Saturday, May 12, 2012
Gender in a 3-D Virtual World
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| A man and a woman (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
(This Research Paper was confined to the readings assigned by the Professor. A broader literary review is required, and the references though succinct are not in any way extensive)
The Freedom of Gender in a 3-D Virtual World.
From early in our lives gender gets constructed (Lorber p.105 1993), we see in children’s stores sections of blue clothes for boys and pink clothes for girls. We see how the mass media creates images and portrays men and women in stereotypical roles of gender (Kilbourne p.142 1999). We are flooded by socialization cues from our earliest ages( Mackler p.80 2001). Yet creating gender is not passive process as examined in this quote by West and Zimmerman:
It is a situated doing, carried out in the virtual or real presence of others... Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social situations; as both an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society. (West p.14 1991)
Is it possible to break free of the social construction of gender? Some may try to escape the social constructions of gender through the act of changing or becoming another gender. Yet, up to now the difficulty of changing gender was accomplished either through hours of makeup, changing of entire wardrobe, or even changing of sexual characteristics through surgery. Now with the advancement of computer and software technology, can changing gender really be accomplished virtually with the click of a mouse?
This paper will examine how by entering a 3-D immersive online world one can attempt to accomplish gender. The world the author has chosen is Second Life. An online world community created not by a single team of software engineers and designers, but by the users of the community itself. The free software enables every user to create not only their own home, furniture, and clothing, but also define their virtual body and gender. This paper will first look at the software design features, then the user communication interactions, and finally the community dynamics to analyze if the user can accomplish and identify themselves as their own unique virtual gender free of social situations and cues of the real world.
It is important to note that this paper will examine the full expression of gender as realized by the interactive online world. The software does not allow personal identity to be revealed through any means other than the voluntary permission of the person who is behind each online persona or avatar. We will also focus on not only the production of the avatars gender, but also how users try and sometimes fail to conceal their actual gender from what they have produced inside this virtual world. Though the author did not expand on the very small minority of non-gendered animal avatars, their numbers are very insignificant. They are extremely rare and hard to find in the vast majority of places. Thus, they play no major role in this online 3-D community paper.
The Second Life software does not allow anyone to die, to kill, to hit, to wound, to move, to hold, or to otherwise control another avatar without the express permission of that user through additional software downloads. So whereas in other worlds you can be a human warrior and be turned into a newt by an evil wizard, in Second Life all avatars are the pure production of the user. The software’s unique ability to control the avatars complete persona gives the user the ultimate control over their virtual gender identity. Thus it should enable the answering of the question “Am I a man or a woman or what?”(Bornstein p.24 1998).
This along with the ability to chat via text, via voice, move or fly the avatar around in 3-D space gives the user even more amazing freedoms. So the options to express ones individuality is limited only to the imagination of the user. The software has two main design features. The first is to create and model 3-D objects into clothing, furniture, buildings, or even pets. The second major design feature is the ability to modify your avatar. Second Life has some of the most sophisticated controls to modify every aspect of your avatar. And it is because of these fine detailed features that users could so masterfully define gender.
When signing on and registering the software you must choose a sex. You get only two choices of sex assignment, male or female. At this stage, sex assigns gender into characteristics specific to that sex without variation (Garfinkel 1967). Then you must choose some default gendered characteristics that support your gender. For example, you could choose to be a black male or a blonde blue eyed female.
These defaults are not important, because once you log in online your software interface allows you to change your sex immediately. The software enables you to change your sexual characteristics in numerous ways.
First you can click the button for male or for female. If you are changing your sex, the software makes specific automatic changes to your body type following the “Natural Attitude” on sex and gender as defined by Garfinkel. So if you had chosen a default pony-tailed skirt wearing female, the clicking of male would not change your outfit or haircut. But your shoulders would become more broad. Your hips would become more slender. And your face might become more square jawed and angular. Again this is just one way to express your gender. This is how Second Life allows immediate and automatic gender identification through the manipulation of specific body regions to suggest sexual identity. Yet it is not the only way.
The user can also define their physical sexual characteristics through individually going from body region to body region making minute adjustments. The software breaks the body up into section parts; the overall body weight, the head, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, the chin, the torso, and the legs.
Thus by giving freedom and empowerment to define body parts, each section enables the user to make choices to define how the avatar will appear or enable us to “Shape our own futures” (Erlbaum p.9 2000). But each choice comes with a socialized ideal of what that change says about our gender.
For example, you can adjust the bridge of the nose and the depth of the brow. By creating a strong brow and wide bridge on a female avatar, you appear to give her a more masculine forehead. Or the user can thicken the arms and legs, which also appear to give the female avatar a more masculine appearance.
There appears to be an infinite mix of masculine and feminine attributes that can alter the gender appearance of the user’s avatar. The same can be said about the skin sections, the hair sections, and clothing as well. Each of these has subsections so you can define size, texture maps or images that give the look of texture, and other details to these features. Yet, the vast majority of avatars stay safely with the two poles of gender. It is rare to see a female with breasts have male facial hair, or any other mix could be expressed in the spectrum of gender (Bornstein).
As mentioned, clothing is another section on the avatars appearance panel. The user has a very small selection of clothing initially. Each avatar regardless of the default previously chosen, has both male and female gendered clothing to choose from in their clothing library folder. The only difference is the clothing that came on them as they initially logged on. Clothing has very powerful gender clues (Cortese p. 60 1999) but are more part of the community dynamic and the communication interactions than personal software design. But of course giving your physically masculine avatar a dress will blur the gender lines which few if any do. But this begs the question what is under the dress?
It turns out that each avatar despite having to be initially chosen male or female has no genitalia. The actual sexual organs such as a penis or a vagina are not included. But even in the sexual organs, we see the societal need to be mutually exclusive sexually (Newman p.127 1997). For example if you were to shop for genitalia, there are no hermaphrodite sexual organs anywhere to be found. Yet, because of community standards and the ability to report any behavior to the “authorities”, it is extremely rare for avatars to run around naked to so as to identify their genitalia. And when avatars are naked they are not always with genitalia. Thus, though having a penis or vagina in the real world is important to assignment( Lorber) to defining your gender, in Second Life it is an after thought to gender.
The role of communication interaction plays a critical role in the accomplishment of gender. The software allows for three primary ways for users to express themselves. One is via the image and physical behaviors of the avatar. Second is the ability to communicate via text chat. And third, the users can opt to speak with their real voice via Voice Over Internet Protocol or VOIP. Each has different implications for how gender is expressed or concealed.
