Congratulations to the First Community-Produced Broadway Musical!

Today is the launch of my friend Ken Davenport’s  show Godspell on Broadway.  Ken is an innovator, gets a lot of things very right, and is always, always thinking about what’s next.

Godspell is an interesting choice because the content is pretty conventional.  I’m sure it will be very well done (and I’ll see next week when I’m in NYC), but what really makes this interesting and exciting is the way it was done.  As you have gathered if you went to the link above, the thing that makes this production really different from everything that’s come before it is that the funding was crowdsourced.  Dozens (or maybe even hundreds) of people bought shares in this show.  That was Ken’s idea, and he has executed it relentlessly.

Really and truly, Kenny, nice work.  People don’t understand entrepreneurs a lot of times because they over value the idea itself.  Ken didn’t develop a laser beam that turns worn out gym socks into clean-burning fuel for the nation’s mini-vans.  He had a simple, powerful idea and he actually brought it into being.

That’s the essence of entrepreneurship.  Innovation is one thing; execution into innovation is the next and more difficult and more valuable thing.  (For more on this, check out Jim Clifton’s indispensable new book The Coming Jobs War.  Really, you must read this book if you care about the future of our country or the world.)  I’ll take a person who executes at a level 10 with a level 6 idea over a level 6 execution person with a level 10 idea every day.

Now if you’ve got both at a level 10…

So Godspeed, Godspell.  This is an exciting day!  And yes, I will change my profile image on Facebook to be the Godspell guy (I think it’s Jesus) today!

(BTW, full disclosure, Goldstar is a small investor in the show.  Ha, ha, ha! You’ve fallen into my wicked plan to have you get interested in going to a show that we stand to make a tiny, tiny fraction of the profits from!)

I wonder how much I could buy the domain ‘qwikster.com’ for?

Not that I’d really want it.  I’m just gob-stopped at the way Netflix has handled itself over the last couple of months.

Netflix is a strong company with a clear sense of the future and a vision for how to get there.  I’m a fan, though not as much of the product itself as I am of the business.  I want businesses like Netflix to exist and succeed.  These days, especially, we need the strength that an innovative company who’ve achieved some scale can bring to the economy.

But I have to say, the communication about the price change has been stunningly amateur, and it’s a worthwhile lesson.  Let’s look back at what happened:

-In July, Netflix announced that the price for DVDs and streaming was going up about 40%.  Wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued.  The company explained in the announcement that it was “better reflecting the underlying costs and offering our lowest prices ever for unlimited DVD” by raising the price.  True, though naturally people hated that.  Suddenly, Netflix, which had been a customer favorite, was getting bashed from every side, and even the stock suffered.

-So in September, Reed Hastings offered an apology for all that.  Well, kind of an apology.  At least, at the beginning, it sounded like an apology because he said “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation.”  What you would expect to follow, if he had ‘messed up’ was some kind of corrective action.  Yet, rather than corrective action, he was in fact announcing that not only would you pay more for both services, but you’ll also have to do that on two separate websites, Netflix and the unfortunately named Qwikster.  A better opening line to the letter might have been “Things are worse than I even told you back in July.”  It was truly disingenuous to frame the letter as an apology when in fact he was not only NOT redressing anyone’s grievances but actually throwing an unexpected second handful of salt in the wound.  Truly, this was shocking to me.  It compares so unfavorably to well-handled mistakes like the Tylenol re-launch or the New Coke debacle back in the 80s.  These were monumental screw-ups, but when the companies said they were sorry and would fix it, they showed they were serious.

-And then today, the announcement came down that Qwikster is dead.  Good riddance, I suppose, but this episode feels dishonest and weird.  Even in today’s post, something bothered me, and it’s this: “While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.”  Are you sure you want to say that, Netflix? What happens in a year or two if you need to make another change?

With due humility and the benefit of hindsight, here perhaps is how the price change should have been announced:

“Thank you for your support and patronage over the years.  Without our customers, Netflix wouldn’t exist.

I have the unfortunate obligation to tell you that we’re increasing our prices because the cost of delivering physical DVDs is so great that selling the combination of streaming and DVDs by mail costs more than we’re currently charging.  We believe that over time, we’ll be able to deliver more and more content online so that the cost to most consumers won’t be more than it is today, but until that time, it will cost more if you want both of these services.  We hope you understand, and we’re sorry that this step is necessary.”

