Cory Doctorow authored a concise article in Forbes last week explaining how he has achieved considerable success with his practice of simultaneously releasing free electronic editions of his novels alongside the traditional printed editions for purchase. Two sentences are key to his arguement; “I haven’t lost any sales, I have just won an audience” and “My fans’ tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just sells books — it sells me”.
The emergent reputation economics of this sort of internet-enabled success interests me — it is a topic I have been following since 2003. I believe that there are models to implement and lessons to be learned here for all classes of knowledge workers, whether you are a branding consultant, an MS Word template guru, an expert on typography, a CSS maven, or whatever. In my mind, the type of practices that both Doctorow and Charles Stross are pioneering within their literary field has strong parallels with the concept of the Global Microbrand being championed by Hugh MacLeod. (Coincidentally, it was reading MacLeod’s ‘The Hughtrain’ free e-book distributed via ChangeThis that first exposed me to his ideas.) For all of us, getting our ideas out into the wild and establishing an audience for our ideas is going to be a prerequisite for success in tomorrow’s economy.
Delicious Tags: Reputation Economics | Global Microbrand | Marketing
Technorati Tags: Reputation Economics | Global Microbrand | Marketing
Thoughts on creating disruptive organisational transformations with design thinking.
Doe sthis mean you'll start posting your daily Whuffie points?
ReplyDeleteThat was me BTW - Blogger has locked me out since I moved from my original account to the g-mail one.
ReplyDelete[Too many bells and whistles and hoops to jump through with Google and blogger these days. Thinking of moving to Wordpress.]
There is an interesting Wiki on Whuffie and the Reputation Economy idea here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
Cool, thanks for the link. Now I sorta know where he got that silly name came from.
ReplyDeleteYou are braver than me going into WordPress territory. I am sticking with Blogger for now as I find it needs little-to-zero maintenance time. OK, so that implies very little customisation and personalisation, but I am working to the Keep It Simple Stoopid methodology.