Talk About A Pirate Day

In honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day, I wanted to talk a little bit about intellectual property, copyright and a slightly different kind of piracy.

I'm still digesting The Pirates Dilemma and trying to figure out exactly what its implications are but with each passing day I'm becoming more and more convinced I'm working within a broken system, and my attempts to apply a new framework to the old system will ultimately be doomed to failure – at least as far as my career appears to be going at the moment. But's another kind of post.

Before I start to organize my thoughts on piracy, I want to be completely upfront and transparent: I am a pirate. I have pirated intellectual property in the past. Here is a list of offenses. Consider this the sheet they'll hang on me when I'm swinging by a rope on Ratcliffe Highway.

• When I was young, I pirated computer software, mostly because my friends and I couldn't afford to pay $50 for a new adventure game. So we'd all pool our money together to buy one copy and then share it amongst ourselves. More on this later, because it's an interesting concept of shared ownership that I think is being overlooked in the piracy/copyright debate.
  
• When I was a teenager, I owned several cassette tapes that were copies of albums I did not pay for. I can honestly say I eventually paid for many of those albums (and owned CDs of many, many more albums than I had pirated tapes for.)
  
• Here's the hardcore stuff. My sophomore year of college was the year that Napster hit the scenes. Before this, my friends and I would rip our CDs to MP3s and maybe pass them along to each other more out of convenience and curiosity. I was a complete nerd and hooked my stereo up to my computer so I could fully experience playing Quake with a subwoofer, so I could actually play MP3s through my computer speakers and not have it sound like a tinny mess, which most computer speakers still sounded like at the time. But Napster made finding music we didn't own incredibly easy. It also slowed our college's T1 connection to a crawl because of all the trafficking we did with it. I don't have many MP3s from those days anymore, mostly because the sound quality isn't that good compared with modern rips, but I've got a few still knocking around my cover song library.
  
  As much as I'd like to say Napster lead me to buy more music, it didn't, at least in the short term. Before Napster I would often purchase a CD for one or two tracks and never listen to the rest of the album, or listen to it a couple of times only. Typically – and this is important – this was because I was buying a CD for a song that received heavy airplay on the radio and I wanted to listen to it on my own, maybe in my car or in my room. For those familiar with the Long Tail model, this is the ultimate 'short head' model – not even listening to an entire CD, but only the hits on the radio. And I know there were lots of other people who did it too.
  
• After moving to the UK I discovered how easy BitTorrent is to use. I'd used BitTorrent before but purely for legal things. Since moving here, I started using it to grab Season 2 of Jericho because the show wasn't being aired here and while I was available to watch completely for free on CBS.com, I couldn't watch it because I was in the UK. Battlestar Galactica episodes? Ditto, I didn't care to wait a week, especially when an American audience could watch the whole thing online for free. And I admit I have also downloaded movies that aren't available here yet as well.

So I may have just painted a colossal target on my chest but I want to talk a little about how piracy has changed my buying habits – one of the key pieces of The Pirates Dilemma. I no longer buy short head CDs for one or two songs; if there's a hit I want badly enough, I can purchase it for less than a dollar from Amazon.com's DRM-free store. But this isn't a story about short heads, it's actually a story about long tails and legitimately purchasing more music. I don't listen to the radio anymore ever; all my music is discovered through my friends or other recommendations. I no longer buy CDs for one or two tracks, but for full albums by artists I like and have sampled online. I'd say that my music purchasing dropped off in the short term but now that I've started to tap into musicians I prefer and never would have heard on a top-40 terrestrial radio station, it's going back up again. And it's almost 100% digital. The only exception is when I buy a CD at a concert.

I'm not going to generalize everyone else's habits based on my own, but I certainly suspect my story is not unique. It is discoveries of this sort that will eventually reframe the business model as The Pirates Dilemma (and The Long Tail) suggests. Apart from the obvious applications of this principle to digitally distributed entertainment, I'm most interested in where it can go from here into other practices. Communications being a prime example.