Not only can body type and dress indicate gender as previously described, so can the avatars behavior.
The user has two ways to communicate behavior, canned movement and acquired movement. Some canned behaviors like bowing don’t appear to have a gender preference. Whereas blowing a kiss, makes even the most macho of virtual Hells Angels look more feminine. The software has a set of these canned body movements that using a simple command will make the avatar move. But the system also allows for acquired behavior. The most gender indicative behavior is the “Sexy Walk” which must be purchased.
Although many stores or malls sell a few “Sexy Walks” for men, many more sell a variety of sexy walks for women . The female Sexy Walk can easily be identified by the wide swinging of hips and the swaying of the head to move the hair from side to side. Sexy Walks also include sexy standing where one hip shifts up, and the avatar fiddles with nails, hair, or in some cases pouts and puts hand on their hips. This obviously supports Una Stannard’s contention that “stereotypes die hard”. Though men have “Sexy Walks” too, this author could not see any difference in the way the avatar behaved other than the folding of arms when resting. Thus the user can use or purchase gendered behaviors to enhance the gender they wish to accomplish though the manifestation of which is classically stereotyped.
Chat can also be an expression of gender. But as it is a direct window to the user behind the avatar, much care must be taken to conceal gender within chat. Most identified male avatars that said they were real male humans, felt chat was the best way to identify real females. Many suggested that being sexually aggressive was a good test. Not that men as women avatars would show aversion to sexual advances, but rather they wouldn’t. Meaning typical real females would be trying to slow the sexual advancement of real men, whereas men as female avatars would be just as aggressive. The author found this to be true. In the authors’ experience, many men became women to gain access to female only areas. Thus their chat would expose them as men, in that they are naturally sexually aggressive / controlling (Angier p.275, 2000) or sexually willing to engage in sexual chat.
Also their style of chatting or communication was indicative of gender Women tend to be more descriptive and interpretative in communication cues ( Schwartz p.169 1996). They would and could discuss clothing and styles among each other in great details. And would prefer men to do the same in courting them. For example, many men might initially make comments on the sexual beauty of the desired female they were pursuing despite having a female avatar. The author observed that women never did this. Women, who were attracted to other women, discussed intimate(Schwartz) details about life and feelings about being in Second Life. Men even as female avatars were impatient and many were unable to achieve the timid pace of uncovering the feelings of the other avatar. Thus by being aggressive, uncreative, and not detail oriented, men gave away their gender via chat.
Finally, it is important to note VOIP. This is the great equalizer. No man or women can as of yet use a voice synthesizer to mask the very real sound of male or female voices and sound real. The author specifically used VOIP, to verify sex of the user in many examples. If VOIP was denied, then it was assumed in most cases that the user’s gender did not match that of their avatar.
It is critical to note that choices in body type can also reveal the user’s sexuality similar in some respect as chat can. It is the experience of the author that women generally speaking did not create perfect female avatars. Despite the softwares default in creating a normal ratio of hip, waist and breast, females created avatars that more mirrored real bodies. Clear signs were larger thighs, or butt, or the changing of the nose to better match the look of the actual user. This was decidedly a break from the social forces which pervade our society(Kilbourne). Though this was not always the case, it was true in the majority of women the author could identify via photo and voice verification. Men posing as women tended to create idealized female avatars, with oversized breasts , hips and butt. In some cases they appeared almost to be cartoon like in dimensions.
The community dynamics of Second Life play an important role in how gender is produced in the virtual world. First Second Life is unlike most typical online 3-D adventure worlds. World of Warcraft have specific rules that enforce specific gender or sexual characteristic boundaries. WoW have rules that men are stronger than women, thus they can kill faster. Second Life you can not kill anyone or make anyone do anything they don’t want to. The author once angered an dark elf clan trying to play a role game inside Second Life. I would not move from having my picnic inside their ritual cave. This has very important gender ramifications.
Female avatars are absolute physical equals to the male avatars. Thus men have no strength advantage over women. This creates a very unique community dynamic. Female avatars still have and can control access to sex, but they have no fear of threat of retribution from withholding sex from males (White et al p.205 1996) . This creates a power vacuum that women have yet to fill. Despite the fact that the vast majority of all jobs are for female sex workers, strippers, dancers, and hostesses, female avatars have not taken advantage. If when entering Second Life you wish to make money, women have the majority of jobs that pay Linden dollars a currency that can be exchanged for real dollars. This should enable women to control most of the businesses of Second Life. If wave after wave of females gain all jobs that pay, and men don’t, one might assume women could take that money and build businesses and buy virtual land.
Yet that is not the case. Though according to conversations with Linden Labs Marketing associate V. Reitveld, expressed that the distribution of male to female businesses was about even, with slightly more men. So despite the job inequity that favors women as hostesses of clubs and dancers they could not overcome the inequity outside Second Life. Yet despite the appearance of this in-world advantage, along with being dancers, programmers also make money. As anything that needs a behavior must also require code. From the authors experience as a software executive in the real world, male programmers far out number the female programmers. But this is only one aspect of the power vacuum.
Women did not understand the full extent of their power in Second Life. Considering that the service only handles about 20 thousand users at a time. All space is virtual and infinite on Second Life. Second Life sells land for users to build on it, this is one way they make money along with money transactions. Thus users are very spread out. This is a critical point. Getting persons to a location to generate any business is the majority of work in Second Life, the rule if you build they will come is just not true there. So hostesses, dancers are critical to make a business place rank high in the systems search popularity.
Whereas Google ranks links to and click to a site. Second Life ranks the number of avatars visiting a site for popularity. If you can get avatars to your business it grows exponentially, so hostesses and dancers help passively attract other avatars and that attraction both in popularity and sexuality is the real power in Second Life community.
Yet out of the dozens of women I spoke to none realized they had power over men. So I did an experiment as a female avatar to test this power vacuum. I went to a crowded beach and began to flirt with dozens of men. Once I had at least 10-12 interested in me, I asked them to follow me into the dance club. An empty club was filled in minutes. I shared this with numerous women friends I knew from
Second Life and had friendships outside as well, and they were astonished. This same experiment was tried as a male avatar in male gay areas and failed. Gay male areas are unusually rare. And after several attempts the author was unable to understand why gay males did not respond while straight men did to female avatars.
