Twitter don’t sell (or advertise)

Here’s Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch, analyzing O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly’s analysis of what a publisher does:

…it is virtually impossible for publishers to “be the winners in a technology race.” So publishers should spend less time chasing what’s cool and what’s new and focus instead on the nuts and bolts of nurturing audiences and sales channels and delivering authors’ work…

Echoing the spirit of generosity and absence of direct self-interest that you’ll hear from the pulpits of Seth Godin and many others, O’Reilly spoke to how social media isn’t meant to work as a sales tool. “Start thinking about what you can contribute… It’s about how you can add value to the communities that happen to include you.”

I’m still unconvinced that we know when to say when when it comes to Twitting, Facebook, et al. At what point does social media stop helping individuals navigate through oceans of content — and only make the information glut worse? I don’t have a good answer for this. But I’m in the market for one.

While I’m at it, this analysis of Amy Grant’s video “Lead Me On” made my day yesterday.

PS. Further to social media and its potential to bite us back, I also can’t help shake the feeling that in addition to exposing us to lovely and novel items and ideas and pretty pictures, it to a great extent fosters the same sense of inadequacy that mass advertising was designed to instill — i.e. it gets people itchy for lifestyles that elude them.

Overheard

“Say you want to eat a whole pie. If you put your face down in the pie, you get pie all over your face. But if you slice out one piece at a time, you’ve a chance of getting it done.”

As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont.

“How to Be Useful” as per 2 Corinthians.

And in common-school education during George III’s reign:

There were no cheap books or newspapers, and no proper system of public instruction. The poor seldom left the counties in which they were born. They knew nothing of what was going on in the world. Their education was wholly of that practical kind which comes from work and things, not from books and teachers; yet many of them with only these simple helps found out two secrets which the highest culture sometimes misses, – how to be useful and how to be happy.

The C Word

Accusations of class warfare are popular these days. Many commentators agree that questioning the size of Wall Street bonuses is Marxist and thus very bad. The logical end result of such class warfare rhetoric—these breathless pundits will tell you—is standing in bread lines. Scowl at billionaires one day, they say, and the next day you’ll be reenacting the Terror.

The National Review likened class warfare to the “politics of personal destruction.” World magazine suggested that the “preaching of class conflict, envy, and resentment” was the undiluted legacy of Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Their writers expressed tremendous concern that the economy would tank because of all this counterproductive talking. Say “soak the rich” enough times and the poor, the bitter and twisted lower classes, would decide to just take a seat and wait for their welfare checks. At the same time, the demoralized rich would feel unappreciated, sulk, and go Galt.

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screwball comedy = class, [no] sex, incomplete information x Barbara Stanwyck

Via Matthew Guerrieri, a better than usual analysis:

Hypothesis: the most appropriate narrative format to describe the history of American culture is that of the screwball comedy. The archetypal screwball comedy, a Hollywood creation, flourished for only a short time — the early 30s until the early 40s, roughly — although aspects of it still persist. But it originated out of a time and circumstance marked by, I think, a relatively rich confluence of the sorts of ideas that American culture is consistently obsessed with: the importance of money, the permeability (and fragility) of status.

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Alternative Workspaces

Cribbed

“It’s very hard to reconcile yourself to the reality of being dependent on people who don’t really like you.” –from Ta-Nehisi Coates

True.

And this is surely the ghost of my publishing past typing, but somehow this belongs in the same post: analysts admit it’s the beginning of the end for Barnes and Noble stores. The codependent relationship between book publishers and B&N has been tense and unsatisfying for years. The love is long gone. So…consider it a good break-up.

Next up are 1) publishers selling direct to consumers, 2) digital delivery, and 3) revived independents.

As long as I’m keeping a running list, cont.

Maestronet forums:

“This is a personal thing. Fortunately my food, clothing, shelter and basic violin making needs are covered. I would starve if I had to make violins for a living. I would enjoy making a contribution to knowledge in the field. Folksinger Pete Seeger (90) recently said “I just want to be useful.” I agree with that. My grandchildren will better remember me if I teach them how to be useful.”

Quoting Howard Rheingold:

Just participating isn’t enough. You must have something of value to others.”, “Need to feed (people) what’s valuable to them. To participate you have to learn how not to be boring and how to be useful.”

Character advancement in gaming:

…they adopted a girl from a primitive world, and set about to start teaching her how to be useful aboard ship.

Gamers — saucy. Earlier: Here and here and here.

Marketing

Why not put “Life explorer, multimedia storyteller, experience architect” on your business card? Lucy Kellaway explains.

The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle made an appearance in ch. 7 because it helped explain bewildering organizational structures. By which I mean it helps explain why there are people at high levels of the organization who are blatantly incompetent. (A brief refresher: The Peter Principle states that people who are good at their jobs get promoted until they finally arrive at a position at which they can’t perform. They’ve “reach[ed] the level of their own incompetence.” And there they stay, enjoying big paychecks.)

Now the New Scientist reports that one way to get around this outcome is to promote people at random, and so presumably both high and low performers had an an equal shot. This is a deeply stupid idea that professor Rajiv Mehta politely terms “a really interesting alternative approach to looking at the Peter Principle.”

He continues: “But it would turn on its head almost every established theory of human behaviour and would face a multitude of problems.”

I’m not sure the Peter Principle is something you can regulate around, not least, as one commenter pointed out, because good people who aren’t rewarded at a company tend to quit in disgust and seek their fortunes elsewhere. As I saw it, its usefulness — as a theory — is that it helps stave off despair when you’re stuck working beneath incompetents. It’s not you, and it’s not even them. It’s the system. Knowing this helps frustrated junior employees from overdosing on self-doubt.