Yes, people would have freaked out, and yes, they’d have been mad that the price is going up, but if it’s the sensible truth, it’s the truth and people would at least feel they’ve been dealt with honestly and given a reasonable explanation.

The lesson I take away from this episode is the following: if you have bad news, deliver it all, quickly, in as unadorned a fashion as possible, with a straightforward explanation and your sincere regrets.  Then put on your hard hats and seat belts to weather the storm, if there is one.

If it turns out you were wrong, here’s the lesson for me there: admit you were wrong; say you’re sorry, and then say what you’re going to do to fix it.  Don’t say you’re wrong, but…

Netflix, I hope, will recover from this, but they have tarnished the trust customers have in them (as brutally evidenced by this graph), and that’s bad.  We don’t strong companies getting weaker.  If you were building an economy on RedBox or Netflix, which would you choose? One’s a reductive step backwards (with a sharp business model, no doubt), and the other’s an amazingly bold attempt at something new and better.

We’re still rooting for you, Netflix, but this is the kind of thing you need to avoid doing again.

Digital Marketing Boot Camp, Poll Question Answers

A couple weeks ago, faced with the prospect of talking about social media to the Digital Marketing Boot Camp for Arts Marketers, I sat down to think about what to say.

And while it’s typically pretty easy for me to hold forth on just about anything, I suddenly realized I had no idea what to say because I had no idea what people wanted to know.  So through the magic of Facebook, I asked.

In short, I wanted to know why anyone cared about social media to begin with.  I didn’t mean that sarcastically.  I meant it literally: why do you care?  I put several possible answers into the question and people were able to add their own, which they did.

The winner?

“Because social media connects [my organization or my client's organization] to audiences in a fun, interactive way.” About 31% of those who answered chose this one.

It was followed by “Because we want to improve our customer service and communication with it” at just under 30%.

“Because we want to sell tickets there” was at a lowly 12% and in fourth place, behind “because so many people are using social media that we want to reach.”

Conveniently for my talk, the most popular answer was one created by one of the survey respondents, Saretta Holler Brown, who does PR work for Situation Marketing.  To see the rest of the answers in full detail, including who answered what, you can check it out for yourself.  Heck feel free to answer the question if the spirit moves you.

If you do answer now, though, you are sadly ineligible for the free pass to the Digital Marketing Boot Camp that we were giving away, because that was awarded to PS 122′s Carleigh Welsh, who was selected at semi-random.  Congrats, Carleigh!  We’ll see you in NYC.

And, just for kicks, here’s a preview of one of my slides for the presentation.  I’ll give a few more sneak peeks as we get closer:

It’ll all make sense later.  Trust me.

We’re a Little Worse Today

Julius Caesar was a genius.  Not just a regular, work-on-really-complicated-rocket-stuff-for-NASA kind of genius.  He was the kind of genius who understood that the Roman Republic was corrupt, spent, and about to be vulnerable to outside domination if it didn’t get fixed fast.  Fortunately, as the greatest military AND political mind of his generation, he took over the Republic as a dictator and began a rapid-fire series of reforms, almost all of which worked.  The Republic got better and it got better quickly.

Of course, this didn’t sit well with everyone, and he was assassinated in the Senate, as everyone knows.  To Rome’s great fortune, Octavian (who you probably know as Augustus) was as great a genius as Julius Caesar and when he took over, the Roman “Republic” (really an empire by then) kept improving, growing and getting stronger.

Then things took a turn for the worse.  Tiberius followed Augustus, and he was a terrible Emperor.  Caligula followed Tiberius, and well, madness ensued.  Caligula went so far as to attack the Mediterranean Sea with a legion of soldiers to show that he had defeated Neptune.

The moral of the story is that some people are special.  When Julius Caesar is leading your army, you don’t ask “how do we make more of him?” because you never will.  Surely, he inspired people and created models that got repeated and followed, right up to this day, but that doesn’t mean you can duplicate him or gin up an army of clones.  You don’t ask ‘how do we make sure the next emperor is as wise and discerning as Augustus?” because he won’t be.  That’s why our founders here in America (another set of un-repeatables) were smart enough to know that if we built a system that relied on finding a “special” person to make everything work, we would be screwed.  Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, among others, happened to be there in one place, with one goal, when our country was being founded.  That was an immense stroke of luck.  If every president had to be Thomas Jefferson for America to succeed, we’d have never made it through the Madison administration.

