UGC and The Law

Published by moderation company Tempero, this guide helps site owners get to grips with how their social media ventures might fall foul of the law and how to avoid that happening. Relying on former audience members to generate your site’s content for free sounds like a jolly good wheeze, but the consequences of using non-contracted employees as your writers might be a spell in the slammer if you aren’t careful. And it doesn’t matter how big you are or where your company’s headquarters are located, as Google discovered recently. The most common problem is copyright violation, of course, but defamation, discrimination, incitement to bad things, privacy violations, aiding and abetting and obscenity are all perfectly possible. Most of the time common sense should be a good guide: if it is illegal offline, then it’s illegal online too; if someone asks you to take something down and gives a good reason, then you should take action or seek advice; a site owner can not rely upon the defence of being a ‘mere conduit’. Nonetheless, pretty-much anyone will discover things here that will open their eyes and lead to a spot more caution.

At 48-pages, this is quite a comprehensive overview. However, like a lot of ‘free’ legal advice, the guide tells you just enough to persuade you that you probably need a lawyer. ;-)

The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media

The second guide comes from US marketing firm Marketo and gives a good overview of how B2B companies can use social media. These media are still somewhat under-exploited in the B2B space with the likes of Twitter and Facebook often viewed as wholly consumer-facing vehicles. The guide has a workbook format with exercises to do and model examples to help show best practise. It encompasses quick guides to particular networks, but the main meat of the book is designing strategies to help guide what content to create, how to measure it and how one might justify the necessary investment. Also 48-pages long. (Hat-tip to my friends at Velocity for their design and sub-editing work).

Note that this isn’t the same as digital maoism. Reznor and the rest are still focused on making music and being rock stars, not selling T-shirts and so forth. Masnick also makes the point that getting all the extra “business” stuff done is a useful job for an agent or even a label, and might help justify their existence.

Just a quick note to point out the publisher-sanctioned free PDF available of The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. It’s a guide to building and running online communities and social networks. Bacon is the community manager for the Ubuntu operating system, the dominance of which compared to other Linux variants is arguably down to the strength of its online community.

The download was actually released in September, but I only found it today. I assume some readers have been similarly remiss.

I may write a little about its content later, but for the moment, a note on the publishing strategy.

O’Reilly is undoubtedly a little more progressive than most publishers, for whom giving away versions of their properties for nothing would seem like madness. It’s also released under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing and remixing of the contents – I could, for example, produce a 20-page ‘version’ of the tome and give it away here for free. (I won’t, though – I may have some time on my hands, but I’m not mentally ill).

Why should/would publishers do this? It’s actually a really shrewd commercial move. Think about the upsides:

1. People on the Internet love FREE STUFF. They feel warmly to people who give it to them. I like O’Reilly as a business to a greater extent because they’ve done this. I am slightly more likely to buy stuff from it.
2. It generates a lot of buzz and positive PR. I’ve blogged about the book, for example. More usefully for O’Reilly, Mashable readers voted it the 2nd most important book on social media. This will lead to increased sales of the dead-tree version, or I’ll eat my cat.
3. The book is nearly 400-pages long. Nobody in their right mind is going to read something that long on screen. It hurts your eyes. You’re going to have a dip into it, decide if it’s useful to you and then buy it.
4. Not knowing whether a book is good or not is a big barrier to buying them online. In a bookshop, you can have a flick through to see if it’s any good. On Amazon, you’re mainly buying blind, which people don’t like to do. (That’s why Amazon give such prominence to reader reviews and recommendations, of course – because they’re very well-aware of this.) The free version recreates the in-shop browsing experience, restoring consumer confidence.
5. This is not a reference book. Were this a manual on writing CSS, for example, the PDF version actually has some considerable advantages over print versions: because you can search and find the nugget you need using your computer. The Art of Community consists of long chapters with lots of discussion – you need to read it properly to benefit from it.
6. Someone, somewhere probably will make that 20-page remix edition and give it away. That, my friends, is called a promo.

And the downsides?

1. If the book was rubbish, then people would find out and not buy it. Of course, this is actually an up-side in disguise. The free version shows O’Reilly’s confidence in its quality. They are saying that they have nothing to hide.
2. Potential buyers might discover it’s not for them. This probably sometimes happens. Again, it shows the publisher’s confidence in the title  – if you pick it up, then it probably is for you. It also gives O’Reilly some moral kudos – it doesn’t want to dupe people into buying something that isn’t going to be useful to them.
3. People might pirate the book. This is something that’s happened since the middle ages, of course. You may recall, for example, the difficulty of deciding what Shakespeare actually wrote because of the multiple variants of the texts from school. I could take the PDF, republish it on Blurb and sell it myself. But that’s not really going to happen: O’Reilly would sue me and I’d go to jail. Some people might take the risk, but they are idiots.
4. People might print out the book on their office printer, bind it and thus avoid paying for the real deal. Again, this isn’t really going to happen – think about the time, the cost of consumables and considerable chance of getting fired when your boss finds out versus the £18 cover price for the real thing.

So there aren’t really any plausible disadvantages. Unless you’re in the business of selling bad books, in which case you should probably give the whole social-networky-sharing thing a miss, if you can.

Note that I am not remotely suggesting that the free PDF version is a cynical ploy – far from it – but it is certainly shrewd. O’Reilly is not waving goodbye to its profitability. What it is giving away is both valuable, but not remotely as valuable as the physical book – it’s a considerable driver for sales of the dead tree edition.

Seth Godin’s been talking about this stuff for years, I know, but there are still few publishers willing to experiment. Paul Carr’s recent decision to pirate his own book despite the wishes of his publishers is a great illustration of the on-going battle between the vanguard and the old guard.

picture credit: Pink Sherbet Photography

“You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to their CEO or other high-ranking executive. Corporations should provide as many possible services for free, regardless of the time, capital, and human resources required to develop and run those services or products. Any efforts of corporations to charge money in voluntary exchange for their services or products is to be likened to highway robbery, extortion, or in the case of particularly large corporations, rape. I hope these guidelines have helped.”

I work closely in partnership with a music business site, MusicTank, and while those guys might seem like dinosaurs to the 2.0 crowd, there is one key issue that they are acutely aware of that always gets brushed over in the digital world. How do artists get paid? The idea of concert revenues or merchandise taking over from direct sales of music is bullshit. People will not buy things they don’t want instead of things they do. The same arguments are true of all content producers. This stuff, these people, these tracks, articles, pictures, whatever need to be paid for.

There’s so much inventory on the web – so many zillions of pages and zillions of users – that advertising isn’t working for publishers any more. So who pays, and how? I don’t really believe any of us know yet.