Ephemeral Media Workshop, 23-24 June

I was lucky to be invited to a seminar principally for academics about ephemeral media, at University of Nottingham. I’d never heard the term ‘ephemeral media’ before, which in this context was used to describe short-form, fleeting media often overlooked by academia – but which plays a key role in understanding how media is evolving particularly through immersion with social media. This event looked particularly at new forms of online video.

Rather than being full of (my worst fear) incomprehensible academic musings, the event was actually full of useful theoretical ideas and examples of how e-drama and media content is evolving, where it came from, and what it all means.  Here’s a taster of my highlights from two days worth of very informed and interesting papers from the workshops entitled: “Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera“

Barbara Klinger – fan re-enactment

Barbara Klinger (Indiana University) showed many examples of fan re-enactment in relation to fan fiction and film including ‘movieocke’, originating from the ‘Den of Cin’ bar in New York where people get together to re-enact favourite scenes from movies, a ‘re-play’ of movie culture.  This has been professionalised by some, e.g. Charles Ross – One Man Star Wars, where Ross, a professional actor, plays all characters and hums the music and FX in a show which is part parody, part homage, part spectacle.

Chris Strombolis and friends re-enacted the whole of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” over many years, originally bootlegging early screenings in the days before home video.  The film later gained many cult screenings.  Fan re-enactments often have comic and parodying effects through its low-tech bricolage.

Re-enactments often use their original locations e.g. The Blob at Phoenixville, an annual re-enactment as patrons flee the Colonial cinema in the 1950s horror flick, or Lebowskifest , a homage to a recent classic film celebrating the culture of the drop-out and misfit hero.  These couldn’t help to me bringing to mind Stewart Lee’s fantastic parody of Del Boy falling thorugh the bar in Only Fools and Horses translated into a folk fayre legend.  The re-enactment movement is led by men; female re-eanctment is usually associated with female led films (we can also see these trends in role play and gaming more widely).

Klinger views ephemeral media as fragments, fleeting, not treated seriously as academia but it de and re-contextualises media and is fundamental to an understanding of intertextuality which allows works to survive and develop outside of conventional releases.

Hugh Hancock, Strange Company – Machinima

The inimicable Hugh Hancock, one of the world’s leading machinima makers (indeed he even coined the name), who I enjoyed working with recently on the “Education for Leisure” machinima production, delivered his usual high-energy romp through machinima past, present and future.

Whilst the internet is primarily driven in innovation by porn, machinima is another innovation of pushing existing technology forward in new and unexpected ways.  Machinima began with Quake c.1999, the first game to incorporate a sandbox for, with difficulty, playing and editing scenes. It is defined as computer generated animation using existing virtual platforms e.g. console games or virtual worlds.

Theoretically using machinima it is possible to create film works with one person, or certainly a  small production team, which increases the artistic independence of the director. Academic theorist Michael Nietsche recognized two types of machinima:
‘Inside-out’ – fan movies made by gamers, often about the game
‘Outside-In’ – filmmakers use machinima as a new tool for animated drama

Machinima has since fragmented into many different sub-genres specific to different games e.g. Sims 1999 site – all use different editors, voice actors and production studios.  Rufus Cubed’s World of Warcraft inside-out games attract 10M viewers.  These are huge communities with economic power – but they quickly dissipate as the game ages.

In 2006 machinima got noticed by the industry: there was a rush from games producers to hire the best machinima makers.  Many went inside and produced segments for games but didn’t go back to making machinima.  Often their work can only be seen by playing hours of the game up to different levels of game, becoming ephemeral due to the limited audiences who can see it and replay ability reducing viewing access.

Machinima makers face a glass ceiling: they can’t break into traditional media due to big games makers e.g. EA denying permission to produce series and DVDs or negotiate royalty splits, e.g. 2006’s Male Restroom Etiquette by Phil Rice which never made it through to a series despite a commission offered. The big crux: machinima has yet to have a big court case determining rights and usage. Could machinima be covered under ‘fair use’ copyright?  Machinima is not ‘copying’ but photographing characters. But makers need to challenge and negotiation more with the industry. Hugh survives as a machinma maker because he doesn’t have an allergy to talking to lawyers.

Machinima, as a form of immediate animation, can, like other types of social media, be used as a force for community and political change. Stealth Legislation was made within 48 hours to show the effects of EU immiment internet legislation.

Microsoft’s Project Natal is a new Xbox motion capture suite under £500 which could revolutionise machinima, particiularly if it becomes linked to Second Life, plus a £100 facial recognition software could mean avatars represent people in real-time triggered by real-life actions.  This could have big effects for both social and business e.g. virtual conferencing, and also benefit indie film-makers by rapidly creating sophisticated graphics e.g. animated characters mapped onto real people’s movements. Machinima and performance capture are on a colition course to mesh into one media.

Tracy Harwood (De Montfort University)’s  machinima study discussed definitions of co-creation (participation) and co-production (collaboration on the project), describing the medium as about socialism and the social, concerned with collaboration and sharing within the community.

Daniel Ashton (Bath Spa University) believes machinima is in a transition form from amateur to professional, or “cresting the Horizon” (Hugh Hancock, 2007).  Limitations are often to do with the framing of its creators;  Lowood believes players should express their work as content developers rather than players, where hacking mixes technological mastery with subversion.