The result was that women had viewed Second Life opposite sex interactions as defensive and cautionary. They did not understand or take advantage of the equality of strength or the power of their sexuality. They did so as they had been conditioned in real life to deal with men and the consequences of powerful sexual women in the real world. Of course in real life men are in positions of power and generally have the advantage in physical strength. They had never realized they could take control by using their gender as a powerful magnet. Instead, they and their female avatar friends continued to take subservient roles as hostesses and strippers. So despite, the equality of rules inside Second Life’s virtual world, real world gender roles expressed itself in the community dynamics emerged from the real world users perspective.
The Self , as that which can be an object of itself, is essentially a social structure, and it arises in social experience... George Herbert Mead - Mind Self and Society
So we can see that despite the efforts of Linden Labs to create a world where you can create your own persona and define your own gender with the push of a button, some social forces were still too powerful to overcome. We saw how community dynamics, communication interactions, and the software its self enabled a wide spectrum of choices. Yet, this is a world that was created from the minds of its users to be anything they wanted it to be. And, they could define gender as a wide and vast spectrum. Yet, this did not occur. Gender roles or categories were not challenged. Thus we could not answer what John Boswell calls “the problem of the universals”. Do we create named roles or do roles emerge from nature and we simply categorize them. Despite all the options in accomplishing one own gender via communication, community dynamics, and design of persona the majority of users could not break free of the crushing force of societies gender construction.
Works Cited:
Angier, N. (2000). Woman: An Intimate Geography. ch. 15, pp. 263-284 “Spiking the Punch” In Defense of Female Aggression Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company
Bornstein, Kate (1994) Gender Outlaw, Naming all the Parts. Random House Inc
Boswell, John (1993) . “Sexual Categories [Realor Social Constructions>”], excerpted from “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,”from Lesbians, Gay Men , and the Law, William B.
Rubenstein, ed. New York The New Press. Preprinted pp.33-37 in Readings for Sociology (third Edition) 2000) Garth Massey , ed. New York W.W. Norton
Cortese, Anthony (1999). Provocateur: Images of Women and Minorites in Advertising, ch3. pp. 45-76, Constructed bodies, Deconstructing Ads Sexism in Advertising.” Lanham , Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Erlbaum, Janice “La GirlBomb” (Winter 2000). Bust Magazine, no. 16, p.9 “Brain Implant, Anyone?”
Farrell, pp.13-37, “Doing Gender.” Newbury Park, Sage Publications
Garfinkel, Harold (1967). “The ‘Natural Attitude’ about Gender.” From Studies in Ethnomethodology, Polity Press.
Huston, Michelle and Pepper Schwartz, in Wood, Julia T.(1996). Gendered Relationships, Chapter 12, pp. 197-210. “Gendered Violence in Intimate Relationships.” Mountain View California , Mayfield Publishing Company.
Kilbourne, Jean (1999) Deadly Persuasion, ch 6. pp.128-154, The More You Subtract, the More You Add.”New York, The Free Press
Lorber, Judith (1993) Paradozes of Gender, pp.3-15 and 17-27, “Night to His Day.” Yale University Press. No. 111, pp. 99-112 in Mapping the Social Landscape: Readings in Sociology(1999), Susan J.
Ferguson, ed. Mountain View, CA Mayfield Publishing Company
Mackler, Carolyn (April/May 2001). Ms. pp. 80-85, “Honey, Disney Shrunk the Kids.”
Newman, David M. (1997). “the Socialization of Gender”. pp. 127-139, from Chapter 5, “Building Identity the Social Construction of Self,” in Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life. Thousand Oaks, California Pin Forge Press
Stannard, Una. “Stereotypes Uber Alles,” ;;/80-83 in In Stitches.
West, Candace and Don Zimmerman (1991). The Social Construction of Gender, eds. Lorber and Farrell, pp. 13-37, “Doing Gender.” Newbury Park, Sage Publications.
White, Jacquelyn and Barrie Bondurant, in Wood, Julia T. (1996). Gendered Relationships, Chapter 12, pp. 197-210. “Gendered Violence in Intimate Relationships.” Mountain View California , Mayfield Publishing Company.
Monday, March 26, 2012
The Social Loafers
How to engage a community? As you grow your community you may find that it has lots of members but not a lot of activity. The term being bounced around in social science is called “Social Loafing” and it means that people online are using their anonymity to shy away from doing any activity at all.
In doing research for our communities, we took a look at the latest academic papers about “Social Loafing” and by doing what academics call a Literary Review, we found that what we know as consultants is true.
One of the most interesting findings of one of the studies about forum communities was that while infrequent posters were similar to posters with regard to trust in benevolence/integrity, lurkers were very different from both groups.
Thus there may be a trust barrier to overcome with regard to this specific dimension of trust that is essential before a user will begin to post in the community.
Here we introduce what Kenwyn K. Smith and David N. Berg call the Paradox of Disclosure, from their book Paradoxes of Group Life. The idea being that if you the community face / leader(s) are not willing to disclose who and why they lead a community, they probably shouldn’t expect others to on their own.
So if no one knows who you are, that makes trusting an online stranger almost insurmountable. Activity on the site may continue, but the lurkers are only there because they “Trust” that there is activity, just not sure of who, what, and where these activities are.
An image of a boy watching a public park basketball game comes to mind. The boy watches, but does not engage. Whereas if the boy comes every week and watches, a familiarity may either encourage the players to ask if he wants to play, or he may ask himself. But in a virtual community were presence is anonymous this is impossible.
The Social Loafer has a higher perceived risk of interaction, which is formulated by the spatial and temporal separation among the members of online communities. This separation forms an information asymmetry, which gives rise to the members’ perceived risk.
Information Asymmetry is the inability of one individual to see that any other individuals have the same amount of information about each other. In the offline world, if two strangers walk into a room, if both are new to the room and each other, their information is symmetrical. A new member to a group may perceive risk as they do not know who anyone is, what social ties these individual have, their norms, values, and expectations.
Therefore, a different tack must be taken. Each social community software platform has different options.
In this article we will use Meetup dot com.
Here are some of the tools we use to create more participants in our communities on Meetup:
First decrease Information Asymmetry.
- Post pictures of past events and future locations of events
- Speak into a camera and explain who you are and why a member should participate
- Post Maps and Directions to next event
- Post a list of things needed for event / meeting
- Post expectations of Meeting activity
Tip the Balance of Paradox of Disclosure.