There's a meme going around about brand hijacking on Twitter; I first became aware of it last week through this post, which cites an earlier incident this year where someone named Janet pretended to be an Exxon employee for three days. As a PR rep I can say with a high degree of certainty that this kind of hijacking would make even the most Internet-jaded old school communicator lose sleep at night: what if someone out there is pretending to be you online? Or worse, pretending to speak for your company and you couldn't control the message?

So much of how companies are trying to engage online depends on their reactions to these kinds of 'pirates.' People are talking about my brand online? Holy shit, are they staying on message? They aren't? Damn, I better get in there and either a) shut them down or b) make sure they've got the approved talking points!

Someone's hijacking my brand on Twitter? Holy shit, I'd better set up an official Twitter for my brand so everyone knows it's officially official!

Chris Lynn, the blogger who wrote the post above, made an excellent point about this in his post and specifically how to properly address it:

Back in the old 1.0 days of the Internet, you could be pretty much anyone–a 40 year old man pretending to be a 13 year old girl–and no one would know otherwise. In the Web 2.0 world, however, our identities are built on and confirmed by our relationships.

How many companies actually get this? And how many communicators get the why of all this? If we look 'under the hood' to we understand why we're being forced to change, that the rules no longer apply? To use a piratical reference – here there be monsters. The rules are being rewritten, and not by us.

But the rules are being bent and broken elsewhere. I realize this post is starting to get long and rambly and I doubt anyone's still reading, but to follow up on some points I made in a blog post on my company's corporate blog we're at a point where piracy is going to begin to force major changes in the way we think about and do business. It's not going to be as simple as just 'let's make some Twitter profiles and talk to people;' what's going to happen is that companies will be forced to reconsider how they do business from the ground up.

Collective ownerships much like my friends and I going in on expensive pieces of software won't just exist among consumers but among companies as well. Take the cooperative business model: what if this was applied to a games company? What if it was applied to a book publisher – not a giant short-head-based publishing house, nor tiny individuals putting out books for their 1000 Fans, but something in between, a publishing house owned as much by those with the presses as those writing and consuming the books.

Let your imagination run wild on the possibilities there. Cooperative banking? Cooperative real estate developments? Cooperate government taxation structures? It's all a long way away from kids pooling their money to buy King's Quest 5, but in the end it's not so different after all.

Let the revolution begin.

The Value of Engagement: Appendix

Brother None made a really good comment challenging something I said in my third post (and the Fallout 3 blog gave me a nice shout out too.) He raises an exceptionally good point, one I'd like to talk about here. Money quote:

The example of how to do modern community management and PR "right" is BioShock, and going strong at 1.5 million sales, it's shown to have worked...

And there's there real puzzling bit. How is Bethesda doing it "right"? They're doing exactly, and I do mean exactly, what you advice PR people not to do in your first posts. They made their press packets, they sent them out, and they're getting their hyped-up posts, on over a 100 sites and magazines that I've seen.

It's all cut and jib stuff. In the meantime, the community FAQ is the only bit of real interaction given, and it was indirect and slowed down, and failed to create any significant buzz anywhere (it had only about 400 posts on their forum, compared to, say, the 800+ posts on NMA's preview).

The bolded bit is the important one, and upon further reflection I think he's right, or very nearly so.

2K did do some of same kinds of things with BioShock, at least in the very beginning. It had a showing at E32006, which kind of kickstarted the campaign, and there were articles in magazines. But otherwise, I think Brother None's point stands. Through a function of writing a post at three separate times and trying to reign in thoughts that are evolving, I didn't articulate exactly what I wanted to say in the third post, so let me make an addendum.

Bethesda is doing some things right. They still have a year or more develop their program, and the "20 community questions" is a step in the right direction, but thusfar their interest has been in engaging traditional media rather than engaging the community on an individual level. And, as BN notes, that could end up being an Achilles' heel as the chatter in the community becomes more negative.

I'd rather not dwell on what they're doing wrong, but instead make some (free - my agency might kill me for this) suggestions about what they can do to improve.

• Engage transparently on their forums. A lot. A community manager should spend 60% - 80% of his time engaging with the community. Even if he isn't answering questions about Fallout 3, he can be talking to fans about things. Post-nuke books and movies. Wasteland. Shared experiences. Favorite beers. These are the kinds of things that show you're not a PR stooge, you're a person.
  
