The original Free

Chris Anderson's book Free: the Future of a Radical Price is getting a lot of buzz for its thesis that companies can make a lot of money by offering free digital products. As soon as I started hearing about this stuff I thought, "Someone has been reading Abbie Hoffman."

Hoffman was the original free-ster. He published under the name Free, and took "Barry Freed" as an alias when he was on the run from the law. His book Steal this Book was an underground classic. He was more than talk, though. He helped organize free stores in inner city neighborhoods that gathered cast off goods and gave them away to people in need.

He also was responsible for some of the greatest marketing gimmicks ever invented, not for the purpose of making some company a lot of money, but to bring attention to causes. During the Vietnam war he and his little tribe announced that they were gathering at the Pentagon and would levitate the entire building using witchcraft. The gathering there to participate in the ceremony was probably the first flash mob. He closed down the NYSE one day by throwing dollar bills into the pit from the balcony, causing traders to stop trading and start chasing the bills. During his trial for conspiracy to riot in Chicago he regularly lectured the judge in his Groucho Marxist voice: "In all my years as a defendant that's the most ridiculous ruling I ever heard."

In a sort of sad application of Free, Anderson and others have ripped off Hoffman's riffs and used them to market consumer products. His famous epigram, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life," from his 1968 book Revolution for the Hell of It, adorns countless greeting cards. As Stephen Colbert noted in his interview with Anderson, "So your book Free costs 26 dollars. Well done, my man." Colbert was being more than just a little ironic.

Marketing: focusing on the stuff that matters

I would have loved to be in the meeting when the decision was made to photo-swap one man's head with that of another in this advertisment (You have to click on the image to see a link). I'm also surprised that someone caught the deception -- I usually ignore advertisments this bland and uninformative. Microsoft looks a little silly on this one.

Telling stories in Second Life

Organizational cultures and sub-cultures was a big topic in my Org Behavior class this semester. Although people within companies often speak of "the company culture" which is determined by its executives, researchers typically find a variety of cultures within a single organization. Each culture has its own assumptions, values, and language, and the differences are sometimes sources of conflict.

Our project this semester was to shoot a video in Second Life that told an organizational story. My team's machinima video attempted to illustrate the differences between engineering and marketing cultures. This "culture clash" has been a rich source of material for Scott Adams, so we freely borrowed from the Dilbert strips, while providing narration based on academic research and our own experiences.

The video lacks in its execution, but was a nice learning experience. Videos like these would be a fast, cheap way to develop prototypes for new services. The prototypes could be viewed by potential customers and their feedback collected prior to giving the demos to managers. That's something I'd like to try to do some day.

Snow day

We had about 2 or 3 inches of snow last night and today. In central N.C., that means everything shuts down, including the universities. That's a lot different from, say, central Illinois, where it takes a blizzard to close schools and people are expected to make it to work on snowshoes. I missed my marketing class, which was a shame. I'm taking marketing and services management this semester in my MBA program at NC State. If every things goes according to plan I'll graduate in December.

Of course, not everyone thinks an MBA is the best way to improve one's life.

What's a marketing guru?

This marketing stuff is new to me, so I followed a link to an article about marketing guru Seth Godin. I read some of the entries on his popular blog and found it to be well-written and interesting. Cool. So I picked up his short book, The Dip, to see what a marketing guru says about marketing. Two hours later I was finished. I can sum it all up like this:

• Be the best
• Quit when you're not getting anywhere
• Stick it out if you think you'll succeed

Sorry, apparently there are millions are rabid SG fans out there, but I don't get it. I felt like I'd just read an extended riff by Stuart Smalley. Perhaps his other books are a little stronger in content, but The Dip isn't the best introduction to marketing.