- Post pictures of who the Leader(s) are are in multiple settings appropriate to the community
- Describe your Leader(s) expertise in leading the community
- Provide links to information and other groups you participate outside the particular community that support your passion for the community
- Be available online via email or forum
Decrease Spatial and Temporal separation.
- Create online Chat event for new Members to ask questions and chat with members
- Create smaller meetings of just “New Members” or create safe space for them prior to an event
- Create Teleconference via Skype or Phone
Target & Moderate Activity:
- Send emails to non-active members
- Create Narrative for non-active members
Finally, there will be new options in the future. Recent developments with Facebook and its Social Graph API, show that there will be opportunities to create a longer tail to our social memories.
The consultants will discuss the implications more in a future post. But we include it here because Facebook is another tool to convert lurkers.
Prior to Facebook, our social memory consisted of our cognitive abilities, our little black book, and maybe a photo album or shoebox..
But as Facebook increases its reach. Using it to share your Values and Norms as supported by your Facebook “Likes” becomes increasingly easier to do. By sharing this information via a link to your leader(s) social community profile, you provide a “longer tail” to the social memory of your community.
This provides an opportunity for members with higher perceived levels of risk of engagement another way to learn what your values and activities are. So if I have a Coffee Party Meetup, having my profile linked to Huffington Post, is an opportunity to extend the long tail of my social memory to other platforms..
The implications of using various platforms to extend the long tail of social memories is enormous, suffice to say here, use other platforms, like Twitter or Facebook to create one.
References:
Mitigation of Social Loafing
Computers in Human Behavior
Volume 26, Issue 4, July 2010, Pages 768-777
Emerging and Scripted Roles in Computer-supported Collaborative Learning
Psychological Barriers: Lurker and Poster Motivation and Behavior in Online Communities," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 18, Article 16.
Paradoxes of Group Life; Understanding Conflict, Paralysis, and Movement in Group Dynamics Wiley Press Smith / Berg
Social Media Scape
There are a lot of lies out there. First you can rarely bump into someone who has a really big firehouse no matter what they say they have and second once you turn on their hose, you need to boil the ocean to the point it will probably stink up any assumptions you had about the space you are looking at.
What they don’t tell you in Industrial Social Media College is what you find when you begin to boil the ocean. What really happens if you look at 90-120 days of Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Blogs, Forums, and more blogs streams of data?.. The amount of data is amazing. So what do you find?
Well, that depends on what you are looking for. Say you are looking for a competitor. Say you have a software suite that offers many different solutions to various use cases. Where do you start? Do you use your industry terminology? Nobody says on Twitter “Do you know of a great Media Management Solution?” Or “BTW , just tried a great Transcoder Video Solution”.
For the most part, what you find is what we find in our ocean, garbage. Sssshhh! Don’t tell the social guru sipping a cocktail next to you about how you have to engage in conversations... If a guru tells you that, or tells how to create “Viral” content, then I suggest you stick his or her nose against the screen of a Radian6 query for 30 days and tell him to go at it...
You can try to find that set of organic conversations but you will sadly be disappointed. It turns out that affiliate bots, marketers, and wanna be social capital entrepreneurs have spammed the space...
A word to the wise.
So when you use a tool like Radian 6 or Meltwater Buzz, or Sysmos or Jive. You need to brush up on your Boolean Logic. Because that’s how your going to query the social data sea or Boil that Ocean. So if your company is say Issac Bernbaum Management, your going to need to set up a NOT statement for “IBM” or at least for NOT Computers” and a range of other statements to clear out the detritus. And there is a lot of detritus...
Luckily I aced Symbolic Logic in College.
Next, to create these filters of phrases you want to find go into Google Adwords, go to the keyword tool. And start thinking like a customer not mid-level tech management geek. Look for phrases that reach at least 100K Nationally or Globally. If the phrase is less than that it will probably not show up in the Social Media Query.
So you have scrubbed the phrases as best you can. You have knocked out every piece of crap you can. Then what? Did you scrub out competitors? Did you scrub out affiliates for competitors? Did you scrub out patterns for associated verticals? Say you are looking for scrapbookers but knocked out photobookers because mixbooks ran a Groupon for Photobooks? Even if you don’t then what? The truth is you put garbage in and you get garbage out. And there is a lot of garbage going into the social verse. So let’s say you take a middle approach looking for an average guy or average gal?
But here you must hold back your analysis too. You see, average joe and average josephine are not what you find in the social verse. I am not going to bore you with statistics, but UGC is not a conservative or pragmatist function. Its for the early adopters or first movers or tech enthusiasts.
Please don’t hand me Mommy Bloggers, I list those under “Affiliate Sites”. That means they have insignificant followers, and over produce content that is either a re-post of a deal or have their own real - world social network supporting their blogging efforts. I know, I look at dozens of blogger sites daily, and well, they don’t have a lot of readers.. Some do, and they actually generate good distinct vertical content. But they are so rare it is ridiculous.
So what you find is not what you want. What you find is what you get. And that is not academically actionable data. At least my professors would find the sentimentality, number of mentions, and other data stats supplied from your Sysmos, Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz totally un-usable.
Now the Social Media Guru’s who are selling Mom and Pop’s the Social Media Bubble Gum, talk about hugging the user, developing relationships with each follower. While none of that is bad advice for a very small company that can afford to pay a social media guy a wage. As a consultant, if you were a brick and mortar company and you had even 35K a year to spend. I would not spend it on a social media guy or gal.
I would suggest spending that on a good small PR agency. Yes, walk away from social media if you are not national. If you are regional, but have many storefronts then again, get your marketing gal or guy on a few things “Social” but really, don’t waste your time. Branding via LBS or Facebook ads really are not cheap. And doing them at small numbers are ineffective.
Spending 35K on Facebook ads is a waste as well, when I can get you 35K new emails for that price via voluntary double opt-in programs.. But more data and tools for next time.. For now as I ramble sarcastically along. Suffice to say this:
As with any free-scale network, 90% of the nodes are not connected to much. There is a lot of salesmen, and very few buyers. Most of what we see in boiling the ocean is absolute crap. So if you were to follow most of the suggestions of those Social Media Books.. Take a Seth Godin book and burn it. Because once you boil the ocean you can’t hug every starfish to develop a relationship.
It all comes back to the new dirty word in Social Media.... Complexity. Because if you want to understand complex human systems, and that is what social media is, you better understand complexity, and you better understand the science of how complex systems work. And you best understand systems, so you can model and figure out how they might behave before you begin another promotions or game-ification of your community...