Because special people of that kind are extremely rare.

Yesterday, we lost one of those people, and there’s no way to replace him.  That kind of genius doesn’t scale.  My career is in roughly the same field as Steve Jobs, and I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of stuff: some of it good, some of it stupid.  There are so many intelligent, hard-working people in the “tech” business that it’s an honor just to run with these people.

But.

He was the very best of us.

If there were a club made up of Steve Jobs and his peers, it would only have had one member: Steve Jobs.  Even guys with epoch-making accomplishments and enormous egos concede this point happily.

Yes, he left a legacy, and there’s plenty you can learn from Steve Jobs that could make you a better person, a better business executive, a better entrepreneur, a better designer, but…

Make no mistake.  We’re a little worse today than we were yesterday.

Caesar is dead.  Long live Caesar.

The Great Jump Ball Continues

Two things over the weekend have caused me to revisit the notion of the current period in history as the Great Jump Ball.  For the non-basketball initiated, when two players both grab the ball at the same time and neither of them has clear possession, the referee calls a jump ball.  The players who were fighting for the ball then stand on either side of a line and the referee throws the ball into the air, equidistant between the two of them, and they’re not allowed to move until the ball reaches the peak of its straight-up flight.

And then the ball is up for grabs.

Right now, global society is one big jump ball, and the society of the 21st century is being formed.  This is always partly true, of course, but for most of the last 60 or so years, we’ve been working within the basic post World War II-framework.  That framework is being revisited, revised, and replaced.

Here was the first bit of news that reminded me of that this weekend: in the U.S., deaths from drugs now outnumber deaths from traffic fatalities.  What’s even more fascinating about this is that it’s the afterschool special drugs that are doing it; it’s prescription drugs.  Meanwhile, cars keep getting safer, and over the last few years, auto fatalities have taken a dramatic downward dip.  Start with this graph, which shows the two trends going in opposite directions, and then move on to this chart, which tells a story of which drugs account for those deaths, where, for example, deaths from prescription anti-anxiety drugs increased by 284% from 2000 to 2008.  If you really want to ruin your morning, start this interactive graph on the year 2000 and then slide it forward in time.  Watch the states darken, as though a plague were spreading, as the drug deaths from things that had mostly been given to them by their doctors, increase.

I’m still absorbing this story, but here’s the rub for me: at the top of the skill pyramid in society, engineers can make cars safer, even if they’re crashed.  In the middle and, likely, at the bottom, people are confronted with medicines they can no longer safely administer to themselves, or alternatively, they choose not to.  This is globalization showing itself in the lives of everyday people in both good and bad ways, but if you’re not paying attention, you might not notice at all.

Here’s the second piece.  Just read this tidbit from the story:

“Gamers have solved the structure of a retrovirus enzyme whose configuration had stumped scientists for more than a decade…After scientists repeatedly failed to piece together the structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus, they called in the Foldit players. The scientists challenged the gamers to produce an accurate model of the enzyme. They did it in only three weeks.”

Foldit isn’t exactly The Sims.  It’s a pretty heavy duty community of deep thinkers, but it is still a game, and they really did solve a problem that resisted solution by dedicated, trained scientists for a long time.

In.  Three.   Weeks.

Did you get that?  A semi-anonymous group of amateurs playing a game solved a major scientific problem that still couldn’t be solved after a decade of work in the time it takes to watch a season of Friday Night Lights. Personally, I might have re-written the headline to be: Scientists Succeed by Using Gaming Community to Solve Problem, because that’s the real story.

There is no meaningful example of  this kind of thing in the 20th century world, but the world after the Jump Ball will have plenty of them.  How will they happen?  Who will they serve?

TBD.

What I Learned on September 13th, 2001

I don’t have one of those powerful personal stories for 9/11.  I was safely in bed in Pasadena, California when the madness began to unfold, and all I did was gape at the TV all day like most people, hoping the world wasn’t coming to an end.  There were only one or two people I knew very tangentially who died that day, though of course, I knew a lot of people who were there or nearby, as most of us did.

And really, no one needs to hear a 9/11 story from a person like me.  Only vanity would drive someone who was so far from the fireball to try to convince you that what I contemplated or experienced that day was worth mentioning compared to what we heard on the 10th anniversary yesterday from people with the important and powerful stories to tell.

