic thought processes business has become so dependent upon. While the
Internet may have convinced some businesses to think "out of the box,"
most are still not even sure what box they’re in, much less which way to turn
for emergency egress.
...
Things that don't fit together in expected ways can make your head hurt.
However, under the right conditions, this pain can also produce insight. It can
illuminate not only the box, but the EXIT sign as well.
...
By screwing up royally here, I hope to provide a new kind of model demonstrating
to business that it not only can, but must move beyond its unhealthy fear of
error and imprecision. Today, it is certainty that is not an option. Failure is
almost guaranteed.
...
Over time, any functional specialization tends to forget its relationship to the
larger social context it was created to work within and serve. Instead, it
concentrates on developing an inner sanctum of specialists who talk among
themselves in a private language inaccessible to outsiders. Almost without
exception, such professionals despise amateurs. Or worse, accord them a
patronizing form of faux eye-rolling patience.
...
delight and passion for the work are precisely the qualities professionals tend
to lose first. The opposite of professionalism is what Zen master Shunryu Suzuki
called "beginner's mind" -- an ability to look at the world with fresh
eyes and an open spirit.
...
The net is a planet-spanning virtual ecosystem, a cognitive rain forest teeming
with new concepts and connections, issues and inquiries, studies and
speculations, proposals, predictions and unlimited potential.
...
In the next X years, billions of dollars worth of news, information,
entertainment and what I like to call "The Artist Formerly Known As
Advertising" are going to do a full 180. That is, a very large proportion
of these media functions will no longer be delivered top-down, as in the
broadcast model, but will be coming bottom-up from creative individuals on the
Internet. X may be two years or five years or ten -- the question is not if but
when. These changes are inevitable for reasons the balance of this book will
explore more deeply.
Business created mass markets through broadcast advertising, the same stentorian
voice of command-and-control it used on workers, but in this case applied to the
marketplace. "Shut up and do what you're told" is not that much
different a proposition from "shut up and buy our product." The
"shut up" part was built in to broadcast, as there was never any
back-channel -- never a way to ask questions. The 30-second jive-and-jingle TV
spot was never an invitation to converse.
The Internet brings something different into the world. It has connected people
person-to-person, and the people so connected are today talking among each other
about things they truly value. People are telling stories. With the advent of
the Internet, markets have again become open, unconstrained conversations. Free
talk. And the best conversations, the ones people gravitate toward, are based on
stories.
...
The mass markets traditionally served by broadcast media have been steadily
fragmenting for decades as a result of global competition.
...
Entirely new micromarkets are emerging on the web today. The real challenge lies
not in predicting the behavior of markets this small, but in determining their
existence. Because they are currently much smaller than existing market
segments, they don't show up on conventional market radar screens. Because they
have no history and don't behave like the markets that grew up around broadcast
media, demographic segmentation is of little use in determining who constitutes
these new micromarkets.
...
The Internet constitutes a market for ideas -- real ideas that interest real
people, not just the feel-good fantasies of product vendors -- what's missing
today is an effective method of marketing those ideas undistorted by hype and
hucksterism. Mass production, whether of goods or information, has always
depended on broadcast marketing in which markets are viewed as top-down targets
from the lofty vantage point of long-established power and control. The Internet
has destroyed that vantage.
...
Net markets are micromarkets, reflecting not the mass of humanity, but rather
the voluntary alliance of individuals around deeply shared interests. Because
such communities are still growing bottom-up, they don't have the sort of
demographic profiles companies have always depended on to identify new business.
These micromarkets are just emerging. They hardly exist yet. Invisible to the
lens of traditional marketing, they are ignored.
But don't be fooled. Micromarkets aren't insignificant markets, and given the
speed of propagation the net enables, their emergence will be faster than the
emergence of the Internet itself. This book describes how billions of dollars of
advertising, news, information and entertainment are about to shift out of
corporate control forever.
The resulting landscape will not be a neat and orderly world, any more than a
rainforest, or any physical ecosystem, is neat and orderly. Rather, it will be
wild.
...
from Chapter One: Eight Miles
High
Market research is dead. Let's hope so anyway, because all it does is predict
we'll want the same things tomorrow that we wanted yesterday. As practiced in
most of the 20th century, market research works against creativity and the kind
of risk taking that's crucially prerequisite to innovative products and
services. Today, there's a counter-phenomenon at work, beginning in the realm of
ideas. If they're any good, ideas propagate well over networks. And ideas create
new markets.
...
The return will come through advertising. Or so goes the formula. Aggregate
enough eyeballs, show them whatever you think they want to see -- which you hope
market research will tell you -- and slip in as much spam as you can between the
"content" segments. The spam then cooks up into a tasty profit
sandwich.