Brand Salience
Recently I had a discussion with a CTO of some very popular video portals. The question he raised for my feedback was whether to develop a “Horizontal Approach” or a “Vertical Approach” to a Social Media Product Development.
He had been having some meetings with Facebook management. He posed this question:
He had been having some meetings with Facebook management. He posed this question:
What do you think Facebook wants? Do they want you to build brand pages on Facebook and bring traffic to Facebook? Or, build your own site and bring Facebook users to your own branded site?
To his and my unconsidered surprise was that FB management wants you to bring Facebook users to your branded site... Thus Facebook is not trying to build vertically, its trying to build horizontally. Makes sense once you use Facebook Connect as a social login, right?
Okay, so that is Horizontal Branding. Providing a layer across products or services that work without sacrificing the brand equity of the horizontal or the platform. In fact the horizontal should enhance it in a kind of symbiotic brand equity exchange. This works in various schematics and environments, take Sirius, or Tivo, or Dropbox... Sirius is offered in several different rental car services. Facebook Connect is another example of this, but its insidious nature was not something I was able to comment on in this brief encounter with this CTO. The antithesis of this is of course “White Labeling.”
Before we investigate Reed’s laws here (which I will return to), let’s take the third word “Salience”. Here is where things get really interesting. Salience is the implicit impact of bounded rationality on behavioral actions, in that as we raise the salience or awareness of a brand, research shows we crowd other brands out. And conversely we enhance brand loyalty with the salient brand. This can be somatic markers or embedded consensus maps depending on the marketing guru you follow.
We also know that many things can and do raise Brand Salience. Last week, I was having a conversation with the VP of Customer Experience of a company that unbeknownst to itself sells “Brand Salience”... Their core offering is a web page application that asks two simple questions and based on the answers given the selected users get one basic request.
- What do you think of this Brand? (On Scale of 1-10)
- What do you think of their specific product? (On Scale of 1-5)
- If they score above 9-10 and 4-5 - They request you to share your thoughts.
That’s it. And it works brilliantly. By identifying the individuals who like the brand and the brand’s products, they take that group and request that they share those positive thoughts... A Simple Brand Salience Function.
But how do you provide Horizontal Brand Salience? The fact is most major brand companies don’t or don’t do it well. Ford does not, Dell does not, neither does Apple. Well, that’s not really true. Apple does provide Windows users with iTunes on Windows. “That glass of ice water”... But that’s it and its very rare for a major platform brand to not build and protect vertically. Of course, Microsoft does provide Office for Mac and some iPhone apps.
And that brings us to the real title... Ubiquitous is the New Black. From web sites to mobile phone platforms, we are confronted by “uneven” networks. Yet we know from Reed’s law that the exponential power to reach new pockets of users is in these subgroups or subnets. And its not always the technology that creates the barrier... Sometimes its content...
Meaning there are pockets of users or technology bounded communities or networks like Blackberry users or iOS users or Chrome users or Symbian users or Apple PC users or Android users or Windows Phone 7 users or Windows 8 Beta Tablet users... Or even combinations such as PC Gamers of WOW. And the list goes on..
And so services that can maintain their “Brand Equity” Horizontally have additional “Brand Cache”.. As their ubiquitousness is part of their attraction. Its everywhere...
Take Dropbox, recently valued at over a billion dollars. Its a frickin slick “FTP client”.. But it works on every conceivable platform from mobile phones to PC operating systems.
So do you put Office on the iOS? Do you put iTunes on Android, seeing the effect from iTunes on Windows? These are and were heated discussions within their respective platforms. But, as all things indicate creating a Horizontal Brand Salience is the gold ring. Which is to say, if you have an iPad tablet and Microsoft Office comes to it, and you are aware of the MS Office Experience working seamlessly between iPad, Mac and say the work Windows PC you have enshrined your product or service within the users set of cognitive brand constructs.. This is a major shift from the days of only building in features for your platform and walling off the platform like an AOL online experience.
But does the platform lose? If I can run MS Office on iPad, why would I buy a Windows 8 Tablet? But if I have a PC does Apple lose if iTunes works on Windows? Observationally no of course...
So what was my answer to the question: Do we build a vertical or horizontal Social Media Product? I suggested a hybrid approach. But as I was limited in time, I had to skip the importance of granularity and abstraction. And more importantly do you lose if you tie yourself to Facebook’s Social Connect... Is this any difference than the trade-off MS will make by placing MS Office on the iPad/iPhone?
And here is where it gets really messy and I will dig deeper in a new post in the future.
But briefly: You use FB Connect you get the aggregate data and maybe more if you are creative. But they have privacy concerns breathing down their neck. Ultimately you don’t want aggregate data of users, you want granular or atomic. That brings you back to thinking you need email as a unique id. Or Twitter id, or extracting an FB id. But ultimately, you need a unique identifier separate from FB/Twitter/Email.
So getting started using FB sounds good at first because of its low friction social spread, but you need abstraction. That means you need to understand that once you begin building granular data around your user ID, you can then abstract the social identity and re-architect the branding from the game logic of the Social Media Product you are delivering.
Thus, visually each product appears separate on each domain, but that is because you are applying game logic that takes both the granular and the organic emergence of subnet/subgroup/product verticals in mind. While still using the horizontal social dynamics across multiple verticals... Example might be a “Point and Shoot Game”. On the kids site you shoot butterflies and on the adult site you shoot ho’s and pimps. The login, the number of inputs and outputs are the same, but the kids game may have some control over not allowing vulgarity in chat and allow only small subgroups to form, while the adult would not. You’re still shooting by tapping a flash button at moving objects in a 3X3 Window, just the visual layer is different...
And yet I understand that this example does not dig deep enough into our discussion on Horizontal Brand Salience (I said it would get messy)... Unless, we return to opening the game API to other game developers or user generated content? Again this is for another post...
Yet in the end, the result is Horizontal Brand Salience that adapts to each community, by individually delivering experiences you want to provide. Where as Dropbox wants to be similar on each platform thus providing a Horizontal Brand Salience, a Social Media Product does in a different way. See how giving Meetup Groups the ability to customize their community works? Their UI is not dramatically different, but UGC will be. And most importantly, the Social Media Product will scale horizontally across the long tail of new bounded communities you have yet uncovered.
The horizontal is that your brand will remain. The code base will remain horizontal. The user database will remain horizontal yet delineated. But the product will be socially, visually and interactively vertical... If you have architected the brand strong enough you will have Angry Birds like ubiquitousness and be seriously in the black...