Quality machinima worth viewing:

‘The Stolen Child’ – a Second Life created film by Lainy Voom (aka Trace Henderson)
Bloodspell – Hugh Hancock’s fantasty machinima feature film
‘The Journey’ – Appears as a 2D animation through post-production effects
Red v Blue “Going Global” – commission of the original and most famous machinima serial for Machinma Europe festival as a  critique of European film genres

Rebekah Willett – camera phone, production and identity

A study of camera phone production – why people do it and what they film, which is an interesting but little studied area. Camera videos are ephemeral in the nature of what’s recorded – yet little is deleted from servers – but its symbolic value is more important than its legibility.  Statistically:

1/3 make personal documentary – e.g. family, friends
¼ make non-personal e.g. weather, landscape
¼ make public performance e.g. recording gigs

Sam Coley – online practices of david bowie fans

Coley, a radio documentary producer, discussed interactivity and fan culture from a producer’s perspective. He produced a documentary about the 25^th anniversary of Bowie’s 1983 concert, New Zealand’s biggest ever gig, which you can listen to here.  It includes a charming original recording of a short song Bowie wrote for his Maori hosts.

Fans communities are reshaping documentary production, offering feedback mechanisms to benefit the producer in pre-production but also give a life to the documentary extending far beyond broadcast. YouTube Insight is a fine-grained analytics tool which allows producers to analyse how users are interacting with the video or audio content and who the audience is.  Audio clip shows, taking advantage of the screen for radio on platforms like digital TV and YouTube, is a new way of re-imaging what radio looks like and placing audio within a multimedia context.

Jon Dovey (University of West of England) – Archeologies, Economies and Ecologies

We’re in the grip of a second dotcom boom: plenty of hype and money thrown at unknown entities. But what is the value of user-generated content: Democratic?  Economic?  Political?

Echoing my own views that social media et al is nothing new: the 1970s Bay Area ‘radical computing’ movement predicted the power of information over land. Today Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Fake and Butterfield (Flickr) and Matt Mulanwey (WordPress) all emphasise the  importance of allowing users to create without technical skills, so creating and accessing media becomes something normal than eventually everyone can do.

The utopia of access for all through the internet is perhaps a Victorian, elitist world view: globally only 17.4% of people can access the web (70% in the developed world). Barabasi looks at the topology of the web, like an aerial view of the rainforest we only see the tops of trees, or a snapshot of all the billions of pieces of information available. Relationships are critical to navigate this forest: comunity management is the starting point of online marketing.

Henry Jenkins believes fan fiction developed into YouTube, though the platform will lose $470M in 2009 – parallel with loss-leading web 1.0 (1999-2001) hype and speculation which leads to the hollow speculative incomes for developer-entrepreneurs.  KateModern, a new form of interactive drama content, only attracted 25M views, 150K per webisode, and that resulted from involuntary pop-ups on users profiles. Bebo sold for £850M and immediately its user-base declined.

Bauwens, a web1.0 entrepreneur who went on to establish the Peer-To-Peer Foundation,proposed three types of P2P networks:

1) Capitalist- e.g. crowd-sourcing around a commercial product
2) Sharing economy – expression, e.g. YouTube
3) Peer production proper – collaboration to create social artifacts, though business may profit (e.g. advertising)

William Merrin – Understanding Me-dia

In the first reformation, the printing press liberating text from purely spreading the word of god.  Today is the second reformation, liberating producers from established publishers and markets. This presents challenges: volume, dispersal, ephemerality (devices, meaning) and access (e.g. network owner control) and needs a new form of analysis – a ‘Media Studies 2.0′: traditional media studies focus on broadcast era, we now need to look at post-broadcast ecologies as a new entity, not just as a continuation of fan culture.

Elizabeth Evans: Kate Modern

Kate Modern, the social media online soap,  is actually anti-ephermal content – 14hrs of content, continually available as a permanent, virtual object. Participation from engagement in the content is only truly possible within a few days of broadcast before the story moves on.

Various interactive exhibition structures were use like marathons (12 films distributed in 12 hours), quizzes (like ‘where is Kate?’) and live events – a live filming which took place on Carnaby St 10am, encouraging audience to participate which leads to deeper engagement and more viral activity.  This was a great analysis, and extends the article I wrote about Kate Modern while it was original broadcast.

Rik Lander – www.u-soap.com

Lander, as a producer of seminal e-drama, offered an interesting practitioner and historic perspective on the form. There are various funding methods for e-drama:

DIY parody
Showreels – to gain professional work
Corporations
Sponsored
Un-funded pure creativity

And many forms of e-drama:

Tv on the web
Linear webby
Interactive
Participatory

It requires many different questions of production like, who is holding the camera? Not a concern of TV but its imperative to internet drama

Lander’s first production was Magic Tree (2001) using text and web (HTML/Flash) as the options available for bandwidth. Viewers were sent a box with chocolate twigs and a magical growing tree, mixing the personal with the consumable. Video is now the currency of e-drama, although potentially e-drama becomes an extension of film and TV rather than a mixed media production.

Lander went on to produce Wannabes for BBC, a teen drama which works on creating friendship ratings and giving advice from characters using video within an interactive database.

Together Alone is a pilot project using actors, crowd-sourced from a talent show format, all over world directly virtually by Skype and montaged together in edit, which gives an endearing inconsistency as settings differ and objects interface from one ’set’ to another.

For e-drama, production viability for acquiring funders is 250,000 viewers, though Bebo et al will claim to sponsors that 20M or more will view it.  Only a fraction of users are likely to be participatory but  they are critical for the development of the production. The web is platform for something ground-breaking and innovative, but not necessarily for producing the highest quality or longevity in film works.

