Over the last year, or even longer (though less consistently) there have three or so major themes here:

1. Music/Sound
2. Electronic communications (social media, Web 2.0, new media, etc…)
3. Our human potential (self-motivation, self-help, goals, etc…)

These themes have taken many forms, including anecdotes, videos, and posts I’ve found online to quotes, book references, poetry, sound samples and musical references. That’s not going to change, but time has given me the benefit of being able to see what this blog is about; what scales, and what’s sustainable as a writer and leader of this endeavor.

If you imagine this blog as an impressionist painting, say a darker Monet (above) or Renoire, and you blur the specific content items into a single whole, the focus of the writing and the message start to get more narrow. You start to see that really this blog is about me and what I’ve tried to do since I came online with my music in 1999, I write a bit about that at the bottom this post here. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s funny because as I write this I remember what it was that attracted me to the Web. I was a musician/composer, and I was working on a recording. After having played guitar for years, being in bands, playing shows, and trying to sell music at venues, I saw that the Web had the power to change everything for me as a working artist — the playing field had been leveled. On the Web, in 1999, Mp3.com had just launched, and it was skies the limit for artists to get out their, hang a virtual shingle, and let the world know about their work. However, it wasn’t about huckstering your product and bombarding folks with spam to inform them about your work (though there was some of that); rather there was an openness that permeated throughout this new platform. There were new channels for sharing what you were doing, as well as for folks, from all the over the world, to share with you.

The Web was, is, the great liberator. It leveled the playing field for artists of all kinds, but for me as a composer, the benefits have been huge. Here are a few reasons why:

• Getting the message out is cheap (often free)
• Exposure is as great as the work you put into it (and free, not historically the case)
• Everyone in the world (with an internet connection) can access your work.
• You are your own limitation because the world is at your finger tips (or to use bad 90′s copy – just a mouse click away)

These items are unprecedented, and while they have, and will continue to, come with their own struggles, it’s has the potential to be a boon for the working artist, writer, and creative. Therefore, the moral of the, blog/story that I’ve been weaving for the past year  starts to look like this:

If you’re a composer, artist, creative, whatever then there’s no excuse to not get your work out there, do the most and be the most you can be; the Web and the many electronic communications tools available to you (including email, social media and even old school listservs and newsgroups) can help you get the message out there about your work.

That’s it.

That’s the fork in the message for creatives out there.

For entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters of any kind I would say that you should get started using social media. In fact, this should have been the first post in the Social Media Take Away series, but hey I’m improvising and making things up as I go here…

What is social media?

Social media is any web tools that allows groups to generate content and engage in peer-to-peer conversations and exchange of content (examples are YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc…)

Social media is particularly valuable for entrepreneur’s, small business owners, and self-starters in-general, I’m thinking artists – painters, musicians and the like, because it gives them low cost, high value, far reaching exposure for whatever they’re doing. As I write more about the social media value, I’ll cover some of these. For starters, I would say see this post on Twitter or items tagged with social media on this blog. Though, I’ll be covering stuff more in-depth, and high level, alike as I develop this feature of the blog.

Some of my regular readers may have noticed that the site has been changing over the last month or so. This really started with the merging of the Digital Imperative blog and my music/design site. I wanted to bring my career workinline with my creative and artistic work here at mattborghi .com. Since then I’ve been reading some of your comments, emails and past posts (of which this is post #90) and thinking about the editorial direction and content overall of The Digital Imperative. This week it became clear to me that while I might talk about Google, Twitter or Yahoo, or Web and Digital Strategy or communications, as well as posting videos or Mp3s of recent work at the core of my message is that of entrepreneurship. Whether you’re a corporate entrepreneur working inside the walls of a Fortune 500 company, the small business owner who’s reach is much more local than global or a Do-It-Yourself artist trying to gain a broader audience for your work — Entrepreneurship is an attitude.

It took me talking to a trusted colleague this week for that to become clear to me. We spent a good amount of time talking about what it means to be a small business and a small business owner. Entrepreneurship encompasses a series of soft skills, including ambition, persistence, organization, attitude and most importantly a belief in one’s self, but there are many other words that describe what an entrepreneur or entrepreneurship is.

