Ze Frank: think struggling brilliant independent. Now imagine that your daily video blog has taken your long-time site into the top 5,000 to 4,000 sites in traffic on the Internet. How do you make money at daily video blogging without feeling like a complete sell out?

Apparantly the answer might be micro-duckie sponsorships — little icons that appear now under each episode that, when you roll over them, display a 50-character message that isn’t even hyperlinked. To borrow a Ze Frankism: worst ad unit … EVER! But at $5, $10 or $50 for a whopping duckie, they are priced for fans and minor patrons. In the last couple of days, he’s sold thousands of dollars in micro-duckie sponsorships each day. I’ve found myself READING THEM because they are like fortune cookie hiakus or one-line classifieds.

My favorite $10 micro-duckie so far said simply, “Support what you love before it goes away.” There is something sophisticated going on here: these are crappy ads that will keep advertisers away and leave it in the realm of “tip jar with benefits.” You’re not really selling something to your fans, you’re accepting donations and providing a little something extra.

Smart stuff, Ze … I’ll be watching how your experiment unfolds. And I owe you a micro-duckie.

In one sense, I find myself thinking a lot about processes and journeys, learning and transformation. I’m reminded of some of the educational theory courses I took back in the dark ages, especially of the work of Lev Vygotsky [wiki]. He was writing about childhood learning and development, but in a way learning has become a lifelong survival trait in the modern age. I wonder how many of his theories apply to the conversations and risk taking and learning of the Web.

For example, Vygotsky was fascinated by the concept of “zones of proximal development” – for him, the difference between what a child could accomplish on their own and what they could accomplish under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. That zone is about learning that is “just out of reach” rather than what has already been learned. That process of providing that collaboration or guidance was called “scaffolding” in Vygotsky’s theories.

I’m certainly not the first person to ponder these thoughts: if you dig into the conceptual descendants of Vygotsky’s work you find things like “activity theory” as applied to information systems or conceptual frameworks like “distributed cognition“. At the core, though, is probably also a lesson about the nature of collaboration and creation in the digital age. Part of what makes bloggers bloggers could be attributed to activity theory: the process of learning from doing in collaboration with people that help scaffold your learning process. Scaffolds fall away as you learn to do it more and more yourself: in fact, you probably start serving as a scaffold for others who are learning by doing. Sometimes you hear the phrase “cognitive apprenticeships” used to describe this as well.

What does all of this have to do with marketing or even Ford Bold Moves? Welcome to my personal zone of proximal development: those are the questions I’m pondering. I’m not sure I have the answers yet, but I’m confronted with the realization that maybe many of us on the Web have missed out on thinking of ourselves as involved in a process rather than just creating products and artifacts. The journey might be even more important than the original destination.

A month later I became a part of the creative team working with a major company trying to walk that kind of talk. Public relations, advertising, marketing and corporate communications turn to metaphors from documentary filmmaking, news publishing, blogging and other disciplines looking for new ideas – new ideas on how to embrace transparency as a company, new ideas on to how to listen to the conversations on Web, and new ideas on how to participate in them.

It is messy, contentious, imperfect, and slower than it should be, but it gets better with every build. It remarkably embraces letting people write about the client, or the issues they are embroiled in, instead of writing for them under their direction. It documents moments of brutal honesty, passionate disagreement and gritty determination. It tries to acknowledge the conversation swirling around the rest of the Web, from praise to criticism to bad news headlines.

The project exists for reasons that Mark Fields articulates in the Intro of the project: “The one thing we’re trying to do throughout this organization is rip out the b.s., rip out the political posturing, and get the issues on the table and have a constructive conflict.” At the same time, the project is also an instrument of transformation: the only thing more transformative than learning to listen to the Web is having a videocamera lens pointed at you during a meeting.

Yes, there are critics. Today, Jalopnik brought this all up again by picking up on Henry’s enthusiasm for a set of Blogads we’re running, summing it up pretty well with:

This is all interesting…and yes, the Bold Moves videos are all about saying stuff other companies aren’t saying — but we kinda thought the Cluetrain Manifesto was all about having “real conversations” between businesses and consumers. We’re not entirely sure it means buying your way onto the page the conversations are occurring.

Totally understandable, and I agree about the heart of Cluetrain being conversation. I’d point out, though, that the advice you’d give anyone about participating in a conversation online is that the first order of business is learning to listen. In a way, we could have waited to launch the project until after all the transformation was done, but we kinda hoped it would be more interesting for people if they got to watch.