Post-PC Social Media Era
The coming of the Post-PC era has been long heralded. A little company called Oracle said the PC is dead, and every business desktop would be a slim / dumb / terminal connected to big iron.
Well, as we know that did not happen...
Recently, the new iPad came out and many considered the original iPad the beginning of this Post-PC era. And is some ways it was. But in my humble opinion, really it started with the smartphone. Now whether you want to use the Newton, or Palm, or Blackberry, or WindowCE based devices as starting points you may. Others might say it was the iPhone that truly “Did it”. But I would say those very smart devices that had a powerful CPU, had powerful multi-tasking OS’s, and had 3rd party application communities supporting them were very much the beginning of the Post-PC era.
One could argue though, that each device was tied still to a digital hub or PC. Yes you could make calls, but each smart phone or smart device generally had a PC dashboard to help you update, organize, and sync your content to the device and with your PC. And that ultimately, these were advanced data organizers, reference manuals, and pocket game players.
But this week three things happened... One Adobe released Photoshop Touch for the Tablet (Android & iOS), Apple released a new Tablet, and Instagram is about to be valued at 1/2 billion dollars.
The first two seem related, but what does the third have to do with anything? You can not have the third without the other two. Or rather the technology, infrastructure, the adoption rate, and the ubiquitousness of the other two, the third can not create a value of 500 million dollars.
Instagram is now a 27 million member social network. Their is no web interface. Repeat, if you visit instagram.com there is nothing there but a request to download the iPhone app. Now of course, the pages or pictures you share are posted into an HTML shell. And the links you share outside of the app can be viewed by any web browser, PC or otherwise..
But there is no URL, there is no web based navigation ala the new social media darling “Pinterest”. It is solely an “App driven Social Network”...
The technology today exists on this multi-core low energy ARM processors to do amazing graphics. From Tilt-Shifts, to Missile firing overlays, to complete layering and editing of photos and videos. You simply do not need a PC... The PC’s raison d'être was desktop publishing of graphic intensive media or graphic rich interactivity in gaming. And now the PC’s power to fight off the Net-PC of Oracle will be replaced with the slim touch based, and cloud connected smart device.
But where does that leave Social Media? Well, Facebook is still a PC friendly social layer, though higher and higher percentages of FB users connect solely through smart devices. Twitter? It may have started as a web service, but its platform was solely designed for quick mobile blurts. Youtube? Hmm, let me test out that 4G LTE iPad, with iMovie and I will get back to you... But their embrace of non-flash wrappers was another shot at the PC’s strength.
So, while the Post-PC era started years ago and we are just entering its second act, the Post-PC Social Media era has just started so what are some rising forces to be aware of?
#12 Post-PC Social Media Things to Take Note:
1) The creation of rich social media messages will no longer require a desktop
- Mobile is the Message, small quick, intimate, and instant characteristics will rule
- Social will be more and more GEO, as GPS continues to push social forward
- Social Media Communities will live and die on their API
- Social Media Manager Toolset will have to have Street Team Experience
- Augmented Reality or Ghosting will be mainstream Social as data smog increase
- New Query Tools to analyze Locale vs. National in social media analysis
- Hangouts will become mob-outs as Trending Stats will be mainstream
- Media Communication skills will change how we communicate
- The powerpoint will finally see the end of bullet points ruling the day
- App Markets with include Semantic Rankings
- Smart Device + Television, Shazam to the Rescue
Sure not all of the above “12” will come to fruition. Just to elaborate on some of the few that seem more peculiar or far-out.
“Ghosting” we are already seeing in mobile social networks, businesses or localities that don’t exist. People in Foursquare create “virtual spaces” to call there own. And these “Virtual Spaces” have comments about their activities even though they only exist in Foursquare. So as more people post not just comments, but also photos, videos, and other media artifacts the data smog it leaves will become more and more interesting and more valuable to business...
Hang-outs become mob-outs. We are already seeing this happen with such recent events in Hollywood, where a DJ tweeted for others to “Come on down” to the Chinese Theater.. Using Twitter was rudimentary, the next generation of tools are already being developed to send and amass people to places through mobile networks.
The death of cursive writing skills will only decline until Edwardian Script ITC is lost forever... The skills to create meaningful multi-media messages will only increase. This means that the bullet points on your powerpoint are getting duller every minute. And classes in iPhoneography will increase.
As we continue to move to App Eco Systems, inter-operability and ranking will continue to gain in critical ways. Already we see “Zombie App Armies” trying to tweak rank. But we are only on the cusp, where just as in Google Adwords we pay to own “Local Mexican Restaurant” , the day when App vendors bid on key categories... Yelp app against Urbanspoon app for the same from Siri, is just waiting around the corner... And Social Media has always been tied to SEO, Ranking, and Awareness.
Already we see that the PC died before it could get a hold in the living room. It tried with the Home Media PC, and other iterations. But now you can grab TV, vote TV, and stream back and forth to the TV with devices that do not run windows, have no intel based chips, and do not have keyboards or mice.
In conclusion, the job of the social media director or manager is going to get more dynamic and of course more mobile, no surprise there. Understanding the API’s of each mobile friendly web service will be key... The Facebook post will be less words and more pictures, as most recommend. Social Networks will slowly be more tied to the mobile experience of location and aggregating groups around types of social events and social behaviors that don’t tie you to a desktop... Think more Red Bull type of live events and less just “Like us” click work.
The building of communities that truly marry online with mobile to utilize these new smart devices, will have an edge. Social Networks like instagram will either expand their API to reach more people on more devices as they have promised. Or other players will help you organize, share, and create diminishing any first mover adoption advantage...
Monday, July 5, 2010
Using Bukido in Real Time Social Situations
Target dictates Weapons dictates Movement
Surprise, Speed, Violence
Surprise: Increase Biochemical Stress
Speed: Eliminate time to adjust
Violence: Full Commitment
Improved Outcome Formula
Constant: Who I am in the Moment
Improvement: Small moves
Situation: You are not the situation
ACTE
Assess the Situation
Create Simple Plan
Take Action
Evaluate
Friday, March 26, 2010
In this article, we shall take a look at three strategies to utilize social networks to increase promotion and sales of music including one example of promotion of live music shows. We will investigate and uncover how these new strategies and systems emerged and are regulated.