I plan to spend more time talking about entrepreneurship and what it means to be an entrepreneur. Keeping in mind that my definition of an entrepreneur is looser than most. I define an entrepreneur as someone who works to put something together and is willing to take the risk for it.  This goes together with the newly-crafted editorial statement that I crafted for this site: The best investment you can make is in yourself.

So that’s the plan, and the direction I plan on taking with things. I’ll still be talking about social media, Web strategy, communications and the like because of course it’s absolutely the entrepreneurial spirit that drives one to undertake these things, especially as best practices are being written as we go. As always, I welcome your feedback, and look forward to the continued conversation.

We get opportunities,
however irregular
to make a difference.
Sometimes,
we’re able to step up
and take it on,
other times
life circumstances
are too much to bare
and we must stick with
what we’ve got
and where we’re at.
Life is a circuitous and
mysterious
journey will all kinds
of twists and turns,
experiences
and opportunities.
When your moment
comes,
will you be ready?

Living in Michigan, with the highest unemployment rate in the country, we’re definitely experiencing some dark days. Every day, I’m grateful to have a job and skills to maintain employment especially as 1 in 4 of the people you meet don’t have a job, and haven’t had one for six months or more. Surely, this is as close to experiencing the Great Depression, that my grand parents told me about as a child, that I hope to come. However, amidst the despair there are signs of hope, and a lot of that hope resides with small business owners. Small businesses drive the economy, and it’s with that in mind that I wanted to share this interesting article on the small business equivalent of “open” business with this interesting CNN Money article called, Love a Local Business, Buy a Share…

Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre… that’s a phrase that’s been echoing through my mind today. Why? Because it’s hard to put value on something until

a.) It’s gone

or

b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

It’s part of the human condition, I’d say, we take stuff for granted when it’s abundant and freely-available and then when it’s gone and is no longer free we start to miss it, it becomes an issue of scarcity. Two situations that ride this median between scarcity and abundance come to mind, both of which are music listening-oriented.

The first is a story of my local public radio station in East Lansing, WKAR, licensed through Michigan State University ran Music from the Hearts of Space for years. I donated regularly because I wanted to support the programming, specifically HOS, as it’s referred to by fans such as myself, but then one day it happened, and HOS was pulled. What could I have done? I don’t know. I did contact station management, and received the standard “budget cuts” reply, fact-based, to be sure, but not very helpful. Bummer.

The second story has to do with Pandora, the excellent music player that came out of the Music Genome Project. I’ve cultivated an excellent playlist on Pandora over the last couple years, and it’s a music outlet I hope not to lose. However, recently they started advertising and introduced a premium service. I’m going to sign up for the premium service, almost certainly, but it got me thinking about what’s lost when you don’t lend your support, and sometimes even when you do. This takes me back to my opening points, I talked about the bummer of losing HOS, which was free, abundant and easily taken for granted. However, it’s the second point that I think of when Pandora comes to mind – b.) It’s free and starts to cost money

When something goes from being free to costing money, no matter how good it was for free, it was just free so how you could make demandments, and have expectations, but when you’re a paying customer you expect a say, you expect a great product, a product worth paying for; the algorithms that brought you Yanni when you were trying to enhance your Harold Budd playlist just aren’t as acceptable when you’re paying. The whole mindset changes.

This is one of the things I love about Google. No matter how much free stuff they give out (of course it’s not just out of the goodness their corporate heart), they don’t slouch on their offerings because they’re free. They beat expectations, they give you stuff you want before you even know you want it. Thankfully, they’ve found revenue streams outside of their software, unlike Pandora, which is the revenue stream like many other software as service Web sites.

Free as in gratis, rather than free as in libre, as I’m thinking about it now, means that something is free of a price, monetary or otherwise, but with regard to libre, it’s totally free and price can’t be attached to it. That was the experience of HOS on the radio, and Pandora when it was ad-free — Libre… However, for a time, it was gratis, too… More thoughts on difference, here.