Claire Wardle (Cardiff University)– UGC at the BBC

As part of an AHRC extensive study into user generated content across several BBC departments, Wardle’s study look at its use in news (download the report here).  Its a small minority who submit UGC who are not representative of the whole audience. 90% of contents is thought to originate from 1% of users.

There are many barriers to participation: technological, impetus (why do it?), perception of those who contribute – plus the digital divide. UGC works best with specific calls to action –  say what news gatherers want to know about rather than just asking people to have their say (as this parody website testifies, the results of user’s views can be absurd to the extreme). UGC has the benefits of networked journalism: audiences knows more on subject as ‘lay experts’.

72% of people have never contributed material to a news organisation, though interestingly the most popular contributory media is newspapers (17%), radio (9%), tv (7%) and finally websites (4%).

Moderation of UGC is still valuable: Sky i-News allowed people to upload whatever news they want, assuming the community would extract false news but after eroneous news of Steve Jobs’s death caused shares to drop they realised the need for curating/policing.

Conclusions

Overall this was a fascinating and insightful event, thanks to Paul Grainge from University of Nottingham for organising it and letting me observe it. What was key to me was that online media is far from ephemeral – prolific and difficult to decipher with new rules of symbolism and engagement which defies the usual structures of broadcasting and intrepretation typical of academic media studies.

Networking bonanza: NottTuesday, Nottingham Twestival, TigerSpike and Nottingham Creative Business Awards

This week I’ve been networking more in the physical rather than online world, though with some interesting dalliances in-between where online networks facilitate “third city” interaction in the real world. With three networking events in one week in Nottingham, it really does seem like the digital and creative scene in Nottingham is starting to emerge splenderous from its slumbering cocoon – these are exciting times!

Nott Tuesday 10-02-09

Tuesday saw the inaugural launch of Nott Tuesday, a new network for Nottingham’s high tech professionals which saw a packed room of about 50 IT and digital types (90 percent male) descend on The Cape bar for a structured evening of presentation and networking. I think I tracked this down from looking at new groups my LinkedIn contacts had joined that week.

Enthusiastically established and curated by Adam from Essendex, the speaker was Ewan McLeod from Mobile Industry Review who gave a fascinating talk on how blogging and social network grew his business. From his frustration trying to promote a previous business offering SMS to screen display to New Media Age, the main press of the time, Ewan started a blog on SMS news using the simple and classic blogging technique of signing up to Google Alerts and a £5 month Typepad account, aggregating content in a simple 10-minute-a-day round-up.

Within weeks he was the top ranking site for the search term ‘SMS news’ and soon he had an audience, which with hundreds of thousands of page views rapidly exceeded the 10,000 readership of New Media Age. When he started excerting his extreme opinion on Vodafone (in a hand shaking ‘dare I press publish?’ move) he realised he had an opinion people wanted to here, which echoes my own blogging experiences of gaining more reaction to opinion than reportage. With web 2.0 forms of publishing, you can become the press as easily as you can try and chase the tails of them.

Today, Ewan dam used the example of attracting the attention of the Government’s Minister for Information through using Twitter Search to find tweets relevant to his expertise, and responding in Twitter’s unique 140 character format to the Minister’s “Google, good or evil?’ post. Soon they were in dialogue, in a way unimaginable in either a traditional offline, longer-form (like letters or even email) or more formal style of conversion. Adam responded with knowledge and ideas to the Information Minister’s specific need to information right then.

Ewan’s talk was inspiring and made me realise I should utilise Twitter search more for potential sourcing of clients and like-minded.

The crowd at Nott Tuesday was a nice mix of digital start-ups, academics, games people, IT consultants and more and I feel really inspired by the possibilities of the new networks and events self-initiating within Nottingham at the moment (which makes my job many times easier!)

AMC/ TigerSpike launch 11-02-09

Way down in that extreme weather beacon of London village, I was invited to an event which celebrated something almost heart-warming in the present financial apocalyptic gloom: the launch of a new London office for Sydney and New York based TigerSpike, whose business has grown exponentially at 1000% per year.

TigerSpike specialise in mobile technologies and commamunications, and have coined the term ‘Personal Media’ - their term to describe person-to-person communications which include talking, phone, social media and web – and a perfect way of defining for the mobile comms solution. Their vision is to become a ‘platform as a service’ like the IBM for Personal Media.

Great thinking and technological innovation come through TigerSpike’s internal Innovation Lab model using a process called RIGOUR (Research, Identify, Generate, Opportunistic, Utilisation, Re-invest) which seems like an exciting formal innovation process to bring to a UK digital technology company. Definitely ones to watch.

Thanks to Xavier Adam from the AMC group for organising a splendid lunch and a very interesting collection of the city’s mobile and digital types there too, and no thanks for a terrible picture of me at the lunch!

Twestival Nottingham 12-02-09

Back in Hood town, Nottingham Twestival was a very different affair; Nottingham came to the Twitter table with late notice to set up a Twestival to join the 200+ other global cities in one simultaneous evening event for charity celebrating those brought together through the social medium of Twitter.  The global reports were impressive – the 700 person artsfest of London Twestival looked mighty fun, I was sorry to miss the 200+ attendees of Brum Twestival where many of my Twitter comrades are.

Nottingham was a more modest collection of 20 or so social media freaks – I was suprised at our diversity and motives – several PR, digital media and social media professionals but also several politicians and a few early adopters from other walks of life – and a few virtual participants joining in via ‘Tweets’ on Twitter.  If you’re not already sold on the instant connectivity of Twitter, the idea of coming together over a web platform is probably more barking that tweeting , but if you like the serendipity of how communities share knowledge then you just might find it addictive, and if you do I’d urge you to follow me on Twitter here.

