XMU is my third favorite source for indie music behind WOXY (RIP) and NPR. I love the ever-changing music, the Download 15 and the endless interviews with great indie bands. I was listening to an interview with a member of the band Mountain Goats this afternoon. I assume it was John Darnielle promoting their recently released “All Eternals Deck”, which you can get for $5 right now (sorry if the deal expired when you read this) on AMZN. I got ripped off by iTunes. I caught the end of the interview, so if it wasn’t Darnielle, I apologize and will correct the post, but I’m going to refer to the speaker as Darnielle because he is the leader of the band and would probably make the kinds of strong statements that I am going to talk about…

Cliche Tired

Darnielle started disparaging twitter, Facebook and tumblr specifically as mediums to release an album. He was attacking marketing. He talked about how using channels that businesses have discovered is tired. He generalized about how businesses do not understand how to use the mediums, manning their accounts with people who only exist to ask people to buy products. He encouraged artists to considered bolting from the channels simply because businesses are on them and that they are becoming another avenue for advertising. Seriously? Testing into new channels constantly is very indie and smart, but leaving them just because others see the value is cliche indie behavior and it is backwards and it has already been done by the likes of Trent Reznor and Edward Droste of Grizzly Bear, the latter of which was using twitter brilliantly and left suddenly and unexpectedly.

Artists: Darnielle’s behavior is so indie cliche.

And he is dead wrong.

The thing that Darnielle is failing to remember is that not only does everyone in social media have a unique presence, but that everyone has a unique experience. We do not all follow the same people and we do not all see/hear/touch/taste/digest the same messages. Mountain Goats have been on twitter since August 21, 2009. They have spent 590 days amassing followers who are interested in creative random thoughts, interactions and their music. And by the way they have been building trust to the point where OF COURSE they can ask their followers to buy their new CD, which they do in this very tweet:

Success is OK

Being indie does not have to mean being a stupid business person. And thinking about how you are going to monetize your music does not mean you are not indie. All it means is that you do not make compromises with your music, style, ideals to get where you want to go. It does not mean you have to throw everything away. It means you need to have a plan and stick to your guns without whoring yourself out to everyone who would throw a dollar at you. Do not throw something away just because some people you do not like get into it. Reinvent it. Keep leading. Keep doing it better.

Guess what? If you do things right and if you are good, at some point the mainstream finds out about you and starts to like you and starts to buy your stuff. What are you going to do? Give the money back? Of course you will not. You will buy some new clothes and equipment that you have been dreaming about. You will schedule a larger tour, make a new album and you will give some money to causes you care about.

In other words, you will succeed, but you will do it on your terms.

PS: File this post under tough love (and buy the album).
PPS: Mountain Goats +10 epic geek points for MtG reference in their album title!

Trent was a vocal advocate for spam controls in twitter. Twitter users know that twitter is not going to implement a big new feature like that in the near future. He announced back in June that he was leaving. He came back in July to announce his last shows and to talk to Dave Navarro. No “wave wave wave wave goodbye”. The @trent_reznor account is just gone. The @nineinchnails still persists though as he said it would.

Good to see he has not gone soft.

#followfriday @agrahamwilcox <- Must follow for NBA fans

Today, Brad Ward decided to take it all up a notch.

The story begins at SXSW. SXSW is the conference that keeps on giving. In the past I have equated it to cramming a whole semester of college into 2 weeks. The people that you meet are the people you want to meet, the experiences that you share are meaningful both in the “classroom” and in the bars and social events.

On the night of the mashable party, Not only did I sing Ziggy Stardust with a live band, meet Seth Rogen and Joseph “Cobra Commander” Gordan-Levitt, I met Brad J. Ward.

I was heading to the bar to pick up my 4th (or so) and I was in queue to sing with the band. Well, the video tells the story

Did I think he was going to gank my charger? No. But my own phone was low on juice and I couldn’t hear the bartender. The band was RIGHT in front of us and Brad was looking to disappear. What good is a business card if I can’t charge my phone later? I decided to chill out about it, sing my song and have fun at the party instead of worrying about whether I would be connected later. Glad I did. Brad is an amazing person that I met at the conference and I am having a good time getting to know him better through twitter. Follow him!

