bTWEEN 08: Selling your soul for fun and profit

The Law of Internet start-ups: In the beginning there was darkness. And then, there is The Pitch. After The Pitch is The Work. And during the focus of The Work there is The User. Ideally you want The User to do as much of The Work for you as possible. This afternoon we managed in a way to cover this whole process.

In any creative industry, at some point you end up having to develop The Pitch.
The Pitch takes many forms but ultimately always has one job: get a commissioning editor, investor or manager to take a meeting with you.
In the software industry, much is made of the “Elevator Pitch” – a 30-second summary of a new product idea so compelling that over the course of just one trip in an elevator, you can get a meeting with a potential investor. In the traditional media World, more emphasis is put on written submissions that editors and managers throw into a “slush pile” and occasionally peruse when they need some fresh ideas.
This afternoon, a variety of professionals from technology firms and one media outlet (BBC) who are used to taking pitches from external agencies went through a couple of example pitches and talked about what worked and what didn’t.
The results were perhaps a little predictable: dense complex pitches get ignored; pitches that solve a problem that doesn’t exist or isn’t explicitly defined get ignored; pitches that are badly structured get ignored; in fact, you have to work quite hard to avoid getting ignored no matter what you do.
Several good pieces of advice emerged however:

• Structure the pitch in terms of the problem you’re solving at every point
• Don’t use jargon, keep language simple
• Keep things short: commissioners are time-poor and will reject anything too lengthy
• Have somebody who knows nothing about your idea have a read through and give you an honest assessment of it

To be honest this is hardly remarkable material: if you were writing a CV, developing a TV advert or writing a business plan, you’d use exactly the same advice. The eccentric aspect of the media industry is that you fully expect to throw the thing away after a few months and start all over again.
Later in the afternoon, discussion moved to how online communities are built through social networking, blogging and other online activities.
One of the big growth areas online right now is known as “crowd sourcing” or “user generated content”. The idea of crowd sourcing is to involve everybody interested in the production of some work directly in that production, as opposed to a professional individual or group at the centre broadcasting their expertise. Within the realms of UGC, users add content, edit encyclopedia articles, upload videos or comment on content.
The advantages for the businesses involved are lower costs and higher visibility, and they also allow for what we term “stickiness” – you’re more likely to hang around if you’re involved. But what’s the benefit for the audience?
Right now, the dominant applications encourage altruistic contribution, and most of the models rely on a user contributing their time, content, expertise or address book and connections free of charge. However marketing men are getting involved and are hoping that we the people will help them build their brands and develop advertising content at no (or little) cost to them.
This afternoon we saw a range of projects in this space from the purely creative project (albeit with business model) A Swarm of Angels, to mentoring projects like Horses Mouth, all the way through to marketing-orientated social applications on offer from Ambient Worlds.
One audience member who observed all this whispered in my ear a fundamental flaw with these models.
Whilst we talk about the power of building online communities, the truth is most businesses in this sector are generating revenue by doing something that can only really be described as barging into the middle of your friendships. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are not your friends and don’t care about the people who are. They want to make money from that relationship, by being a mediator. We can talk about user generated content and the power of crowds all we want, but the audience member I was speaking to was more concerned about why we were introducing middle-men into our relationships.
Aren’t users one day going to complain about this? Aren’t they going to say “Hey, why are we building your business for you?” and demand some compensation? Or do we continue to assume that users will never care?
The presenters on this topic today did a great job of showing potential at a creative and personal level, but I think scales are starting to fall from eyes within the industry and it’s only a matter of time before the U in UGC notices and asks: when are you going to show us the money?