I had a range of very different conversations – from using social media for business, to the pitfalls of beer festivals, to Nottingham’s tawdry legacy of Robin Hood. There’s definitely a ‘vibe’ to the ’share and share alike’ Twitter community that allows conversations between people from different professional and backgrounds to intermingle.

I’ve been warmed lately by the sheer volume of ‘non geeks’ signing up and how conversation are shaping more widely to augment the community.  The number of novice Twitterers, even at the Nottingham Twestival, shows we have some way to come as a social media connecting business community to compete with the chaps in Birmingham and beyond – but now is the right time for us to get inter-connected.

In the bar we had a screen displaying Twitter feeds from our own event, alongside posts from the rest of the Twestivals.  The beauty of Twitter is that you can easily aggregate information by tagging your posts with terms like #nottstwestival.  Here’s a lowdown of most of our collective conversations via Twitter, and you can follow some recap on action at the NottsTwestival Twitter feed.  Thanks to Martin for splendidly organising it all – we did raise £210 for charity (and I won a very bizarre DVD in a raffle that I can only describe as a strange am-dram Biblical version of Alan Bennett which will certainly be making it’s way to a charity shop near you soon. Double donation

Nottingham Creative Business Awards Presentation 16-02-09

And finally, a more formal wine, canapes and presentation do c/o Nottingham Trent University where winners of their 2008 Creative Business Awards presented their wares, with some corporate vid style big-up for the 2009 awards.

Martin Knox talked about how the city is ready to come out of its cocoon and the economy means everything is up for grabs for creatives.  That may be true, but I wonder whether the cash-strapped City Council and other private business will fund the awards in 09.  I’ve never been one for expensive penguin-suited awards ceremonies being a thorough digital type (the mantra: you get more for less online) but I do see their place in the visual creative industries and anything that openly celebrates the creative scene of the city is good news.

Many award winners werethe successful and predictable – I’m curious about University of Nottingham winning the digital award (Nott’s digerati get it sorted!), although their mad scientist Periodic Table videos on YouTube is, admitedly, quite funky in a “Look around you” way.  And Hetain Patel’s business of the year was a brave step for a one-man performance art canvas.

So despite the financial apocalypse gloom, I do believe the future for Nottingham creative sector is looking pink, if not rosy.  And this paves the way for an announcement from me very soon on a new digital project to take Nottingham’s creatives to the next stage of connectivity.

Social networking tips for creative freelancers and media

Last week I gave a talk in Manchester as part of the DMEX training programme I’m working on which upskills ‘traditional’ (strange term in itself!) media professionals from TV, radio and film to work in digital environments through a series of work placements, mentoring, an online network (email me if you’d like an invite to join), a collaboration project (we’re currently making a machinima film) and a series of workshops.

This one was on the mixed subjects of pitching (with Stuart Nolan from Hex Induction), multi-platform commissioning (with Mario Dubois from BBC Multiplatform) and I gave a presentation of using social media for benefiting your freelance business.  (The full write-up of the event is available on the DMEX Ning website – email me if you’d like an invite to join).

Here’s my presentation with some videos and links to case studies:

Dmex 04 02 09 Blogging And Social Networking

View more presentations from susioneill. (tags: social media)

It was a fun, practical session with a lively group where I did a lot of “show and tell” and created a live blog post to show how easy it is to get going with publishing and connecting your ideas to the wider business community.  I’ll no doubt be writing more on this subject soon, but some key points to take away:

All networks are social

Online networks are much the same as real world networks, you need to feed your network and nurture it for it to bloom, but online networking, rather than just time-wasting, is like the telephone and email – just another new form of conversation so treat it as that – immediate and rich with an equal mix of great ideas and bullshit.

Start with the end in mind

Decide on your goals in advance.  It could be to gain profile because you’re new to freelancing or new in town – in this case a frequency strategy of short but high volume “presence” on blogs and other social networks is effective.  You may want to position yourself as an expert – you’ll then need to define your subject and think of carefully crafted links, comments and posts that define your specialism.  Maybe you want to use social networks to further your own knowledge – in which case you’ll do this by becoming a ’super connector’ giving advice and ideas to others in return for a piece of theirs.

Have fun and value your time

I’ve just started to use the rather excellent CreativePro Office (it’s free and let’s you track projects, milestones, invoices and time spend on projects) and now I monitor how much time I spend as part of my business development on Twitter, RSS and Facebook.  Decide on your goals and don’t let social networking impact on your workload – it takes a while to “work” for you in terms of bringing in work, so I prefer a little but often frequency to avoid internet addiction.  Keep it light and make it fun – you could make deeper relationships between you and your prospective clients, collaborators and peers.

I noticed my old colleague Dave Harte also did a talk recently on social media for business success, so check that out too – he has some interesting complimentary examples.

Hi to everyone I met at the seminar, it was great for me to help other people get a bit de-mystified and fired-up as to the why and how of social media for business.  If you’d like me to give a talk for your group or business on social media, please get in touch.

Amplified 08 – connecting the dots in the social media maze

Yesterday I went along, like the rest of the Twiterrati, to Amplified 08 at the HQ of NESTA. Amplified is the new brain child of NESTA and Toby Moores (founder of Sony game Buzz whom I recently interviewed for a fascinating piece ‘in the mind of the serial disruptive innovator’ for a project for Creative Sheffield). It bills itself as a ‘network of networks’ that connects people from around the country who are developing leading-edge thinking in using social media technologies.

