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Dear Michael McDonald,

May 30, 2009 Mitch Leave a comment

You don’t know me, but I’m your brother.

And as such I just don’t understand why you hate me so. Why, Michael, why?

Let me explain.

Every time I buy tickets to a concert where you’re slated to appear something happens and I end up not seeing the show.

At first I thought I was suffering from a Steely Dan curse. Even though we’ve seen the “Dan” a couple of times over the years, twice I’ve had to ditch tickets to Dan-related shows: once because we couldn’t get a sitter and once because Donald was sick and we were out of town for the make-up date.

But now that I’m forced to ditch our 2nd row center tickets for your upcoming show with Boz Scaggs and we’re still planning on seeing Steely Dan perform Gaucho live in July, I realize that YOU’RE the problem. Don’t try to deny it – I know that you were touring with Steely Dan when we missed that show.

Truth be told, we’re not terribly upset over missing your show with Boz. At first we were really excited. You know that we see Boz every chance we can, we scored great seats and we thought it would be nice to see you open up the show.

Then the tickets arrived in the mail and we discovered a shocking thing – your name was listed first. It appears that Boz is opening for YOU.

Seriously? How is that even possible? No disrespect intended, but Boz is a million times better than you.

Michael, I love your voice. You were great in the Doobies. You were great with Steely Dan. You even have a handful of decent solo hits. But I know Boz Scaggs. I’ve loved Boz Scaggs. And you’re no Boz Scaggs.

In disbelief, I asked everyone in the office who they thought was a bigger star. Sadly, I work in an office full of 25 year olds who had never heard of either of you. But you’ll be happy to know that among my peer group they all favored you over Boz.

Eh. What do those idiots know anyway?

Let’s figure this out sports sections style with a head to head matchup:

Singing

Boz has a beautiful and flexible voice that has aged perfectly. He has the range to cover blues, jazz, standards and disco-flavored pop.

Michael has one of the most iconic and memorable voices in rock history and still sounds great, even on weak-ass Motown covers.

Advantage: McDonald

Playing

Boz is an excellent blues-guitar player. Although he keeps a lead guitar player in his band to handle most of the heavy-lifting he still graces us with a smoking solo or two every show. That cat has gorgeous tone.

Michael is a master of the Casio, a decent but unspectacular keyboard player.

Advantage: Scaggs

Songs

Boz fills 2 CDs with well-known and well-loved hits from all phases of his long and illustrious career. There is absolutely no filler on his Greatest Hits collection. For a (very brief) moment he was the biggest star in the music world. I own his entire discography.

Michael’s greatest hits album is 50% filler even with some Doobie Brothers hits included. I hate to admit it but I skip at least 6 songs (out of 18) on the disc. I mean, “Jah Mo B There” is the 4th song on the album for Jah’s sake. In fairness, the good songs are awesome, though.

Advantage: Scaggs

Associations

Boz was a member of Steve Miller’s band before going solo in the late ’60s.

Michael made the Doobie Brothers great, added wonderful background vocals to Steely Dan’s best albums and recorded many famous duets as a solo artist.

Advantage: McDonald

Final Score: 2-2

It’s a tie! Sweet Georgia Brown! I never saw that coming!

Well, Michael, I guess we’ve got nothing to argue about after all. I hope you have a great time in Boston. Catch a Sox game. Take Boz on a Swan Boat. Eat a lobster roll at Neptune Oyster.

Love Always,

Mitch

Categories: Music

Evaluating Performance Reviews

May 19, 2009 Mitch Leave a comment

With performance review season nearly upon us, I am reminded of the many reviews that I’ve received over the years.  While some were long, formal affairs with elaborate corporate forms and others were short verbal conversations, I always learned a lot about myself – or at least how others viewed me – through those evaluations.  Performance reviews, while painful to deliver and receive, are quite necessary to the health of an organization and your career.

But the biggest problem that I have with reviews is that they tend to focus on what people need to improve instead of focusing on what they do well.

Obviously there are minimum standards for performance in all areas of the communications industry that need to be achieved.  To a certain extent, training programs can help people learn how to write, how to present and how to execute work.  Mentors can teach youngsters how to carry themselves and how to manage challenging situations. 

But our business is one of strategy and ideas.  It’s about charisma and relationships.  In many ways, the most important skills for a communications professional are inherent skills.  If you practice hitting jump shots every day for years eventually you’re going to be a decent (or at least improved) shooter.  But all of the training programs in the world aren’t going to help you come up with compelling ideas if you don’t have any.  Either your brain is wired that way or it isn’t.

That’s why I like to focus on what people do well.  Our business needs thinkers AND executors.  It needs relationship builders AND deft financial planners.  If you can help people identify what they’re good at – and put them in a position to succeed – then they’ll be happier and more valuable to the organization.

Think positive this review season!

Categories: Marketing

Twitter & the Future of Creative Content

May 2, 2009 Mitch Leave a comment
Yesterday, while paying full retail for Bob Dylan’s new CD, I reflected upon the fact that I chose not to steal the music. Now, truth be told, I haven’t stolen music since the glory days of Napster. But I could have easily procured a free copy of the disc. All I needed to do was find a friend with the disc and grab a copy. Or download one from a bit torrent site. Or rip a copy from a sample stream. There are plenty of easy ways to steal music.