Today, advanced technologies are harnessing social dynamics to promote cultural products. These social interactions are now being automated, crowd-sourced, and leveraged to play an increasing role in how we find, buy, and consume musical entertainment. We begin by enquiring about how we arrived at this place in time where the old record stores and the over the air broadcast radio stations are taking an ever-decreasing role in providing music to the masses. Finally, we will take a look at three social networks, Meetup.com, Imeem.com, and Gowalla to see how these social platforms are used by the music industry today and what it means to the independent musical artist.
Change in the State of Music distribution
Before we can discuss MeetUp, Imeem, or Gowalla we need to address secondary facilitators with the rise of technology and the use of social networking platforms like FaceBook. These include various exogenous shocks to the music industry, such as changes to the legal landscape, new technology, and new technology entrants.
We begin with the passage of the Telecom Act of 1996. This unleashed the broad use of the Internet, the consolidation of radio/television entities, and broader competition over telecom services.
Prior to the introduction of the Telecom Act, Internet use was primarily the domain of universities and large corporations. The act allowed a “New Era” of connectedness (Bridges 2001) of various broadcast and telecommunication companies to compete. For example, local exchange carriers were empowered to provide data services as well as cable operators, who were also endowed to provide data access to the Internet. A key provision was “Universal Access” which helped companies through subsidies to build out their communication networks.
Yet with the increased competition, also came deregulation cutting back on the ownership restrictions initiated by the Telecom Act of 1934. Whether consolidation of ownership creates less choice in the public is debatable, but its perception of lack of choice is still apparent. Radio Corporations like Clear Channel, control over a 1,000 radio stations, though as Professor Rossman detailed in lecture; the Hotelling theory tells us that monopolies in markets are intrinsically motivated to provide a variety to cover all segments of the market in which they dominate.
Finally, the Telecom Act did not provide regulation of large technology firms. An attempt was made to wrangle in the expanding power of new digital content distributors via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998, this act’s main impact has been to give power to the copyright holder over digital distribution of their work (Myers 2009). In reality, it simply created greater consolidation of web distribution by creating higher licensing fees of music and stricter enforcement of those licensing fees, thus allowing the copyright holders to simply take over the distribution. This occurred because to the streaming content rate hikes which squelched the business of streaming media. CBS’ take over of Yahoo’s Launchcast and Last.Fm are prime examples of this effect(NYTimes 2007).
A technology review affecting music industry of the last 100 years is a paper if not a book itself. Suffice to say, the cost of production has decreased, but the cost of distribution has shrunk even more dramatically. The fact that Moore’s Law, Metcalfe’s law,(Pang 2000) or Cooper’s law(ArrayCom 2010) have remained true simply mean that integrated circuits, networks, and bandwidth have continued to speed up, make less expensive, and expand capacity to provide fast reliable production, distribution, and consumption of digital content.
These technological changes enable new entrants to challenge the older guard of Warner Bros or CBS or NBC which are nearly 100 years old. (Rossman Lecture) (Knopper 2010)Companies like YouTube/Google, Facebook or Apple now play a critical role in how digital content will be distributed or consumed.
Massive changes have occurred to the record industry in terms of technology. Apple computer is now the largest distributor of digital music in the world at nearly 70%(TG Daily 2008). Its iPod device is ubiquitous in terms of music consumption. Despite this apparent monopoly, the use of say the Herfindahl index to measure and reign in Apples’s apparent monopoly is difficult as digital downloads only make up 60% of all music sales in the US(TG Daily 2008).
Interestingly, despite efforts to control online media, the most popular site on the web is not owned by AOL/Time Warner or Fox Interactive but is privately held FaceBook. FaceBook boast over 300 million users(CNN 2009). To give you an idea of that kind of power, due to the changes in cable ownership, expansion of channels via satellite and the web. Fox or CNN boast at best 1-2 share or one to two million viewers for their top rated shows(bythenumbers 2009). Facebook has an audience of 200-300 times that.
Thus the rise of social networks has been the focus of media companies for some time. Fox purchased MySpace for “Users”(BBCNews 2005) as did Warner Bros’ merger with AOL(CNNfn 2000). But eyes are not enough as both have seen their investments flounder with various schemes to synergize those networks. Though the players have changed, their strategies have not, so we will now look at how the players in the music industry have adapted (BusinessWeek 2006).
Same Strategies New Environment
As any industry matures, over the last 100 years the record industry has been part of the media business community struggle to find ways to consolidate its power. Early entrants into broadcasting after deregulation such as Warner Bros, Disney, NBC/Universal, all today have various radio and television divisions which produce their own content and distribute via their own networks. In fact, NBC/Univeral and Fox have their own web distribution site called Hulu.com as well (Hulu.com 2007). Though there are no direct record labels that own any radio stations networks. The pattern to consolidate production of content with distribution of that content has not abated with the introduction of the Internet.
And so, the rise of social networks, like MySpace or Facebook has signaled a dramatic change in the way music would be delivered. It appears that the old media companies have tried to adapt primarily using three standard strategies: “pay for play aka payola”, vertical consolidation of corporate properties, and pursuing synergistic opportunities.
So the first round of music distribution came with attempts to do pay for play. One of the first major entrants in this scheme of old strategy / new environment was Yahoo’s Launchcast. Launchcast which is now owned in part by CBS, initially offered a personalized radio channel based on the users musical tastes. But it soon became apparent that a portion of the songs you listened to did not fit in. The Launchcast Private Policy document (YahooLegal 2010) openly states that it shares your information with affiliates and other entities for marketing and promotion. Note, as the Internet radio provider, it is not held to any FCC standard like regulation. Regardless, CBS can hide the details in limbo within its legal privacy policy text. But note, a new entrant to Internet radio Jango, actually offers labels pay for play upfront without any fear of legal recourse(TechCrunch 2009).
Regardless, the synergistic approach and consolidation is not limited to just old media players like CBS or Fox. Apple has recently purchased social music network Lala.com(WSJ 2009). As the largest digital distributor of music, even Apple needed to extend and combine its musical distribution muscle beyond the confines of its iPod device and iTunes application user interface to reach directly onto the web in any web browser. Thus, Apple is combining synergistically its iPod, iTunes Library, to the entire reach of the web.
So both new and old companies are looking at social networks to extend their reach . Do the same strategies of the past work? And what are these companies doing to utilize these social networks to distribute their products?