Around 200 people were there from a surprisingly broad range of disciplines – teachers, media producers, techno geeks, citizen journalists - a mix of ages and personalities but with a strong male bias. A fairly lose structure of discussions made for a somewhat chaotic space – having been to the OneMedia open space conference recently I found the sheer volume of people here a bit unwieldy to really have useful conversations – but in general the spirit and the ideas were full of vibrancy and excitement to connect and share ideas, and it was nice to put some names to faces and meet new folks outside of my usual digital media bubble.

The sessions were as diverse as the attendees, but tended to focus on changing the world a bit by changing a bit of the world, and what web tools can do to enable that. I popped into quite a few – some were really useful like Online Video, others a bit unstructured and meandering so I think it pays for session curators to be a bit better prepared to present their ideas to help focus the discussion. There’s probably a learning curve here and some delegate education needed on how to successful do open space or semi-curated events like this so people get the best out of it. We were all told to tweet after each session so there are heaps of tweets you can trawl through here.

On the whole I found it probably a bit too ahead-of-the-curve for my own more commercially focused practice (yes, me is un-cool consultant) – and sometimes I wonder if it’s best to go to ‘what you know’ where you can contribute and learn more or to throw yourself into the least relevant and known subject to see what you can learn. I did a bit of both – maybe at the next one I’ll throw myself into the deep end and go to more of the blogging-will-change-the-world instead of is-home-taping-killing-music sessions I usually choose.

I bumped into Toby then next morning at Tuttle London – many of the Amplified Individuals were somewhat muted after a night of boozing. Whereas I went over to a church hall in Leytonstone to film a pop video dressed as a school mistress (I kid you not – coming soon!) til the wee hours instead. Toby says the next step is to hold regular networks across the country to start to connect the dots – with sessions in the Midlands, South Coast, London, the North and maybe other places too. Hopefully the Amplified network will somehow will feed into my own plans to improve the connectivity and networking of creative thinkers in my hometown of Nottingham.

Promoting your music as an independent artist using social media

I’m a musician by training – and occassional after-hours trade.  So I often meet up with muso-types and they are often bemused when I hand them my ‘digital consultant’ business card.  “So do you make websites?”. “Well”, I reply, “not exactly…”.

Lately a young chap called Yinka took me up on my strange business card and asked me for some advice on using social media to promote a new EP for his band Sabatta.  I love this challenge as:
a) It makes you really think about how to apply theory to a real situation – how is this stuff all useful to someone on a low/zero budget? and
b) I think a great skill in life is just to ask and ask again until you get a bit of what you want – and I’m all in for people taking up on advice and giving back when they’re up the ladder.

So here’s an extract of my advice:

“The biggest problem you have as a self-managed and unsigned act is that, if you pardon the pun, there’s a lot of ‘noise’ out there in independent music – and it’s not just about guitars and singers, there’s just a thick cloud of information everywhere in the music space.  All the ‘ear time’ at the major new media platforms (Bebo, Youtube, MySpace etc.) is taken over with the professional pluggers – so in this respect getting to the top of the channel and ‘recommended’ sections is still in the hands of the old-school music industry.  This has to be done through the old fashioned plugging virtues of hard sweat, with the hope that you can create something that’s either so good, or so quirky (strange, weird, funny, dark) that people recommend and share.  Short of becoming a serial killer notoriety is hard to achieve

First up – just about all the best advice that can be give comes from Mr Andrew Dubber and the excellent New Music Strategies website – sign up to his blog and be sure to download the free e-book.

And of course read Kevin Kelley’s excellent article “1000 true fans” about using the ‘long tail’ to be sustainable as an independent artist.

Take it with a pinch of salt though, some people think you can’t make any money of the ‘long tail’ in music – and all of us scraping about to make any money at all probably suggests this is true.

There’s just so much stuff out there that you can create some great content (a song, a video, animation, photo shoot, podcast) and it just sort of goes ‘out there’ into the ‘deja you’ land (not ‘deja vu’ in that you’ve seen it in a past life but you’ve seen it all before!). So the crucial thing is what marketers call “stickiness” – why you would stick around, come back – it’s the repeat visitors that become fans, then they buy – and there’s no shortcut round stickiness.  Stickiness is about creating the right ambiance and the right space – like creating a great cafe or bar where people are happy to hang out and chat or just check out the vibe.  That’s the philosophy behind a lot of the social networks like Bebo anyway.

Looking at what’s big…

I noticed recently that novelty videos on YouTube were getting frightening high viewing -  like Ninja cat, the whole Kersal Massive phenomena of loads of remixes from one naive teenager attempting to rap or the Cillit Bang techno remix.

This probably doesn’t help if you’re not into novelty and comedy music, but gives you an idea of how important humour is to make something viral - so maybe a collaboration with an upcoming comedian to make a video/viral could be an interesting idea.

Another lateral idea:

Seth Godin says go buy CDs wholesale of artists you sound like, then post them a CD of yours in the package.  A low-cost way of putting yourself in the centre of potential fans.

You’ve already identified what artists you think you sound like, and who likes your music -  you say: “Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Kravitz, Thin Lizzy, fans of the quirky often like us also – someone told me the other day one of my songs sounds like Elvis Costello meets Metallica – which was cool.”