I do have an important 9/13 story, though.  Well, sort of important.  Important in that I believe it revealed a special secret about human nature and because it helped nudge forward the existence of my company, Goldstar.  And because I’d like people to know this little secret.

Here’s my 9/13 story.

Like most of you who weren’t directly involved with the events of the day on 9/11, I sat riveted to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC and the rest that day, flipping from station to station waiting for the next bit of info on the crawl.  (Not a lot of people remember that the “crawl” was invented because of 9/11.  Before that, tv screens were blissfully free of a never-ending ‘aside’ other than perhaps stock quotes on the financial channels.)

On 9/12, I got up and put myself right back in that same spot on the sofa in my old house.  But human nature’s funny: a few hours later, I got fatigued of this because, as riveted as I was and as important as the events were that were still unfolding, I couldn’t do anything about it and it wasn’t affecting me at that moment.  It was  late morning on 9/12 when something other than terrorism and cataclysm entered my head.

And do you know what that thing was?  Tickets.  Specifically, tickets to see Wynton Marsalis the LA Phil and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra at the Hollywood Bowl.  And these tickets were for the very next day, 9/13/01.

In tv shows and movies, you sometimes see a person who’s trying to make a decision, and on one shoulder is an angel and on the other a devil.  Typically, these two figures resemble each other (and the person deciding), except that one is clad in red and might have a pitchfork and the other robed in white.  They’re basically equal and opposite; they symbolize the ambivalence of the person.

But if such a metaphorical pair of spirits had been standing over my shoulders, they wouldn’t have been equals.  The “Go to the Show!” side would be argued by The Hulk or Optimus Prime and the “Stay Home or You Might Get Blown Up!” argument would have some wretched creature like Smigel from Lord of the Rings or Jon Lovitz as its spokesperson.

I knew I wanted to be at that show.  It wasn’t even a feeling of wanting to “keep the terrorists from winning,” because on that day, at that time, they were winning.  Believe me, it wasn’t fatalism either.  9/11/01 also stands in memory for me as the first day of pre-school for my son Jake, so on a day of death, I had been given a profound reminder of some pretty good reasons to live.

No, I wanted to go because I wanted to be with all those people.  Something about confirming emotionally that the world wasn’t breaking up.  That the laws of physics still applied.  Remember that hysteria, perhaps rightly, was running pretty wild at that moment.  There were no airplanes flying anywhere in the United States or across the Atlantic.  (I remember in fact someone saying that the Atlantic is quiet for the first time since the 30s or 40s and just marveling dumbstruck at that idea.)  There was panic just below the surface, although Americans generally behaved extremely well.

But one thing that the chatterers who had been chattering as never before kept saying, as though they knew, was that people would not gather in large groups or that people should not gather in large groups because that could make them a target.  Surely, no one will gather in large groups any more, at least for a while, they said.  They said.  And they said.

But F’ it.  I was going.  If they didn’t cancel the show because no one gathers in large groups or high profile places like the Hollywood Bowl anymore, then I would go.  If I were the only person there, Wynton could play for me alone.  I hoped other people would be there, but either way, I was going.

And here’s the secret I wanted you to know: everybody else felt the same way I did.  There might have been a few Smigels out there, hiding in their caves, “afraid to gather in large groups,” but they were outnumbered by the people who poured into the venue, filling it up and creating an atmosphere of unhinged excitement that had the potential at any moment to switch suddenly to fury, grief or even delight.  It was like everything was close to the surface.

People did as they do during hard times of shared trauma: they treated each other nicely.  Food and wine were shared.  No one was a stranger, and conversation with people on the concourses and parking lot were easy.  That’s what you’d expect.  And the crowd did a truly impressive rendition of the national anthem.  Seeing  that flag go up somehow made people feel that if we could still raise our flag, we weren’t beaten.

The secret is that people need to be with people in settings where something special is happening.  They’re not just there for the “content.” They’re there because being together beats being alone.  In bad times, grim times, scary times perhaps more than when things are sailing along swimmingly, people want and need live entertainment.  They’re not just in it for a couple hours of amusement. They’re in it because they want to be there, with the performers, in the place, with the other people, in the scene, smelling the smells, listening to the weird little conversations, feeling the air, remembering what point in their lives this performance or game or thing marked.

We’re apart from each other enough.  Our experience is “mediated” enough, and now more than ever.