Network Externalities, Social Dynamics Prevail for the New Gatekeepers
In the past, due to regulatory restrictions record companies have focused on the surrogate gatekeepers. Those being initially the radio programmers or DJ’s of the station were the primary targets. As the industry moved from a cycle of payola scandals, new regulations created “Indy promoters” or a third party to handle the interchange of record companies needs to pander and radio station needs to increase profits.
But as radio continues to decrease its audience, a new gatekeeper has emerged. This new surrogate takes two forms; the online community organizer and the social network platform itself. As these social networks grow, again record companies are willing to pay to gain access to their audiences.
Let’s look at three recent strategies and their effectiveness in reaching their target.
The Influencer
One approach was to use “Organizers” embedded in social networks to promote the album. Recently, Bruce Springsteen released an album “Working on a Dream”. There are many networks to choose from. The author of this paper has first hand knowledge of this, as the author is a member of Meetup.com. Thus, the author has personal knowledge of this promotion. The label approached Meetup to promote the album. Here is their approach:
They offered $50 dollars to each online organizer of various online groups. For example, my good friend Ken Heyden has a group called “Drinking with Strangers”. It is important to note, it is unknown what the age, sex, or musical preference of this group is as neither the Organizer nor the MeetUp network collect such data. Mr. Heyden has a group of over 3,000 active members. He was given $50 dollars for a banner ad link on his group’s site for 90 days and 4 free CD’s, as were many other organizers with similarly sized groups around the country.
This approach is clearly identical to what record labels do with “Indy Promoters”. The idea being that Mr. Heyden would promote this album to his audience, just as in the same way the “indy” would give the CD’s to various radio station programmers to promote. The author spoke to Ken, and he had no idea what to do with just 4 CD’s of the album. He is not a program director or DJ. Thus other than the link to Bruce Springsteen’s promotion site, this old strategy was apparently ineffective.
Another approach of which this author is personally familiar with was with the promotion of U2’s “No Line on the Horizon” album. In this case, the record label used another social network Imeem, which was recently was purchased by Fox’s MySpace(Billboard 2009) another attempt to synergize the features of the shrinking community social network. In this scenario, “Buzz Agents” or online promoters working for U2 posed as the Imeem members calling themselves “U2” on Imeem.
A few weeks prior to release of their latest album, they apparently searched for persons who had either uploaded U2 songs, tagged U2 as a group they like, or possibly listed groups associated to U2 like the Alarm (another 80’s rock band). They then proceeded to ask to be a “Friended” . “Friending” is an act in which one participant requests to share information of a personal nature with the other. It is doubtful that U2 band members would spend hours or days adding friends. So we must assume this was a promotional team. Then on the day of the release of their album, they utilized their “Friends” by sending them a link to a special Imeem page that included their entire new album of songs. Each song could be listened to in its entirety. And, each song had a link to purchase it via iTunes or Amazon.
We can see by comparing these two, which was more effective. Obviously getting your songs into the ears directly of fans is the most effective use of a social network. Imeem being a music based social network has the data profile that would make best use of targeting consumers of music.
But these are online uses solely, can social networks be used to persuade social action off the Internet? Just as a point of fact of social networks being used directly by promotional arms of major media corporations, this author has been approached by major book publishers and movie studio promotional arms to help market their products. Penguin asked the author’s Generation X Meetup group to attend an 80’s genre book signing and Sony Picture’s used their street promotion team to promote the Gamer Film to the author’s bar group. In each case they used the social network to get people offline to participate or interact with their product. But, newer technologies have extended that reach even farther.
Gowalla a smart phone / GPS based social network has recently begun promoting musical shows via its social network. Recently during the South By Southwest Tech Convention in Austin, they added a Smokey Robinson “Badge”(AustinChron 2010). The concept with GPS or proximity based social networks like Gowalla or Foursquare is to use actual locations and rewards to persuade people to interact with the sponsored product. Gowalla does this by offering badges to persons who complete location based tasks. These badges are stored in their smart phone in the Gowalla phone application. In some cases the badge can be shown as a coupon for that venue as was the case for the Smokey Robinson Show. Recently Warner Bros Valentines Day film used Foursquare to make users travel to all the locations in the movie to gain a “Valentine’s Day” badge(Foursquare 2010), which could be used at participating theaters for a discounted ticket.
So despite the new technologies, the strategies have basically remained the same. Use surrogate gatekeepers for promotion of recording artists. In some cases the surrogate gatekeeper has been the social network platform. And in other cases, the gatekeeper has been an online organizer of communities embedded in that social network platform.
Future Strategies and Directions
These three social network instances are just scratching the surface of how the recording industry and media conglomerates in general are beginning to use social networks. The author foresees three issues gaining greater significance in the coming years. These deal with information cascades, human capital investments, and greater reliance of network externalities.
As there is a continual need to build momentum for recording artists, greater and greater reliance on rank in specific social networks will gain greater importance. Thus the concept of information cascades, or herd effects will be increasingly used. Whether the behind the scenes manipulation of this will create another scandal is not known. But most users assume that “magical algorithms” place an artist at the top of a list by popularity of their talent not random choice or undisclosed sponsorships. As these destinations gain in stature the lists will too.
As the need to find what Malcolm Gladwell calls the “influencer” increases, we are already seeing media networks invest in human capital. From American Idol to Style TV’s Design Star, the use of a manufactured “Tournaments Model” for an artist to reach a level of “Super Stardom” exists today. But in terms of human capital investment we have yet to see it in terms of social networking stars. Today companies are already paying celebrities to co-op their Twitter feeds to inject ads (TechCrunch 2010). The time to create social network influencers is here, it stands to reason that the investment should naturally follow.
Finally, as we become more connected, the importance to be continually connected increases. In the first years of MySpace and Facebook, these networks were closed data silos. But increasingly in the last few years efforts have begun to share data(Wikipedia 2010). This cross-seeding of socially networked information is only going to make network effects ever more powerful. In fact, currently many sites use Facebook updates and twitter feeds in their content. New tools are enabling audio to be aggregated across networks as well.
Conclusion: The Fate of the Independent Musician
Thus even though the major players have changed little, the strategies have changed slightly, the platforms or technologies, and results continue to evolve. As changes in laws changed the landscape of the major media players, little has been done for the independent non-signed artist. They remain stuck in self-subsidy and jousting to miraculously unseat the super star. And despite the decreasing cost of both production and distribution, artists still need to gain access to these social networks where the lists are gamed by conglomerates, ads are controlled by labels, and the resources to hire “buzz agents” to be-friend millions remain in the same hands for the most part as they did over nearly a century ago.
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