What we have instead is an opportunity to watch that transformation happen. Since we’re fresh eyes looking in on the client’s process, bringing with us the feedback of the conversation all around the Web, the project also becomes one of the tools of transformation. I find myself using the word “ombudsman” alot with our teams. Of course, the Cluetrain Manifesto laid all of that potential upside for companies that “take delivery” seven years ago, but the delivery doesn’t arrive all in one shipment.

Conversely, I’ve never personally seen launching Blogad campaigns as “buying your way onto the page” — it is far less that than it is about stimulating conversation and curiousity. I’d be interested in hearing what people like Steve Rubel think of that fear.

In March I made yet another sorjourn down to Austin, Texas for SXSW — my first year was 1988 (when my career was in music), I had a film there in 2001, and this year I was sitting on a panel on the interactive side fascinating called “Cluetrain: Seven Years Later” with Doc Searls, Heather Armstrong and Henry Copeland. It has become one of those rare events where the interactive and filmic communities that I’m a part of really intersect and have the chance to cross-fertilize, and never has that rubbing together become more interesting than now.

The “Cluetrain” panel was at a bloody early hour of the morning, but it didn’t stop it from being occassionally fiery. Doc, after describing good online marketers as “arsonists,” went on to predict “an explosion in independent filmmaking you can’t imagine” as the next territory of what a 14-year anniversery of Cluetrain panel might cover. As you can imagine, my eyes popped out of my head. The panel covered a lot of territory (and you’ll have to wait until June 8th to be able to download the podcast), but one of the interesting strands was about sustainability.

I asked the audience how many of them had business plans that culminated in exit strategies of “and we’ll get acquired by X” or “and we’ll go public”. Not a single hand went up — whether that’s a sign that people were too shy to admit such a Web 1.0 business model or if it really was an irrelevant question to them (”What’s your exit strategy for your blog?”) could be up for debate, but I remember a day when hands would have shot up enthusiastically around the room. When I asked the question, “How many of you are looking for ways to make your projects or companies sustainable,” those hands went shooting up again.

Sadly, if you walked across the hallway to the filmmaker sessions people were still crowding into panels on “How to get your film acquired” instead of “blogging and filmmaking”. My collegues in filmmed entertainment are still mired, for the most part, in the kind of Web 1.0 business models that come with having huge corporate gatekeepers of distribution. Not all of them, mind you: there’s a growing wave of “new independents” that have essentially grown up with the Web (and if there is one thing that the Internet is good for it is opening up chains of distribution from the hands of gatekeepers.) Most of them are also a generation younger: I regularly cringe now when some bright filmmaker tells me they were 16 when we launched indieWIRE (or that they were 12 the first year I went to SXSW.)

ReveNews has become nearly as ancient … not as old as indieWIRE, but older than Cluetrain. When I first started writing it in 1998, it was essentially a working notebook on sustainability models for online publishers from having our arms deep in it as brand publishers. It started with observations like, “Wow, we’re making the equivalent of $74 CPM on revenue-sharing banners? What does this mean to us as sustainable publishers?” It has led, over the years, in a myriad of directions, but sustainability (of business models, of marketing models and during the dark times even industry models) has been one of those ongoing threads of this community.

A new revolution (heck, several at the same time, but let’s focus one at a time) is getting ready to break out around the last distribution bottleneck that the Internet hasn’t yet warped, mutated, blown out and deconstructed. In many ways (for me, at least) the last eleven years have been about preparing for this particular storm. In 1997 I sat on a panel at the Sundance Film Festival that seems amusingly dated today called “The Internet for Filmmakers”. Filmmakers wanted to hear that the Internet would free them from distribution, and I was the geek having to explain to them that 28.8 modems weren’t quite ready yet to distribute films. “It will be at least another decade before we’re ready for that, but that day is coming,” I raved like so many other wide-eyed early advocates of the digital revolution.

What we … the Web … have been learning collectively for that last decade is how to meet the challenges that come with being responsible for your own distribution and sustainability. How do I attract an audience? How do I generate revenue to sustain production? How do I sell downloads? DVDs? What can I give away for free that others have to charge for? Some of the most interesting people asking themselves those questions these days are filmmakers: they are starting to talk about sustainability and learning to think like marketers.

How does a revolution incorporate sustainability into its core identity?

AdAge’s real beef seems to be with advertisers like American Express (who “paid a handful of bloggers to discuss small business”) and the use of blogs as a “word of mouth” vehicle — so they turn to the WOMMA to defend blogs:

“Bosses accept some screwing off as a cost of doing business; it keeps employees happy and promotes camaraderie. Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, said blogs have become the favored diversion for ‘office goof-off time,’ though he notes it’s hard to segregate blog time since blogs often bounce readers to professional media sites.”