Traditionally, this approach has produced a lot of money. And little else. It
has produced the kind of television programming where everything is nearly
indistinguishable from everything else -- where the women are always beautiful,
the men are always tough, neither are any too bright and everybody wants to be a
millionaire. Market research says that's what we want. So we get it by the
bucketful, ad nauseam.
...
But we do have a choice: the Internet. Rather than explode with anger and
frustration, a flood tide of humanity has immigrated to this temporary
autonomous zone. The net is like a vast global city packed with displaced
persons, refugees fleeing the insanity of mass media.
...
As the music industry learned from Napster -- just a few days late and a couple
billion dollars short -- you can change the rules.
Mass media works top-down. Like Aztec temples, they concentrate power and
ownership atop steep pyramids based on command and control, using broadcast as a
form of human sacrifice. To the teeming millions massing from the bottom up on
the net today, this is not just an overburdened metaphor. Having been treated
their entire lives only as eyeballs, as fodder for this impersonal, inhuman
media mill, they have no allegiance to the gods of broadcast and their unholy
rituals of content licensing and windfall profit. If you change the rules, you
can change the world. And the only real question has become: why not?
But as predicted, this revolution is not being televised. Business depends for
its intelligence on broadcast news and market research, both of which tell it
what it wants to hear. Business has its ear to the wrong ground. Happily touting
the wonders of e-commerce, it is tuned to a dead channel, deaf to the voices of
the dispossessed.
At first, the world at large ignored the net, missed its significance, scoffed,
then jumped in with both feet, thinking it was a bandwagon, asked the wrong
questions about how to make money with it, got too excited when it seemed to be
something it wasn't, too depressed when it turned out to be what it is: mirrored
fractal nets within nets, the collective intelligence of the human race
unfolding in real time -- and for the first time, on its own terms. The Internet
routes around obstacles; the bigger the obstacle, the more joyous the detour.
The humorless power of the state, the iron-fisted control demanded by the
corporation, the sexless desire insinuated by broadcast advertising -- all are
falling to networked imagination.[3]
And so far, we've just been playing. The flap over Napster is merely the toy of
public opinion wound up and released -- a plastic duck quacking its way through
the mainstream media. It's right! It's wrong! The millennium has come! The end
is nigh! But who cares? Most of this "debate" is looking backward,
trying to salvage constructs that no longer matter. Whose property is intellect?
Whose right the right to copy what has gone before? Human culture has always
been the work of thieves, beginning with Prometheus. Kill Napster today, get the
fire next time.
...
"Today I want to talk about piracy and music," said Courtney Love to
the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference in May 2000. "What is
piracy?" she asked, then answered her own question. "Piracy is the act
of stealing an artist's work without any intention of paying for it. I'm not
talking about Napster-type software. I'm talking about major label recording
contracts."
...
Huge media empires with dreams of top-down mass market control are living in a
past that's no longer relevant. No more can broadcast advertising shape the
tastes and desires of some undifferentiated mass of humanity. In contrast to
mass media, the net has liberated audiences and markets to seek out what they
are interested in.
...
Here's what's wrong with approaches based on this model: all they care about is
making money for investors. And here's where many business readers will pull a
full-body Keanu Reeves: "Whoa!" Because isn't that what business is
all about? Yeah sure. But business is not what the Internet is all about. Never
was, never will be. Mass media were created to serve the marketing requirements
of corporations. The net had no such provenance. Companies that assume the net
is there so they can sell more tend to forget why so many people are there:
because business is not -- at least not in the same intrusive and unavoidable
way business is there on television.
...
mass media provided a perfect cure for this inattention: advertising.
Advertising was an effective way to "remind" people of how much they
really wanted -- how much they needed -- that new car or insurance policy or
washday miracle. Companies talk about branding products, but what mass marketing
is really about is branding people -- stamping product impressions onto as many
forebrains as possible as many times a day as possible. The product is boring?
No problem. Get a bigger hammer to drive the message home. This process is what
most media mediate. Commercial sponsors are their lifeblood and reason for
existing.
Not so with the net. It's possible to spend days and weeks online without ever
seeing an ad -- if you don't count the email spam (delete, delete). Many sites
have no sponsors, yet are drawing an audience. How do they make money? They
don't.
...
Without making a profit for investors... why business wouldn't be... business!
Well, one thing's for sure. It wouldn't be business as usual.
...
Gonzo marketing provides a model whereby companies can stop manipulating people
as if they were abstract demographic data, and instead create genuine
relationships with emergent online communities of interest: powerful new web
micromarkets. The paradox is that companies can have everything they've always
wanted. Greater market share. Customer loyalty. Brand equity. All those empty
phrases that today make people blow coffee out their noses. But companies can
actually achieve these goals. No, really. All they have to do is follow the
advice my Junior High principal once shared with me. "Son," he said,
shaking with anger, "you've got to get your thinking straight!"
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