• Engage on other sites. Yes this is hard because you won't be in your own playground anymore, but make accounts on Duck and Cover and NMA. Roll up your sleeves and get into the discussion. Be ready to be called names - this takes a thick skin - but get in there and do eet.
  
• Here's a novel one and Brother None will no doubt enjoy this. Offer to do some guest posts on the Fallout 3 blog. It can't hurt.
  
• Set up a Fallout 3 Twitter. Twitter is now so popular that the White House has a Twitter you can follow. Whether you'd want to is up to you, but you can do it. It's easy, and it's a good way to stay in touch.

That's not a comprehensive list, but this isn't a new business pitch either so I can't give away too much for free.

It's going to be very interesting to see how this develops over the next few months. I'm definitely going to revisit it from time to time, not only because it's a topic of personal interest but it's a very interesting test case.

Twitter! What is it Good For? Well...

Good question. Twitter is a Web 2.0 tool where users create an account and are given what is basically a "micro-blog" where they can record posts up to 140 characters in length - typically about enough for a sentence. These posts, called "Tweets" (yes, both "Twitter" and "Tweet" sound like something related some kind of drug), are then posted online and are automatically fed to people who have subscribed to your blog (not necessarily people who you allow to see them.) In this instance, it's a marriage of instant messenger and RSS aggregator/broadcaster: you can see what other people are Twittering about, and it can be as simple as having it delivered to a desktop client or an RSS reader. Whichever makes it easier to read.

My first thought was, OK, that's interesting - what would I use it for? So I logged in and signed up and gave it a whirl. Twitter informs you that you're supposed to use it to tell people briefly what you're doing. For example, a Tweet might be "I'm riding into work" (you can post to Twitter through the web, through text messages on your phone, or through an IM client - I use a Firefox extension, but to each their own.) That's kind of the first application.

Then there's the second, the one upon which my ilk has seized: it's a marketing tool. In fact, it's so much of a marketing tool that the New York Times has taken notice: a great blog post by Saul Hansell details how marketing and PR people have begun using Twitter to great effectiveness - not to tell the world that they're making breakfast, but for quick and informative updates their audience will care about. For example, "the art assets for Ninja Captain 3 are online at www.tinyrul.com/314149/" might be a Tweet from a marketing person.

Third, and somewhat related to the second, is the use of Twitter as an IM client when you know the person you want to talk to is on your friends list. This is frankly the least attractive use of Twitter I can think of: IM is insecure enough as it is, and if I'm going to write someone a short message, I'll just use IM to do it unless they aren't on IM, in which case I'll use email. "@Jimmy: Man you were right, the Fantastic Four movie was great but Galactus sucked LOL" is an example of this kind of Tweet.

And then, the fourth application, and so far my personal favorite: I've been using Twitter kind of like a school notebook. Not to write down notes from class, but to put random brain droppings into. These can be song lyrics, especially if I'm having a hard time getting the song out of my head, or funny phrases, or just random things I think are funny. Going back and reading my Tweets, it's a pretty eclectic and random collection of crap. The kind of thing you might find in a modern George Carlin book, and I don't mean that in a complimentary way.

So what is it good for? The marketer in me definitely sees the application of a tool to inform a large number of people in a relatively small space that something's available, but hey - don't we already have email for that? How does this bring us closer? If anything, the 140-character limit forces an unnatural end to conversations that might otherwise be more informative. Maybe it's my reaction, because I tend to have diarrhea of the fingertips anyway (as Stephen King once so eloquently put it), but 140 characters isn't enough to have meaningful anything. It's barely enough to put a line from a song or draw a stick figure with a gun.

Online discourse doesn't have to be shorter, faster, better. In fact, I think that's one of the main problems with a lot of online discourse these days - it lacks the depth of traditional media and even face-to-face conversations. Not that Twitter is a bad tool, not at all. It's great for my stupid scribbles and as a marketing tool - but it's not a substitute for other kinds of discourse, either.

Web 2.0 it may be, but other than that it's just one more thing in the old Bat utility belt.