It’s not just entertainment for the sake of distracting you from an otherwise dull existence. It’s a touchstone that helps you understand what your life is and remember what it was and dream about what it’s going to be.  And in the darkness of the days following 9/11, I learned the secret that people needed that then perhaps more than ever before.

I have another ticket that I keep in my office.  It’s made of bronze and it’s almost 2000 years old.  It was a ticket to see a chariot race at the Circus Maximus sometime around the 1st century.  It’s a reminder that we work in an ancient industry fulfilling an ancient need.  I like to picture the Roman who was holding that ticket.  I even imagine, for the sake of making the daydream more exciting, that this Roman was one of my ancestors.  Who knows what was happening in that Roman’s life and why he or she went to the chariot races that day? It probably wasn’t shortly after a Roman 9/11-type event (of which they were many in a thousand years of history); but it could have been a personal moment of crisis.  Or a particularly beautiful Italian autumn day with family or friends or a new lover.  Anyway, I like to think that whoever held that ticket kept it safe (which enabled it to survive down to me) because it meant something to them.  It reminded them of what their life was like on that one day…

No one’s going to have my ticket on their wall in the year 4000.  It’s paper and it will be long gone back to dust.  And I don’t particularly want to spend a lot of time revisiting the way it felt after 9/11, even for someone like me who got off easy. It was awful, even at 3000 miles remove.  But I do like to think back on that moment at the Hollywood Bowl where I felt for the first time that despite the awfulness, it would eventually be ok again, at least for most of us, the lucky ones.

And I do occasionally like to remember the moment when I realized the business concept that Rich, Robert and I were researching might just make sense, not just because of what our data told us, but because of an important secret deeply embedded in the human heart.

Wrong Question, Yahoo

Do you remember when Yahoo ruled the world?

I certainly do.  I was part of a company that Yahoo bought in 1999 for almost $5 billion in stock.  A few months later, that stock was worth even more, going as high as $108 per share (split adjusted) on December 31, 1999, compared to today’s $13 or so.  The company was worth nearly half a trillion dollars and making huge, drippy troughs of money.

Now, well, what can you say?  Google ate their lunch.  It isn’t exactly the end of the world to make a billion dollars a year and be worth “only” $16 billion, but it isn’t the future Yahoo believed it had.

So yesterday’s firing of Carol Bartz didn’t surprise me.  Nor will it make any difference.  She was on a suicide mission and so will the next Yahoo CEO be UNLESS…someone comes up with a good answer to the question, “What is Yahoo and why should it exist?”

Fundamentally, that’s the question that faces every organization of every size and type.  It’s what Ries and Trout, advertising and marketing gurus of the 20th century, called “Positioning.” Have you got a “position” in the minds of the people in the marketplace?  What do you mean to them?  If the answer is “a little bit of a lot of things,” you’re probably in trouble.

So the important question is not “Who’s the next CEO of Yahoo?”  It’s “What is Yahoo?”  You can be successful there, or anywhere, without a good answer to that.

I Have a Question for You…

In October, I’m talking about social media at the Digital Media Boot Camp for Arts Marketers in NYC.  And as I started to think about what I’d say, I kept going backwards, like this:  What should I talk about?  What do people want to know? What are people doing in social media?  What do people think about social media?

Until I arrived at the terminal point in my thinking:

Why does anybody care about social media in the first place?  In this audience, I mean.  Any answer I would have come up with would be just an assumption, so, being a data-driven marketer, I thought I’d start with a question:

Why do you, arts and live entertainment marketers, care about social media?

So if you’ve got an answer, kindly go to the little Facebook poll question that I made and answer please.  You can either check the answers given or add your own.  I’ve gotten a nice handful of responses so far, but I’d like to get a wider range of opinions!  This is really going to be influential on the presentation that I give, and any brilliant insights from anyone who answers will be given full attribution in front of the gathered audience.

Thanks!

Five Million Tickets

I’ve been roaming the great American southwest for the last couple weeks or so and away from my desk, but I want to pass along a cool piece of info.

Here’s a write up by Techcrunch about Goldstar’s 5,000,000th ticket sold.  We’re pretty excited and excited to be in Techcrunch as well.

If you don’t mind, retweet, like or even (if you could) comment about your (undoubtedly) positive experiences with Goldstar on that story.  Thanks!