So this is interesting – but would EITHER Elvis Costello or Metallica fans like you?  Some will, some will not.  This is a kind of crazy idea in itself of two quite different kinds of music -  I could see you translating this into some kind of animation if you’re able to do this, or even something simple like a mash-up of Costello and metallica videos with your latest single as the soundtrack – coudl be big on YouTube and will show you’ve got a good sense of humour too!

You’ve got a great professional looking website – well done, you’re up on 90% of artists who struggle with an out of date site or just use MySpace.  It suits your image – which is strong.  Of course you’re a band who value your authenticity highly and have already established your musical style, so it’s not a case of jumping on the band wagon!  But there’s something here I think which connects with social media – it’s more about engaging with people directly, so they get an insight into your world and see things from your angle.

Social media let’s you engage manageably with literally thousands if not tens of thousands of people – but what people want today is a ‘piece of the action’ – I don’t just want to hear about the artist or know when they’re playing in my town, I want to understand what they are writing about, their motivations – even what they had for dinner is interesting to the real trainspotters!  So a micro-blogging platform like Twitter is really great for updates, particularly when you’re on the road, or to announce what you’re doing with the band.    what are you listening to?  What other gigs have you seen?  Fashion, even hair tips (?).  Social media is all about conversations.

I notice you have a blog too – well done on this front.  BUT it’s rarely updated and seem to focus on what your’e releasing and is, if I may say, a rather ‘hard sell’ approach focused on what releases you want people to buy rather than a sustained relationship, i.e. getting people to know what you’re doing and to want to commetn on it and feel a part of it, and feel part of a conversation with you.  That doesn’t mean you have to spend your life posting stuff, but a once a week update is nice – or even a bit of a ‘tour diary’ – There’s plenty of tools to make it really easy to upload photos or video from your phone etc. It shouldn’t just be about text!

Play around with stuff too – like you could do a series of short posts on a different theme or set yourself a mission – do reviews of all your favourite record shops, talk about what happened when you got in there, who you met, what you bought.  Them a shameless plug for your new EP…then people may find your post who are into the same music and bingo…the association of your ideas with your music starts to set.  But it takes a long time for these things to work!  So you have to enjoy the process.

Some artists use the whole idea of ‘crowd sourcing‘ to get people to buy into (literally and metaphorically) what they’re doing. Elbow did it years ago when they got the names of everyone at their show to put on the sleeve of their concert DVD.  Of course, a lot of people who weren’t even at the show put their name on the list for the craic (me included ) but it was a way of getting more people to pre-order the DVD – and Elbow seem to have been doing OK lately…

It’s basically an extension of the ‘fan club’ idea – people like Richard Cheese go heavy on it as it’s the primary way by creating ‘exclusive’ content (even getting Richard to sing your voicemail message) he can make money, particularly as an artist doing exclusively cover versions.

It’s so easy to set up polls, forums etc to start getting the ‘fans’ to contribute and help you filter your ideas a bit – maybe do your A&R for you – after all, they are the people who are going to be buying it, so give them what they want! MySpace is a great way to start out.

I notice you’re on all the big platforms – facebook, Last Fm, Myspace, Youtube etc. which is all good – you’re doing all the right things.  You may want to think a little strategically about how these spaces interact rather than duplicate one another – it can be a lot of work doing the ‘copy and paste’ from one to another.  Maybe each space may have a specific objective (like one is the ‘green room’ for lateral stuff to do with band, YouTube obviously for videos, MySpace may be exclusively focused on recordings and music) – but cross promotion is good too – like linking to your ‘proper blog’ from the MySpace blog.

In short, I don’t think there’s any real shortcuts – and it would take someone far more creative and imaginative than I to tell you what would work – and even then it’s still a bit of a lottery.  The crucial thing is to be hanging out in the places where your online users are – that’s probably email, Facebook and MySpace primarily.  Anywhere else is a plus, but that’s where your focus should be.

You need to engage and create a volume of ’stuff’ and content that reflects what Sabatta are about, but remember : ‘no one shits a masterpiece’.  In today’s environment, people have voracious appetites and want a lot of new ’stuff’ and you need to feed them with it  – titbits and hors d’oevre – remixes, exclusvie tracks, blog posts, videos, photos – not necessarily always the highest quality but the mass of it will give you presence – after a while people will be aware of you from a link here or there and that’s how you start building notoriety!

The offline stuff, flyers, flyposting, press reviews all works in pretty much the same way. But importantly – dont spend your life being an administrator of MySpace/Facebook - spend more of your time on the art than the message – decide how much time it is worth spending on social media to meet your creative and business goals, and stick to a rigid timetable otherwise it can get too time-consuming and demoralising.

The live video on your MySpace looks good, you’re a great live band – so more of this!  If you can get the gear together to film all your shows or get a film-maker in your entourage, you’d be suprised how much great content fodder you can produce from just one camera and a few cut-aways.

Good luck!”

I’d be interested in any more worldly advice you have for Yinka and Sabatta, and if you want some advice yourself why not drop me a line.

Guide to social networks for creativity (or ‘I finally found a use for LinkedIn’)

This lengthily-titled (and length) post is about two things – creativity and social networks. Like many of my peers (and other self-proclaimed digital experts), social networks are both an intrinsic part of ‘building your online brand’, but also a neat thing to play around with, whether you’re a cyberspace digital geek, or a real-world social networker (who would have thought digital technology could connect two such diverse groups?).

So here’s my subjective take on the three I’ve used the most – LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace – and how they work (or not) for me to promote the different strands of my business.

