MURKETING

Music, coolness and legality: You tell me

You’re a legal expert, right? Good, well maybe you can answer a question for me.

I’ve been very interested to learn recently about things like Muxtape (via Delicious Ghost and Popgadget), Mixwit (via Sleevelessness) and the somewhat similar but more conceptual (and very much worth checking out) “Cassette From My Ex” (via Delicious Ghost).

I’ll just use Muxtape as an example, since I’ve played around with it a little — and I really liked playing around with it. It’s cool. Basically it’s a very easy way to upload MP3s into an online mixtape kind of thing that anybody can listen to. When you actually upload something, it says: “By uploading a song you agree that you have permission to let Muxtape use it.”

Well! That might let Muxtape off the hook. But how do I knew whether I have “permission to let Muxtape” use a particular song?

If you know, please tell me.

[And please understand, my question has nothing to do with any ideological statement one way or the other about the idea of “sharing music” etc. It has to do with not wanting to get sued. Ever.]

And are any of you using Muxtape or Mixwit, either as mix-makers or as listeners? What do you think?

It’s not Ira Glass the person. It’s Ira Glass the brand.

As an aside in a piece about using Facebook etc. as a reporting tool, Ellyn Angelotti writes:

About a month ago, I Facebook-befriended one of my storytelling idols, Ira Glass, the host of This American Life. With my request I wrote a long message sharing how much I appreciate his work and the opportunity to network with him.

I was glowing when he accepted my friendship. It granted me access to his personal page. Then my bubble burst when I saw this:

“I’m not really Ira Glass. I’m the web manager for This American Life. We’ve put this together so that fans on Facebook would have a place to give us feedback. And because we’ve got tons of video stuff to share with you from the This American Life TV show, which debuted on Showtime on March 22, 2007.”

Angelotti adds: “At least they are honest about it.”

And I guess if you can’t really be friends with Ira Glass, maybe it’s nice to hear from his web manager all about his exciting TV show which debuted on Showtime on March 22, 2007. That’s sort of like friendship. Kind of. In a way.

In The New York Times Mazine: Stardoll

DRESSING UP
It’s just like paper paper dolls — only digital, global, mercantile and branded.

In Consumed, head of Stardoll.com Mattias Miksche an answer to anyone made uncomfortable by commercialization in this girls’ world. “We have a list of 1,200 brands our users have asked us for,” he says, from aspirational names like Dior to quotidian ones like the Gap to “the most obscure Ukrainian jeans brand.”

Up next: the ability to design their own digital apparel — and, if they like, sell it.

Read the column in the February 17, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or right here.

Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.

Express yourself … or whoever

One of my favorite topics is the flipside of the supposed confessional, privacy-indifferent nature of Web expression: The amount of Web expression that is not only un-confessional, it’s somewhere between self-marketing and flat-out lying. So this story in today’s WSJ about people who crib from the profiles of others on social networking or dating sites made my day:

Online daters feel pressure to stand out and believe they must sell themselves like a product, say researchers at Georgetown, Rutgers and Michigan State universities who are conducting a joint study of them. “You are not making money off of somebody else’s work; you’re just trying to market yourself,” says self-confessed copier Jeff Picazio, a 40-year-old computer-systems manager in Boynton Beach, Fla.

Businesses have even cropped up to sell people elemements of a marketable personality. One, the WSJ says, “offers 12 ‘proven’ profiles for $4. Sample: ‘There is a shallowness, a fakeness to much of the “‘singles scene.”‘”

Worth reading.  

Now you can be a “fan” of Consumed on Facebook. Why? And what next?

I’m not exactly a power-user of Facebook. I have an account, and I have a little more than 100 “friends” there, and I do check the news feed once a day or so. But I’m not very active.

Even so, when Facebook announced the feature where brands or whatever could set up a page for “fans,” I immediately thought: I’ll make one for Murketing! But every time I pondered it, I couldn’t quite figure out what the point would be — besides naked self-promotion, of course.

But last night, I abruptly created a page for Consumed, my Times Magazine column. Should you be into this sort of thing, you can now declare yourself a “fan” of the column. It’s here.

Beyond that the page is presently rather threadbare, since I knocked it together and alerted most of my Facebook friends to its existence in approximately three minutes. (So far about 50 have declared their fandom.) Yes, I realize it’s sort of stupid to create a Facebook page and then try to come up with an after-the-fact reason for it to exist.

And here’s my primary reason for this post: Now that I have this page, what might I do there? What would be interesting, useful, or valuable to readers? Any ideas?

My secondary reason for this post is to explain — in the interest of “transparency” — why I did this. If anyone’s interested, that’s after the jump. Read more

Time to weed out your unattractive Facebook “friends”

Amusing, and interesting, piece in the Times Styles section today, by Stephanie Rosenbloom, about how people “manage” their online identities includes this:

[T]he attractiveness of the friends on your Facebook profile affects the way people perceive you. [A study] found that Facebook users who had public postings on their wall (an online bulletin board) from attractive friends were considered to be significantly better looking than people who had postings from unattractive friends.