Left to defend their own strawman (a requirement for “objective journalism” is to appear to search for answers even if you don’t find them), they do their best to seem forgiving of blogs that might actually have something to do with business:

“Some blogs do relate to work, but deciding just how relevant they are to the employer is open to debate. For this analysis, Ad Age chose a simple score: Count all business blog traffic, half of tech and media blogs and one-fourth of political/news blogs as directly related to work.

“Based on ComScore’s tally of blog categories, this suggests just 25% of blog visits directly connect to the job. Employees this year will spend 4.8 billion work hours absorbing wisdom from other blogs that may enlighten visitors but not amuse the boss.”

Take that, strawman attacker! 1.6 billion work hours of that 6.4 billion wasted hours might not have been completely wasted! Don’t blame ReveNews, we don’t waste any employee time here. Don’t blame indieWIRE: we only wasted half of your worker’s time (as we’re a media blog). Blame Gawker, as they are not in a protected blog category! They are even bragging about it so they’re just asking for it!

I tell myself I should approach this objectively, and give equal weight to both sides of this issue: the side of me that cackles in glee that they still don’t get it, and the side of me that thinks the lady doth protest too much. Then I’d be covering both sides of the issue.

Just last week, I was evangelizing the importance of “general research” (seriously learning something new, but not something required to solve an immediate problem) to one of my co-workers. Using a simple score where I ignored all data that didn’t fit my central argument, I proved that a daily commitment of 2 or more hours each day to “general research” was the single most important trait for success as entrepreneurs. People who don’t understand that learning new things is a part of everyone’s job description in the digital age (or who don’t understand the blogsphere’s role in producing learning opportunities) probably to be frightened of the future.

Several imaginary confidential insiders note that it must drive people like Jason Calacanis crazy to see Andy Sernovitz quoted defending the strawman of blog reading as “office goof-off time.” Blogs combine the boogeyman of “word of mouth” with the reliable strawman of office productivity in jeopardy, served up just in time for Halloween to scare us all. It’s just the kind of ghost story that could keep a technophobic office manager or major B2B print publisher up all night!

At the same time, over at the IAB/AdWeek Mixx Conference & Awards the “Art of the H3ist” campaign picked up an embarrassing number of awards (in no small part due to the tremendous overview of the workings of the campaign put together by the agency McKinney.) At the panel I sat on at OMMA (about marketing with “micromedia” like blogs and podcasts), the recent Audi campaign was one of my frequent examples of the unexpected ways to market via community micromedia.

When part of the topic turned to some panelists’ reports that they had to explain to their clients that advertising in blogs frequently produced lower results, it rang very different for me: not only were blog placements great producers of visitors and buzz, they were even more impressive in terms of efficiency because they were so cheap. A number of publications and blogs picked up on the metric soundbyte of the comment, but not necessarily all of the context for why the approach of the ads was as much to blame as the blogs they got placed on.

In a complete example of irony, a comment here and there in the blogsphere on the topic has misconnected the Mixx Awards and who throws that conference with the panel I was on at OMMA, suggesting my comments were “more IAB and agency-driven hype for the purpose of creating new interactive revenue streams.” And I thought I had a tin foil hat!

Without a doubt, traditional media marketers are going to like the Audi campaign, because it used traditional media in untraditional ways (a theme that Joseph Jaffe picked up on) as much as it also used untraditional media in ways that also aren’t at all traditional (but still are in service to traditional metrics and measurement.)

But a big part of the “micromedia” or “consumer-generated content” approach (see Tom Hespos’ excellent post-OMMA thoughts on the topic) is thinking of ad space in a different way. I’m not the only person placing ads on blogs that mentions to one another that there’s a difference in the response rate from some blog networks versus others. I personally think, at least if you’re approaching them as conversational marketing, that the IAB standards are part of the problem. At least in blogs, they establish you as “an ad” — which makes it even more challenging (but not impossible) to convince them that instead you’re a part of the conversation they are already having.

So in places the Heist used IAB standards to remarkable results (by using them in different ways than normal), and in other places embracing non-IAB standards (especially HTML/image combos) contributed significantly to reach and pre-qualification of engagement. In a truly integrated strategy, you don’t have to pick one thing over another, you can have all of the above. Don’t confuse the placement with the synergy between the creative and the placement (as these are strange branded entertainment approaches to ads.)