LinkedIn

Particularly since the meteoric rise of Facebook, I’ve come to question, what exactly is the point of LinkedIn? It is designed to: ’strengthen and extend your existing network of trusted contacts’. When I first used it in 2004 it seemed well cool – freelancers or job-hunters could sponge up thousands of new contacts to boost their work, working on the ‘bow tie’ theory that it’s not your ‘inner circle’ of immediate friends, colleagues and family that get you work, it’s the much bigger grouping on the ‘outer circle’.

The problem is, LinkedIn doesn’t really DO anything – other social networks are about learning, connecting, joking and sharing – whereas the interactions of LinkedIn seem to be quite limited to just linking and…well that’s it. At least you don’t need to submit your ‘links’ work email now to connect (thus defeating the point of having a network which sits outside of your current job and transcends to past and future). You can pay to ‘get connected’ to the CEO of Sony Entertainment or whoever – but why would he/she want to read your email any more than if you’d sent it through their corporate website?

I conclude, LinkedIn is off the boil, its time has past. Even people I know who are very well connected tend to stick at 100-150 contacts. Mine is a mere pathetic 50 and no more people I know are using it. A network needs common identity and shared purpose, it can’t exist for its own sake. I guess the main problem with LinkedIn is it doesn’t feel very…well..friendly. It’s all about making ‘connections’, but not strengthening the human interaction behind those connections. I’d rather respond to a ‘thanks for the add’ friend request than a request to ‘get linked in’ – the call is not compelling. That said, it’s the most private of social networks and a great way to store all your email contacts in one place.

However lately I had a new revelation: you can use LinkedIn Answers to ask all your network, or indeed the whole community, a question – which is superb from a focus group/user-testing perspective. The questions tend to be quite highbrow, of the ‘How do we solve the problems of the Middle East?’ type or ‘Do CEOs of European VC backed technology companies get the necessary support, resources and time to succeed?‘ (hmm..axe to grind?). It’s useful for the question poser, but also a good brain-sharpener on those moments of downtime for CEOs of European VC-backed technology companies. Expect on average 15-20 answers from the global community within the week.

I answered an interesting question posed by James Stuart: What does creativity mean to you? Global answers ranged from:
“Creativity is the blending of imagination with reality.” (Marc Aniballi, Creative Technology Strategist)
“Creativity is an outcome of simple space and courage. The space that one needs to imagine, and then the courage to do.” (Abe Kasbo, CEO Versoni Worldwide)
“The ability to see things that can’t be seen yet and may never be” (Stephane Mot, Author and Chief Propagandist)
Through to…
“Creativity is what you do when your fly won’t zip up and your first-date is at the door.” (Edwin Hung, COO Utopia Printing)

I think what was interesting was the varied interpretations of the word creativity – some saw it as a force for innovation in business, some self-expressionism and an intrinsic part of the soul, others as a unique activity in itself (e.g. as in the ‘creative’ industries).

And look who won the swot prize for best answer

Anyway, here’s my LinkedIn profile – please become ‘linked’ to me as I need some more links/friends!

Facebook

I got into Facebook a few week back and, like many new converts, am hooked. The premise is, it’s like MySpace for students and (not really quite) grown-ups, where you link with your real life college friends and share photos, news, entertainment recommendations and sometimes turn them into a zombie (in the form of 1000s of games and silly plug-in applications you can install with one click for maximum goofing around).

What’s most amazing about how Facebook’s technology influences the community, is that every action you take, you send out a slug trail (or feed) to all of your Facebook friends (aka your real friends) telling them you’ve joined a group, made a new friend, posted an announcement etc. This is an amazingly intuitive way of sharing fun, light bits of transient knowledge (a bit like Twitter, which I see as being part and parcel of the Facebook type of social networks) – particularly as the feeds only stay live for a couple of days – thus the need to log back in regularly to see what’s happening in your personalised community.

Rather than write a formal email requiring a formal response, I can post a ‘hows tricks?’ email to a friend or colleague through their Facebook email or write on their ‘wall’ (which will be visible to all, but you can only see the reply if you’re friends with both people corresponding), making communication more light, fluid, informal and fun. Of course, living your life so publicly can have big repercussions in protecting your identity (one in five employers admit to using Facebook to vet potential employees’ suitability).

Today, I found out that one friend in my locality is going to my local for Sunday lunch (handy if I wasn’t stuck 300 miles away due to the floods), some guys I used to be in a band with are doing a gig, and an old friend is ‘no longer married’ and a work contact is ‘now single’ (the latter may be a result of a change to their profile as oppose to a final decree.). So here are my five tips tips for using Facebook:

1. If you value your privacy very highly, don’t use it
2. If you value privacy quite highly, don’t use a photo or join a regional network, and only link with people you really know and trust
3. Don’t put up anything you aren’t proud of doing, especially photos, or write about places or things (like work) you don’t want some people to know you’ve been to – i.e. keep it light!
4. Learn how to delete stuff off your mini-feed (grey cross) if you change something (like joining the Patridge Family Appreciation group) but you don’t want everyone to know.
5. Try and create an identity where you are around open people and can be open about the kind of person you are and the live you lead (desirable, but obviously not always possible).