Innovation can’t happen in the closed organization. Innovation, by its very nature, requires openness and transparency. This is true, because innovation, generally, like great inventions, comes from necessity, and if an organization or a group is trying to innovate under false pretenses, or a feigned necessity, then whatever is created on is built on a cracked foundation, and surely won’t last or at least last very long.

Merriam-Webster defines innovation as 1.) The introduction of something new 2.) A new idea, method or device… In either of the instances above, an organization or group needs to start the discussion not with regard to what it takes to be innovative, but rather by looking at what is broken, then reviewing organizational structure, past fixes/workarounds, and best practices if they apply. If none of these pieces fit the problem, then, and only then, it’s time to innovate.

Sadly, a lot of organizations don’t get this and throw this corporatism around lightly.

Social media is a new term for a concept as old as the Web itself. As long as the Web, as a network of connected users has existed, it’s been a social medium. So when you have folks sharing things in a variety of formats (i.e. still images, audio, video, etc.) somehow it becomes social media. That’s it. It’s really that simple. There’s no mystery or secret to what marketers and communicators are calling social media; it’s what the Web has always been from YouTube and Facebook, today, to pimply-faced teens swigging soda on Dungeons and Dragons BBS’ (Bulletin Board Systems) all through the late 70′s, 80′s and early 90′s.

Social media has evolved, the technologies have changed, and the user-interfaces have gotten better, but the core of what the Web is, has changed very little. In recent years, particularly since the Web 2.0 hype began, marketers have tried to frame social media as something else, some kind of communications or awareness panacea whereby you herd your fans/customers into some kind of digital stable, and get a direct, captive audience. This has worked to a very limited extent because as soon as there’s somebody building a fence or stable, there are ten other people building wide open pastures where users can roam free. I’m not sure a model that promotes captivity over freedom will ever exist, online or elsewhere.

Doing the right thing isn’t easy; it takes courage, follow-through and a near-constant defense of what’s right. It’s not that people don’t want to do what’s right, but it’s not the path of least resistance. Sometimes, though, you can’t fight all the good fights, but rather you have to pick your battles strategically.. What will have the best outcome? What are the pros and cons? How would this  benefit the team, the organization, the world, etc… Sometimes this makes it easier to choose, sometimes not. Doing the right thing, often, is tough, but there’s personal solace in knowing you did the right thing. Somehow, this is what matters more than anything.

Yesterday, in this post, I talked about how if you want to be successful you have to create value, stay centered in the Tao and the rest will follow. Almost immediately after posting that I saw a New York Times alert that announced that Google was launching an operating system. An operating system! Really!!! They’re a search and advertising company, right? Well, not exactly, they’re quite diversified into applications, and cloud computing in general. Anyway, with yesterday’s post fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but think there was Google yet again stepping out of their niche.

This is a brilliant move, here’s why:

People want an alternative to Microsoft – If all netbooks are running some flavor of Microsoft OS then susceptibility to viruses is a huge problem, and a netbook, by it’s very nature is on the Web all the time, so that means you might as well sign up for a life (of the machine) membership with McAfee, Norton, or whomever’s playing that game these days, because with a Microsoft OS you’ll need all the help you can get.

The Mac alternative – for netbooks, there isn’t one.

Linux or something – Nobody wants to buy a netbook with no OS… command prompt takes us back 15 years to when nobody wanted to use computers precisely because of this daunting reality, and native Linux netbooks, so far, haven’t gotten great reviews.

The release of Google’s OS is a case study in what it means to deliver value, keep to the center and be successful. Their following what people need, but not in the classic ‘find a niche and exploit it’ kind of way, rather through  organic means they’re putting it out there opening the code to the open source community, and letting anyone have access to it for free. The value is not just that it’s free, the value is that it’s freely available, and available to be built upon and further refined; as they say on their blog “we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.” This statement is what it means to be at the center and also illustrates that they know what it takes to be a success.

As the Tao Te Ching says, ‘whether you go up the ladder or come down it, it’s still shaky and better to be on the firm ground’… another illustration of the center. Google knows the center, and we need more companies like them.