I pay attention to the people that I’ve met in person. I’ve met a lot of people initially through twitter online, and then I’ll run into them at a  conference or when I travel to another city. Once you’re able to put a face to the name, all their tweets become a lot more interesting!

“I’ve always thought that customer service was important, even at my previous company LinkExchange that I co-founded. The difference with Zappos is that during the first few years, we shifted from thinking that customer service was important to really wanting to make customer service what the Zappos brand is all about. I think my passion for customer service comes from being annoyed when I receive bad customer service, which happens on a daily basis.”

Zappos is full of innovative ideas. Gregory Ng of Contagious wanted to know whose idea it was to pay people to quit.

All our ideas at Zappos come from either our employees or our customers.  For us, company culture is our #1 priority, so it seemed pretty obvious that we should be willing to pay people to quite in order to protect our culture. We’ve actually been doing it for several years.  I don’t remember how it hatched, it was probably like most other ideas where there was a group discussion and it came out of that.

Corporate culture is everything to Zappos. They are the kind of company that attributes big wins to the entire organization. This became evident when I asked Tony about his best day at the office.

I wanted to know if there was some kind of secret formula to Zappos success, so I asked Tony about Zappos analytics practices. If they do start using analytics, watch out!

We probably don’t do as much analytics as we should. We really just try to provide the best service to everyone across the board. The problem with trying to do analytics on an individual customer level as it relates to profitability is that you’re not taking into account the word of mouth that an individual customer might generate, which is usually worth much more than the direct profits from any individual customer.

I’d probably be involved with another consumer company. The idea of building a consumer brand that people are passionate about is exciting to me! It’s kind of like having the good parts of fame without the bad parts.

Who is your mentor? Where or to whom do you look for inspiration?

I don’t have a single mentor. My belief is that there’s something to learn from anyone no matter what their position or background, and that anyone can be inspiring somehow. I’ve been told that I have a diverse group of friends. I think that’s helped me in the business world, even if they aren’t all from the business world.

Do you ever disconnect?

Yes, I love watching movies. I turn off my phone and can get immersed into another world for 2 hours!

Complete: If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me ___________________ .

How is it possible to buy shoes online without trying them on? (Answer: it’s free shipping both ways, so it’s easy to try on different sizes in the comfort of your living room.)

What question did I forget to ask you that I should have?

I’ve talked about the importance of company culture, but it’s really hard to actually understand what I’m talking about until you visit our offices.  We give tours on weekdays, and we invite all of your readers to come visit our offices for a tour next time they’re in Vegas. They can just email tours@zappos.com to schedule one (a tour takes about 45 minute to an hour).

Tony, thanks for the opportunity to interview you. Thanks for being accessible to your customers and for making Zappos a social culture.

I forgot to ask you why there are no loafers for adults with blinking LED lights in them. Maybe next time. Hope to meet you in person in the near future.

Plurk is the latest yasmmet. It’s clearly a “competitor” to the popular twitter system. Twitter essentially is an open version of popular instant messaging platforms like MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Messenger. Plurk has an opportunity to capture social market share, [Notice that I did not say anything about revenue share as neither currently has a revenue model to speak of] primarily because twitter is horrible about stability.

Plurk has had the benefit of watching twitter flop around like a fish on the beach, but twitter has a big head start. Plurk’s user interface is a lot different. Twitter’s advantage is that most of its users are already longtime instant messenger users and bloggers who understand the technology and have easily adopted and embraced its value proposition. Because Plurk takes a few times to get used to, it puts it at a huge disadvantage in a space where people will give you about 90 seconds before they decide if they want to pursue something– unless they get some of the Twitter elite to convert people.