That said, the category of community media (my preference to “consumer-generated content”) remains this area that marketers continue to try to figure out (and a topic I’ll be writing more about.)

While online marketers have always been excited by the “bling bling” of interactive digital media, they frequently seem suprised or startled when media emerges online from that core innovation of the Web. Despite being nearly 10 years since the publishing of the Cluetrain Manifesto, online marketers are still confused and nervous about a world where the line between publisher and audience is thinner and thinner. I still occassionally have clients that say things like, “Not everyone should be allowed to have a blog” or “We need to stop people from saying that kind of thing.”

The Internet and the people who use it, however, have never been confused on this subject (even if perhaps they can’t express it), and if you look at where both the greatest sum of human attention and the greatest sum of bandwidth on the Internet are going, you find it leading back to that same core of many-to-many media — email, instant messenger, online gaming, peer-to-peer sharing (like BitTorrent), discussion boads and community media make up the thriving heart of this medium. Sorry to say, but buying stuff and click ads rank way below that.

If you think you’re working on something innovative in online publishing or advertising and that something doesn’t enable your audience to collaborate with other audience members, you’re still stuck in the mold of reproducing old media approaches in a new environment. Not that there’s anything bad about that, mind you: television networks are still putting cameras on radio hosts and thinking that makes good TV. But with that mindset, you’re likely to continue to look at things like blogs and podcasting and wikipedia (let alone newer more potentially disruptive technologies like Grease Monkey) as strange, fragmented, dangerous, confusing niches.

Like Cluetrain said so long ago, companies seem afraid of their marketplaces — and the more organized and collaborative those marketplaces, the more capable they are of throwing monkeywrenches into the safe and controlled channels that a one-to-many marketer would prefer. The most interesting innovations in online marketing (and therefore the people that I’m most interesting in rubbing shoulders with at OMMA) are those that embrace the Internet as a community, a conversation, a many-to-many experience. A marketer’s real choice is whether they choose to participate in that conversation or stick their fingers in their ears and hope all those disruptive, uncontrollable niches go away (or that they aren’t talking about you.)

Alasdair wrote in that comment on this article:

“By making your handset discoverable you are permissioning ANYONE to send you something. It’s like putting your number in the phone book [...] So if you don’t want it, don’t [a] turn bluetooth on [b] make handset discoverable and [c] walk into the zone and [d] accept the content.”

Welcome to what I think is the one of the new battlegrounds in privacy and marketing: your cellphone and PDA.

During a recent campaign, we explored the potential of doing “bluecasting” (inside the context of a game) and were surprised to discover that there were people to partner with that could provide Bluetooth transmitters with a kilometer broadcast radius. Think about that for a second: a kilometer radius is goodly chunk of Manhattan or LA. It would even fit in the trunk of a car, so you have a mobile transmitter if you really want it.

We intended to use it entirely on a permission basis: people with Bluetooth devices would be able to find our transmitter as a discoverable device. It is true, however, that this exact same system could have done the discovery and tried to push a handshaking packet to every device it could find.

Yes, to every cellphone with Bluetooth where someone who had left the device on as discoverable (perhaps from when they were actually using Bluetooth for what it is designed for: build links between their own devices) in a kilometer radius. The user would have had to authorize that connection, true enough, but discoverable is not the same thing as “permission for anybody to call”.

Aunty Spam describes Alasdair’s comment as invoking the dubious “She Asked For It” defense.

I agree with her: Bluecasting can be a very cool tool, when it is clearly used as a way to provide interactive services with permission. Being able to use my Treo to browse a catalog in a bookstore … or even choose to receive messages from Filter … is a great avenue to explore. It would just be entirely too sad if we had to fight the whole “permission marketing” fight again just because it is some new protocol for delivering that message. No matter how cool a new technology is, someone will always try to make a weak argument that a passive action implies consent to unsolicited messages.

I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s excellent piece on business and “Open Source” (Open Source thinking keeps popping up with this line of thinking) with his remarks about “average quality” not being the point of blogs:

Those in the print media who dismiss the writing online because of its low average quality are missing an important point: no one reads the average blog. In the old world of channels, it meant something to talk about average quality, because that’s what you were getting whether you liked it or not. But now you can read any writer you want. So the average quality of writing online isn’t what the print media are competing against. They’re competing against the best writing online.

