The Sunday Times (London) has published a pretty fine review of Gonzo Marketing, which you can see (I think) here. My answer to the final paragraph is: "yeah, it's just you." In fact, I sent that along with a thank-you note to the reviewer, Frank Fitzgibbon (whom I don't know, btw). The less tongue-in-cheek answer is that I wasn't being cynical at all. I hope I was being some reasonably level-headed form of "realistic." At any rate, this was nice to see in such an august publication. Haven't noted it anywhere else yet, so remember: you read it here first.

You just never can tell (at least I can't) when you're gonna catch Dr. Weimeraner in a philosophic frame of mind. One big clue is when he starts lettering and numbering his lemmas. So David? If you're there, put your ear up to the screen, buddy. I WAS KIDDING!!! No, I don't really believe the Internet is all about me. Or the world for that matter. (However much I may wish it were.)

As to being for others, I have come around to thinking that if I take care of myself (the precise details of how to accomplish which, I admit, continue to elude me), the others will get along just fine. Better, probably, than if I were to dedicate my life to what would have to be -- if you think about, wouldn't it? -- my idea of what would be best for them. Having said that, I want each and every one of you to know that I do love humanity. Deeply. So much that it hurts. In fact, it hurts so much that I say every morning when I awake: fuck em. let God sort em out!

For those who haven't read it, David Weinberger has a solid review of gonzo over at JOHO. David says, "Locke doesn't think of gonzo marketing as a type of guerrilla marketing that mixes the decorum of Mardi Gras and the social graces of a vomitous hangover. Rather, he and Thompson agree that 'gonzo' actually means 'subjective and engaged.'" Engaged, here, aren't we? Thanks David.

I think it was best said as "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

The question that can be asked is how do we accomplish being for ourselves and being for others. And how do we reconcile the effects that being for ourselves has upon our being for others.

I CELEBRATE myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.

~ wanker talkin' about hisself

Bull shit. (Hell, RB gave up the rights to his meme when he published his book.) If the only topic voice can express is me, then we're living in a really boring universe.

Gonzo marketing requires expressing your passion about things. We are not only passionate about ourselves, unless you mean that in some lame-ass way that fudges the math. Here's the math: A cares about B and talks about B in an honest voice. To say that this always means that A cares about A is true, but to say that A always only cares about A is false. Fudging it would mean we couldn't tell the difference between: (1) Benetton putting out a book letting condemned prisoners have their say because Benetton (that is, the marketing people at Benetton) thinks capital punishment is an abomination and (2) J. Crew putting out a brochure about how comfy-yet-rugged their doeskin fucking mukluks are.

I really like what RB says about the Net being all about me. There's a ton of truth in that. Every time we speak we do so with the arrogance that what we're saying is worth hearing. Me me me. Absolutely. But, that doesn't mean that we are our only topic; most of us - even RB - spend much more time talking about how the world looks from our point of view. That we're always gazing from our point of view is inevitable; that we're always gazing at ourselves is not.

And then there's also this little thing we call listening that the focus on the me-ness of voice misses.

So, bite me.

As you could maybe tell from that last, I'm in a crappy mood. It's mostly because I've been procrastinating for months, literally, on revising this goddam article I originally wrote for Harvard Business Review. They rejected it -- and after reading it again over the "holidays" (hah!), I can see why. What a piece of shit! The reason I keep promising myself to do this is that I've also promised a far shorter version (2000 words) to Perseus, who want to include it in a monster business encyclopedia they're bringing out next year with Bloomsbury (the UK publisher of the Harry Potter books).

So every day for the last couple weeks now I've waked up thinking TODAY I'm gonna fix it. Mother of God! What is wrong with my brain? Why can't I write a single fucking paragraph? Oh well...

I did get pretty excited a couple days ago, enough to put together these two tables, which show at a glance what I'm arguing for. I've renamed the thing "The Case for Business Criticism."