I use an icon as my Facebook profile picture, so I’m not sure where that leaves me in terms of my impact on the perceived attractiveness of my “friends.” But I’m guessing that if I used a real photo, all the Times readers in my contacts would be un-friending me right now.

Anyway, the article, which is worth a read, also deals with the less-than-truths of “online presentation strategies” — a topic I address in a forthcoming Fast Company column, actually.

MySpace aesthetics revisited

So the other day I asked: If “good design” is more important than ever, then why is (the basically hideous) MySpace so popular?

I got a variety of answers in the comments to the post, and having pondered them. One of the first responses was: Design isn’t how something looks, it’s how it works.

I understand this point. I should have used the word aesthetics. That’s what I was talking about. And I think it should be indisputable that design at least includes aesthetics, and I’m not aware of any example of something that it is said to be “good design” that is not also aesthetically pleasing, at least not in the consumer market. Correct me if I’m wrong.

I also want to clarify that the importance of aesthetics in the current marketplace isn’t a point of view that I made up, or even one that I necessarily hold. It’s one that is repeated almost constantly by a wide variety of commentators. (Virginia Postrel, to name maybe the most obvious example, makes a theme of pointing out new examples of businesses responding to the “aesthetic imperative.”) Stuff that is judged to be aesthetically beautiful sells well in many categories now, categories where that didn’t matter before, and this is widely taken to be evidence of improved design/aesthetic taste among masses of consumers. This isn’t something I’m declaring, it’s something I’m repeating.

Okay: So if aesthetics are important, why is MySpace successful?

To me there are basically two possible answers. One is that aesthetics are simply overrated. MySpace users don’t care that much about the look of MySpace, they just care about its functionality. Some comments suggested things along these lines. (And this line of thinking is bolstered by the idea that people are moving over to Facebook, if that’s actually true: Facebook is certainly more aesthetically pleasing to me, not because it’s anything special, but because it’s relatively clean and uncluttered.)

The second possible answer is that MySpace users like the way the site looks. Some comments also pointed in this direction, and it’s what I find most interesting.

When I first looked at MySpace, my reaction was: “What a mess. It’s just (visual) noise.” In fact I think I reacted to it much like parents reacted to some of the music I listened to when I was a kid: That it wasn’t music at all, just noise.

Now what’s interesting about that to me is that, from my point of view, it most certainly was music. It was not “noise” in the way they meant, at all. They just didn’t get it. We differed.

And since I first looked at MySpace, I’ve wondered if something analogous isn’t going on. It looks like visual noise to me, but maybe I just don’t get it. The people who made MySpace a hit originally were largely members of a generation that I’m not in. Maybe MySpace spoke to them in a graphic/visual language that not only made sense to them, but pleases them — the same way the Ramones or the Clash pleased me, but agitated my parents.

Given the size of the MySpace audience, the real answer is probably a combination of all of the above, and everything in the comments to an earlier post. But this last line of thought is the one that interests me the most. And of course it’s worth pointing out that the difference between me and my parents is that they did not end up listening to the Ramones on their own time in an attempt to “get” what I heard, whereas I gritted my teeth and got a MySpace account even though I hated looking at it. Draw your own conclusions on that one.

Topping the Facebook “fan” chart: NYT!

Yesterday I was checking my Facebook “news feed” for evidence that my “friends” there were signing up as “fans” of any of the brands or products or services participating in the social network’s new ad scheme, but saw nothing. This morning, however, Adverganza offers a quick preliminary countup of fan acquisition — this via AdPulp — and as of last night the leading fan-getter was none other than the New York Times, with 582 “fans.” The other examples mentioned were a TV show, and something called Sprite Sips (32 fans). (As I type this, the NYT is at 1,482 fans, and Sprite Sips is at 83.)

What I haven’t been able to do is figure out how to see a full list of all the “product” pages, or presences, or whatever. Seems like there must be an easy way to browse these — am I missing it? Please tell me if you know, and particularly if the answer is so obvious that I’ll feel stupid for having asked. Or maybe the idea is that I the potential brand fan am supposed to think up products that I want to align myself with, and search for them and see if they exist on Facebook. That doesn’t do me much good, since I’m not actually interested in expressing brand fanship. I’m interested in seeing other people‘s fandom in action. You know, for the job.

Anyway, I think Adverganza is onto something, and should compile a Billboard-like chart every week.

Update [11/10]: So, someone in my friendpile did in fact just announce his fandom for a brand. Which one? For Facebook itself! He’s in marketing, yes.