The language, tone and main user groups for Facebook is under 25s US college students and alumni (e.g. how to I say I’ve worked as a contact/associate with someone but not at the same company?) – so how does it work as a business tool? As well as the ‘light touch’ informal contact, you could download the Happy Hour application and buy your real life contact a virtual drink – handy if you’re 100s of miles away! You could also pose a question to your group, as you can in LinkedIn, but it’s better to keep it more of the fun and frivolous rather than deep and meaningful (I was bitten by a zombie by a digital media colleague!) – and be careful you can guess your contacts share a similar humour. You can gain a deeper, richer idea of your clients/contacts through learning what they are up to – what their hobbies are, what films they like etc. It’s legal snooping! As a business tool, it’s better for younger people as oppose to more traditional colleagues or formal relationships, although, the Vice Chancellor of University of Bristol tells me he has a Facebook profile, and the recent contest for Deputy Leader of the Labour Party was described in the press as a ‘facebook off’ for popularity. For me, there needs to be more critical mass among my business contacts and more business-focused applications for it to be more useful, but it is growing.

Here’s my Facebook profile (or ‘I am not a number’).

MySpace

The mother-ship of all social networks, MySpace (aka MurdochSpace) is not just a website, it’s a terms used to describe a whole generation – the previous Generation X. But you’re not included. Except maybe you are. It accounts for 80% of all social networks traffic, is rumoured to have over 100 million worldwide users (though typically only 20% may be active at one time) , and was valued at $580 million when bought by NewsCorps in 2005. It’s total value could reach $15 billion within years, though on paper (or should that be wires?).

Money aside – what’s it for? Think: the social network with multimedia. You create a profile or identity (typically a pseudonym) and start off with a friend they give you called Tom (ditch him quick or he’ll skew your number of connection profiles). Then you search and hit ‘add to friends’ to connect with your real friends – and if you like, the bands, actors or people you admire (sometimes run by their labels, sometimes by fans or as parodies) and even make friends will people the world over you don’t yet know. You can upload, share and comments on videos, pictures and music and ‘tag’ your profile (like a teenager would their bedroom) with multimedia badges of interest, or ‘pimp my myspace‘ with some extra colour, backgrounds and HTML.

But where MySpace has come into its own is as a means of promoting new music – Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen claim to have been ‘created’ by MySpace, but remember they both had significant record deals at the tim. The website provided a good platform for promoting their music, cheaply, to an international audience.

I’m a musician and have a profile for my music on MySpace. As a musician, it’s indispensable. I like it because I know I can check out a band and always get the same ‘ingredients’ – four songs, pictures, a list of influences and friends, and a means of getting in touch – I can add or read comments if I want. (Although I wish people didn’t abuse their profiles with nasty background images and bad design – there’s no accounting for people’s tastes ) It saves going through a hard to navigate band website to find all that. I can ‘re-discover’ musical artists from the past, and new ones. It’s enabled me to hook up with ‘friends of friends’ and meet old bands I’ve played with or know from before in London. The downside is, lots of requests from people with tenuous connections musically, and I do like to check out all the requests I get to see whether I think they’re suitable or related enough to be a friend – I have my own ‘brand’ to consider and it becomes a time-consuming activity which may be distracted from me doing more direct forms of marketing.

From a commercial point of view, I haven’t found MySpace great for upselling music – I’ve only sold one CD through a MySpace contact. It tends to be a bit of a ‘free lunch’ scenario where people want it all for free. And the ‘rot’ has already set in with opportunistic pluggers using ‘friends’ profiles to post adverts (often dubious porn type content too) or general meaningless self promotion or the ubiquitous ‘thanks for the add’ message (post one of these and I will delete it!).

MySpace is much more about the mass connectivity than the more intimate experience of Facebook, it’s about a sense of playfulness, parody, and what I’d glibly call ‘youth’. But what’s the business benefit? I think it’s limited for most – if you have a youth brand (music venue, band, T-Shirt manufacturing, photographer) it’s an invaluable way of making links but the connection isn’t ‘deep’, it’s very surface level. The commissioning editors of Channel 5 all have MySpace profiles and other business figures – but it can be hard to control – competitors could post negative comments on your message board. If you can work the network and build up a significant volume of ‘leads’, you can message them through MySpace in a less intrusive way than email – but you’ll need extra software to navigate MySpace’s crumbling, poor and sluggish interfaces (it’s stuck in Web 1.9 rather than 2.0 and above as an online experience – frustrating). You can’t control your brand through the platform (one reason big advertisers have stayed away), but others can abuse it – my friends include Prince Harry and Cillit Bang man (from the advert), who has more friends than Gordon Brown (tag line: ‘don’t you wish your MP was hot like me?). Use MySpace as a platform if you have a product to showcase or you just want to use it as a means of ‘bookmarking’ interesting stuff.

Social networking: make it work for you

So these are my experiences – what about you? Let me know how you find these sites for your own business connections. Of course, I’m not being remiss by missing out YouTube, Flickr or Last FM etc. – while these are major social network sites, I see them more as platforms than communities – you go to YouTube to watch a video, not make a friend or business lead.

I don’t think the perfect tool is yet how there for business – but perhaps there never will be. Web 2.0 to 3.0 is much more about forming niche communities of interest, and perhaps that will be through existing portals and brands – e.g. Internet Movie Database (IMDB) builds a community around the existing names in its catalogue.

To make a social network effective for you, remember it is not ‘free’, like all contacts, you have to put in significant time into searching, seeking, cajoling and mining your friends’ friends contact to increase your network. But there’s no point in having 50,000 ‘friends’ as many MySpacers do (mainly through software like Badder Adder), each connection has to be meaningful and regularly nourished with extended contact – on and off line.

Not all social websites are for you – decide your goals, maybe as a means to ‘bookmark’ some work colleagues (they may stay with the network longer than their job) that is as fine as using one to announce your next divorce…