The reason I chose not to steal Bob’s music wasn’t because I was afraid of getting caught or because I have a huge issue with music “sharing.” I chose not to steal Bob’s music because I wanted to pay for it. I’ve been a Dylan fan for as long as I can remember. I appreciate his work and I wanted to support him. Imagine that.

***

The big talk in town this month has been the impending death of The Boston Globe. I even participated in the ironic “blog rally” to save The Globe by throwing some brilliant ideas into the ether. But do I really care if the institution of The Globe survives? I’m not so sure anymore. Now, don’t get me wrong. I do care about the content that The Globe provides. I enjoy local news and brilliant columnists like Bob Ryan. But do I really care about the middle man? How is The Globe, a distributor of news content, any different than the Columbia records, a distributor of music content? They’re both middle men, who make a profit by connecting content creators with content consumers. The unintended consequence of their role as middle men is that they’ve also divorced the content from the creator. The Globe buys content from Bob Ryan and re-sells it to me. My relationship is with The Globe and not with Bob Ryan. A wall has been erected that separates me from the creator. Is that the way it should be?

***

In the old advertising-supported model, distributors like newspapers would provide content in exchange for our eyeballs. The nominal fees that we paid covered some costs but the real money was made in advertising revenue. Content was geared and packaged towards the most lucrative audience that could be resold to advertisers. But technology has shattered that model. Monster.com and Craigslist killed classified revenues and media fragmentation weakened the power of the distributors. Free blogging and podcasting platforms opened the door for more people to provide content as a means of creative expression. The good news was that the wall between creator and consumer was starting to crumble. The bad news is that the revenue model was crumbling, too.

***

Record labels and newspapers operated on different models but both contributed to the same problem: the devaluation of creative content. Record companies overcharged for music for too long. We all knew that it only cost pennies to make CDs and yet the price remained at $15-$20 for two decades. Consumers resented being overcharged and as a result had no qualms about stealing music once technology allowed for it. Revenge against the greedy distributor overrode any fleeting sense of ethics. Consumers didn’t feel like they were stealing from the content creator but from the distributor they loathed.

On the other hand, newspapers gave away their content for free on the web for so long that people ultimately expected news to be free. They established the value of online journalism as zero. And once something has no perceived value it’s nearly impossible to charge for it.

Music and news – two of the biggest categories of online content – unwitting colluded to divorce content from the creator, devalue the content and create resentment against the distributors all at the same time. They dug their own graves.

***

It’s probably too late to save the distributors like newspapers and record labels. And while it’s tragic for the many people that are employed in organizations that distribute content, the death of content distributors doesn’t necessarily signal the death of creative content. In fact, if we can restore the perceived value of creative content and connect creators with consumers then the future of creative content may be much brighter than the past ever was.

***

Most creative content providers on the web have the enormous challenge of breaking through the clutter and getting people to notice and sample their work. Getting consumers to pay for it is an even more vexing problem. Twitter might just be the answer to these two key challenges.

The internet made word-of-mouth advertising sexy again. It even got a fancy new name, viral marketing. Every marketing professional knows that word-of-mouth is the strongest and most reliable form of communications. If a person that you trust tells you to try a product or service you are more likely to do so than if you just saw an ad or an in-store offer. Technology made passing content and recommendations along via email, message boards and web sites easy.

Twitter is imbued with features that encourage word-of-mouth promotion of quality content. Getting people to re-tweet links solves the challenge of creating awareness of creative content. Of course the content must be of sufficiently high quality to merit passing along, but good ideas will always bubble to the top of the stream.

But viral marketing isn’t Twitter’s most important feature, nor is it going to help solve the revenue dilemma. Twitter’s most important feature is two-way conversation.

Forget about celebrities that have hundreds of thousands of followers but follow few people in return – they’re merely using Twitter as a broadcast medium. Ignore the brands that hire ghost Twitterers to create the illusion of conversation. If you want people to pay for your content then you’re going to need to get them to want to pay for your content. And this can be accomplished by sincerely engaging with consumers. By having a conversation and creating a relationship. By being a person that sells a product rather than just another product for sale. In other words, by doing it the right way.

I was encouraged the other day to see that the Rifftrax crew was testing a live broadcast for a measly ten cent fee. I like the idea of micropayments for content. Get enough people to pay a token fee for an essay, or a podcast or a vlog and pretty soon you’re talking real money that’s going directly into the hands of the creator, with no middle-man required. It’s a win for the creator and a win for the consumer. The only loser is the distributor.

***

Perhaps the death of content distributors isn’t really such a bad thing after all. Why do we need a gatekeeper between the creators and the consumers? Perhaps we need to lose some valuable properties (like The Boston Globe) in order for consumers to start to realize that creative content has value and you have to pay the creator if you want content.

And if that content provider happens to be someone that I have a relationship with then I’m much more likely to want to pay for their content.

(By the way, this essay is the equivalent length of 50 Tweets.)

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Categories: Marketing