In the same way, networks aren’t worried about the “average user” (or the “average affiliate”) and their activities anymore: they are worried about the worst of what someone could do given the way the network exists (like the havoc of a stealth installer deployed via IM, or the CPA models those stealth installers exploit to make money from it.) This is no different from encrypting credit card transactions or put up shoplifting sensors at the doors of a physical store — not because your “average customer” is going snoop IP packets or shoplift a camcorder, you are doing it because someone can or might. Your company and its efforts (at least in a networked economy) live or die by the activities of 1% of your users or affiliates.

Which brings us back to that tinge of grey than any open network will always experience. My good buddy Wayne is probably confronted with a Herculean task if he hopes to “re-secure the Greynet” — the fact that applications can be downloaded without central authority is a trait of an open network. Trying to re-secure that infastructure is an arms race that produces evolutionary pressure on both sides, in the same way that computer virii and computer virii removers are driving each other’s evolution toward complexity. Wayne is getting caught in another one of those arm races (securing the open network), but at least he’s assaulting it with the tools of the open network — collaboration between people.

Warren Harrop & Grenville Armitages use “Greynet” in networking terms as “a region of IP address space that is sparsely populated with ‘darknet’ addresses interspersed with active (or ‘lit’) IP addresses.” If an IP address is unused in an “outbound” sense, then there is really no reason for anything to be poking from the outside “inbound” on that IP address — that footprint into the darknet is used by some sophisticated network administrators to watch for all kinds of malicious activity. Not everyone has a big block of unused IP address to play with, so Harrop & Armitages talk about instead using a “greynet” — a sparsely populated area of IP addresses — for the same kind of detection. It seems to work, even though there’s still scatter legitimate use through that same block of IP addresses.

While this is a very different definition that what Wayne is using when he writes about “Greynets,” I wonder if there isn’t some inspiration to be had from the network security vision of “greynets.” To benefit from the positives of an open system like the Internet, one has to accept a certain level of risk: people’s computers will never be 100% IT department sanctioned anymore than all drivers on the highway will obey the law. The risks associated with the actions of that 1% are high enough to be worth finding and enforcing solutions, but not worth taking the cars away from everybody.

If these battles between malware makers and malware vanquishers are like games of chess where both players are playing to win, we could be in for a very long arms race. Perhaps, instead, there’s a method of using the open network itself to play for a draw — something that seeks to perserve a certain shade of grey that’s still acceptable rather than securing the unsecurable.

Gameplay, conceptually, is based upon a set of mutually agreed upon rules: woe to you if you didn’t define the rules well, though, because part of gameplay is getting away with as much as you can within the rules: there are no rules about bluffing in poker, for example. The more people involved, the more likely every rule is to be tested to it’s limit, and the more people’s behavior starts to look like gameplay, or is even openly courted as gameplay. Affiliates test the limits of the rules, exploit loopholes, brazenly ignore the rules and hope to get away with it, and protect people looking at their hands just as much as poker players in a casino. Ditto for search engine arbitrage, and the dance of Google AdWords. Don’t even get me started on the on-going game (that frequently looks more like an arms race) between virus and spyware makers and their cooresponding anti opposition.

Let me give you three quotes to show you where all this starts to come together as a common human trait. The first is historical, but is featured on Jane’s site AvantGame, someone who’s focused on gaming as organic supercomputing and play as problem solving:

“Anything will give up its secrets if you love it enough” – George Washington Carver

The second is from Derek Vaughan, writing about Google AdWords strategies that he compares to “cheating” because they are so good:

“If so, you may be able to save a bundle by cheating Google! Okay, so it’s not exactly cheating per se, but if you’re not using all the tools and tricks that AdWords provides, then you’re definitely leaving money on the table. And, when your competitors see your results, they’ll think you’ve somehow cheated the AdWords system.”

The third is from PaperGhost writing about the newest discoveries in how a certain piece of spyware is spreading:

“A wonderful game of connect the dots is being played out…and it looks like we have a winner. When a raft of circumstantial evidence is available, putting the pieces together usually solves the puzzle. And what a puzzle it has been! A globe-spanning paperhunt, multiple translations and a whole bunch of testing has driven me to one conclusion…”

I know I said before we were bred to gossip, but it is equally true that we were bred to play games and that the ways in which communities function (online and off) has something to do with both. It’s also very likely that part of what networked technology does is enhance those kinds of natural tendencies in communities while increasing the number of emergent possibilities that come from them becoming massively scaled. Which is another way of saying, for example, that affiliate marketing gave birth to spyware and the Internet gave birth to virii as a natural product of gaming the system. If you read the Wikipedia entry on why you shouldn’t game the Wikipedia system, does it remind you of any conversations you’ve had about anything else? What about this, this, this or maybe this?