Plurk’s Approach

• A left to right timeline
• Instant categorization of messages (plurks?): is, loves, hates, wishes, hopes etc.
• Categorization of followings into friends and fans so that you can send messages just to friends or to everyone in your network.
• Exposed analytical fields: “Karma” which help it identify interesting plurkers
• Personal messages that only the plurker can see
• Blog/Comment style plurks so that you can see track a response to a plurk.

Obstacles to overcome

• Proving that in a world where twitter, pownce and jaiku already exist and have user bases, plurk needs to establish its differentiation point
• Getting people from twitter to plurk is going to be a chore, especially the social media evangelists like Chris Brogan, Rob Scoble, Mike Arrington and Jeremiah Owyang.
• Stability and uptime. Plurk already experienced lag when they got a surge of users.

What I like about Plurk

• I like the time line interface.
• I like how the responses can be mapped directly to a plurk. This way I know exactly to what someone is responding.

I suggest you give Plurk a try and a chance.

Was Mama Cass an inspiration for twitter? My 5 year old was singing this song the other day and I immediately thought of twitter. I find myself putting things on twitter just to see if someone else will identify with my references. Other times because I tweet just because I need to get something out of my head and move on. It’s not exactly singing, but the whole tweeting for tweeting’s sake is a lot like making your own kind of music.

Stepping back: Direct marketing guru and Internet junkie, Gregory Ng, introduced me to twitter. After a couple of days of use, I got the general gist of it, but I really wanted to figure out what I could learn from it. After all, this was really close to my dream of being able to work all day mining AIM or MSN conversations and then return home with my 6 friends to our dark haired princess who washes our clothes and makes us supper. I just want to learn how to serve you better. I promise I am only quasi-evil!

So I built a little MySQL database and PERL script that started storing tweets from people that I felt were influential on twitter. People like Paul Kedrosky and Chris Brogan. I soon discovered that this was the wrong approach. While it’s interesting and helpful to get the opinions and most commonly used word pairs of the experts, it is the twitter population at large that can help you tell a story about what is happening in twitterland. You can use one of the many cool search tools like Summize to get a buzz

pulse, or you can use some of the cool first generation analytics apps, some of which I mention below.

The Twalaxy’s Attempts at Buzz Measurement

• Twitterverse

  is a twitter tag cloud that shows what is happening within the last 1 to 10 hours on twitter. You can set it up to look at one word or two word phrases.

• Intwition

  is a cool tool that tells you the most popular links on twitter for the day. It also tries to suggest what will be popular dude to its hotness within the last 8 hours, and it also gives a 5 day summary.

• TwitterBuzz and even better: Twitturly

  Twitterbuzz is a link aggregator. It shows the most popular links on twitter. It aggregates the primary URLs and then allows you to drill down. The only problem with this is that it aggregates tinyurl, dwarfurl, snurl etc instead of following them to the actual link which would be far more interesting. It also is not setup to capture and display double-byte characters so Chinese tweets are not legible. <a href=”http://twitter.com/waynesutton/statuses/808211269″>@waynesutton just turned me on to Twitturly </a> which I think is even more compelling because it DOES follow the links and has a really slick look and feel.

Twitterverse 2.0

These apps are cute like and they do give us a flavor for what is happening, but what happens if we do more than make a cute app for the sake of saying we did have a cute twitter app? How about some natural language processing to tell us if the message is positive or negative. How about we apply that to a brand? Consider a new competitive product release like the (fictional) Dunkin Donuts Strawberry Cheesecake Latte and (you know you want it) Starshmuck’s Raspberry Ripple Espresso. How about a compete.com-esque tool that allows me to enter the products and gives me a trend line showing the positive or negative buzz about the products?

Even better would be an aggregation of these, similar to what is happening on Trendrr but using natural language processing to care for abbreviations, related works and the like. Trendrr is a great first step and I think could prove to be a bridge to the Twitterverse 2.0.

I will be keeping my bananas peeled on these developments. Tweet me with or comment with others! @schneidermike.

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