If you’re doing the other stuff right your people
should have some pretty interesting jobs. I bet they’ve got interesting
stuff to say. Do they blog? We do. Do they comment in chatrooms? We do.
Let them join the conversation, it should
be part of their job.
The entertainment industry is an aspirational
business. I don’t know how many applicants you get for even the most
minor role but I’ll bet the glamour of either the music of movie
industries pull in a bunch more candidates than the equivalent
roles in engineering or finance.
Journalism and writing are also aspirational jobs.
Pretty much any industry where you’re paid to express yourself (or
facilitate that expression) is going to be an attractive one to a lot of
people.
Which is why seeing articles like this one is a bit depressing: Sky News clamps down on Twitter use
Basically, in implementing this ruling, each of
their individual twitter feeds became less valuable. In fact, you might
as well cancel the individual feeds and just link to the website.
If we go back to our old techdirt equation of
Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$$, this appears to be a clear case
where the institutional instruction is reducing both of those factors;
by restricting people to only tweeting about their
field it makes it harder to make a connection with readers (fans) and
by forcing everything through the central news desk it slows down the
transmission of information and potentially reduces the value of their
feed (reason to buy).
In a market where the legacy players are fighting
to preserve both their reputations and their relevance the expertise of
their staff remains one of their most powerful weapons. Restricting
access to that expertise (or vice versa) undermines
the business.
The entertainment industries in particular are
suffering something of a crisis of perception as much as anything,
contempt for the inherent imbalance in current copyright law, and the
continued head-in-the-sand behaviour of the lobbying
groups has meant that “the industry” is widely seen as “the bad guy”.
Actually engaging with those disenfranchised fans (rather than suing
them) is going to be necessary to rebuild the industries’ reputations*
and the people on the ground are the ones to do
this – not the CEOs or heads of the lobbying groups. Why? Because of
Stephenson’s sixth law**:
I’ve recently discovered a blog run by a bunch of creators*** (mostly musicians) who appear to be trying to do something
around that connecting with fans and, judging by some of the comments,
they appear to be having some degree of success
in terms of persuading people. Unfortunately they also appear to be
trying to approach the whole debate from a moral standpoint (ignoring
the underlying economics is rarely a good idea) and also by thinking of
things in terms of a zero-sum game – they seem
to be trying to attack pretty much every web-based service as
not-paying-as-well-as-the-old-
Additionally some of their writers have a tendency
to embark on aggressive, expletive-fuelled rants about the people
they’re trying to win over, which doesn’t seem a particularly good
strategy.
But anyway, it’s a good example of trying to free
up your people and helping them connect with their current &
potential future fans – and they’re getting a lot of hits on their
articles.
So whilst I may disagree with a lot of what they
say, it’s a prime example of getting your message across without falling
foul of the sixth law.
* Assuming that the industries update the rest of their business models as well. White-wash won’t work.
** This, of course, has absolutely no data to support it at all.
*** I’m told that there’s a rumour (could I be less
specific?) that this site is in fact supported entirely by a major
music label and is what is known as an “Astro-turfing” site, but I have
seen no evidence on this and it’s largely irrelevant
for the purposes of this instalment.
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