Waiting for “trusted referrals,” and how trustyworthy they’ll be…

I’ve hardly studied this, but from this article amid the sea of Facebook-ad stories:

Through the branded pages program, advertisers can design custom pages with information, content, and custom applications–“any application that was written for users on the Facebook Platform,” Zuckerberg explained. Facebook users can sign up as “fans” of that brand, install branded applications, and other activities that will all show up in their profiles’ “mini feeds” and on the “news feeds” that are broadcast to their friends lists.

“When people engage your page on Facebook, that’s going to spread information about your brand virally through the social graph,” Zuckerberg said. “It becomes a trusted referral.”

It sounds to me that like that would be relatively easy to game: Offering people some kind of incentive (a rewards-points scheme, coupon or equivalent, giveaway-contest entry, etc.) to get them to sign on as “fans” of a brand, product, movie, etc., at which point their “trusted referral” shows up in their actual friends’ newsfeeds.

In Consumed: Getting Along Famously

Buddylube: A company greases the wheels between (the online presences of) celebrities and their fans.

In an interview with Rolling Stone published earlier this year, Bob Dylan commented that “the relationship between a performer and the audience is anything but a buddy-buddy thing.” The role of the Dylan fan, he suggested, is to appreciate Dylan music. This seems out of step with the pop zeitgeist. While the impact of digital technology on record labels gets more attention, it also affects the fan-star dynamic: online social networking tools promise us more interaction, or a more direct connection (to use the buzz terms of the moment), with artists. This version of the “buddy-buddy thing” has obvious appeal — so much so that the birth of a company like Buddylube seems almost inevitable….

Continue reading at the NYT site.

UPDATE: Nancy Baym (quoted in the column) has these interesting follow-up thoughts.

LieSpace!

I’ve long contended that most of the stuff we read about how people are so “confessional” online is a bunch of hooey. MySpace and its ilk aren’t about confessing. They’re about presenting a marketed version of yourself — better looking, smarter, cooler, etc.

And what better summation of this could there be than the fact that everybody’s “friend” Tom has evidently been lying about his age. He wasn’t 27 when co-founded MySpace, he was 32. Soon he’ll be 37, a veritable geezer! Thumbs up, Tom.

In Consumed: A For-Credit Course

Chase +1: To gain campus recognition (and customers), a bank hooks up Facebook.

About a year ago, JP Morgan Chase started a new credit-card program aimed at college students, working with Facebook, the social-networking site. “We felt Facebook would be a good partner for us, since they had such strong credibility in the students’ world,” explains Sangeeta Prasad, who oversees branding for Chase Card Services. “And we felt, you know, financial institutions lacked credibility. Students don’t see credit-card issuers or financial institutions in general as meeting their needs.” Thus the company started offering a new card it called +1, primarily by way of a “sponsored” Facebook group….

Continue reading at the NYT Mag site.

Thanks to Web 2.0, you can be friends with a rock star’s intern

Amusing post from the always-enjoyable Online Fandom (Nancy Baym) on friending Michael Stipe and Peter Buck on Facebook. “For weeks nothing happened. Which was about what I expected,” she writes. When suddenly one day: “Both friends requests were accepted within 45 minutes of each other.” She continues:

Over the next couple of hours I watched as they both joined lots of groups and became friends with the same people at the same time.

And I’m thinking, ok, I didn’t really expect it to really be you, but do you have to make it SO OBVIOUS that it’s not?

In the end, though, she keeps Stipe and Buck among her “friends” just the same. For full explanation and thoughtful consideration of pros and cons, here’s the whole post.

Note: I’ve added a new category and backed in previous Murketing posts on Facebook etc., all now are categorized under “Social” Studies. Also: Murketing’s del.icio.us links on “SocialNetworking” here.

Last note on the marketer Facebook invasion

Ad Age’s Matthew Creamer on the rush of marketers into Facebook-land that I was pondering earlier this week:

Not since the advent of blogging four years ago have ad and media types so jumped on a new-media bandwagon for their own communications and networking purposes.

It’s as though the ad business, frustrated with voyeuristically looking on at the rampant growth of younger-skewing sites such as MySpace, finally has a network of its own and has responded with an eruption of self-expression….

Why the sudden rush to a platform that’s been open for some time? “A lot of marketing people felt they were too late on blogosphere 1.0, which was very generous to those who moved fast, so they’re trying to avoid that this time around,” said Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Nielsen Buzzmetrics. “Also, they’re realizing what all the college kids did: that Facebook is a solid platform with sticky appeal.”

Wal-Marting of Facebook? Or Facebooking of Wal-Mart?

Either way, draw your own conclusions about how this news relates to our earlier discussion:

The world’s largest retailer on Wednesday is launching the “Roommate Style Match” group on Facebook, a social networking site that has millions of college-age users, in the hopes of grabbing a larger chunk of back-to-school shopping dollars.

Facebook users who join the Wal-Mart group will be able to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of “recommended products” they can buy at Wal-Mart to mesh their style with their roommate’s.

Via Retail Design Diva.