Table 1. Google Search Results





         Query                   Hits

      

      "literary criticism"    223,000

      "art criticism"          29,500

      "media criticism"        22,600

      "social criticism"       19,600

      "cultural criticism"     16,900

      "music criticism"         5,040

      "science criticism"         551

      "business criticism"        170





Table 2. Google.com Search Results

      

         Query                   Hits

      

      "music critic"           45,900

      "art critic"             43,800

      "literary critic"        24,600

      "social critic"          13,300

      "media critic"            9,410

      "cultural critic"         7,340

      "science critic"            178

      "business critic"            85

I included the "science crit" entries as an afterthought -- and it was a lucky one, as through those searches I discovered an article called Why Not Science Critics? by Don Ihde, who is a big gun in the philosophy of science (sorta like being the best basket weaver on Wall Street). Anyway, the parallels in our arguments were pretty arresting, and I got all turned on for a minute. But it wore off and now I'm cranky again because I really do have to finish this today. This self promotion shit is really hard work if you think about it. Maybe I should switch to self-effacing humility. Maybe that'd be easier. You think?

Just to clear up this business about self promotion: yes, self promotion is absolutely crucial. It's the most important aspect of gonzoism (there, I've nominalized it, so feel free to crank out the bumper stickers and start The Movement.)

You see, Mike, the Internet is really all about me. And I mean that in a very personal way. It's about me, Chris Locke. Me, RageBoy. The whole world wants to know what I'm thinking. Surely, you do, right? And I figure it's my responsibility to be selfish and irresponsible as much as I can, as often as I can. Also, to be humorless and moralistic and create rules around all that and question the motives of others who aren't Just Like Me so they can become More Like Me.

F-u-u-u-u-u-u-ck! What's it all about, Mr. Natural? Huh?

Sorry. But I'm not sorry. This passive-aggressive nagging gives me a headache. It gives me, as Rabelais once said, the Bloody Flux of Lombardy. So bite me.

For a better time, go read what Jeneane is doing over here.

Mike:
Just to add a little something to Jeneane's answer - One of the things that hooked me about Gonzo was the vivid contrast with traditional marketing techniques, like broadcast advertisements (which, on the net, we call SPAM).

These are made by people who don't use the product, usually don't know that much about it, certainly won't tell you about any flaws it may have or give an honest appraisal of its relative worth (vis a vis any competition for example), and are simply paid to say nice things about it loudly.

Gonzo is all about the voice of experience. Check out the examples that Chris uses for his suggestions of patronage; you'll see that while he encourages Ford employees to talk about how a Ford truck might relate to their gardening hobby, there is no suggestion that they ought to toe any particular party line.

On the contrary, he clearly and repeatedly stresses that any such editorialising would render the exercise almost completely futile. The voice must be engaged, and therefore it must be genuine, it must be human, and it must be free of imposed agendas.

Only then can listening to it be of maximum value, only then can it be Gonzo.

Objectivity is not the objective (pun intended, sorry!). In fact it may be entirely irrelevant, except in the sense that in Gonzo it is not pretended to, as it may be in other marketing techniques.

I would say that it (objectivity) is surely possible, I suppose that many an art critic would consider themselves objective, even though fully engaged in the Gonzo sense.


"Art critics create nothing, and thereby feel themselves qualified to judge the works of creative people. There is logic in this: they hate all creative people equally." --Robert Heinlein

Mike--no offense taken. Did anyone ever tell you that you ask great questions? I think that it is indeed a gonzo objective to do away with the notion that writing--or better yet voice--must or should be unbiased. The stronger the voice, the stronger the notion of self wrapped inside of it. And this is not a bad thing. Especially on the Net, this is the way it has to be. Because the very medium--browser-based access through brightly-lit screens--sticks voice right in your face. How powerful! And, how much more meaningful and joyous than the vapid reporting of rat-tat-tat events we've been spoonfed and have come to accept as journalism. No?

To All
The small-post suggestion was not directed towards anyone and I apologize if anybody was offended or felt censored. I made the suggestions in an attempt to revitalize this blog.

To David and All
Whenever I read or hear anything, I assume it is colored by the person's point of view. Even when it is supposedly objective journalism. Is it a gonzo objective to make that bias more explicit or to dispense with any attempts at being objective?

I agree with David (and am so glad to see him here!) Gonzo is not about the author/writer/speaker/thinker, but *from* that person. In other words, I can speak of someone else or even as someone else, but it's gonzo if it is engaged -- if the author is involved in the writing of the text. That is where voice emerges. This doesn't mean the writer must necessarily be physically involved or present, but it does mean that the author has a vested interest (and as David says, that he 'exposes' something). Self-promotion is a byproduct, not so much a forethought. And it is completely optional for the audience to support or underwrite that voice. The voice remains regardless. My two cents.

Thanks Mike for zinging some life back into RGE. David, please come back often, and bring some folks with you!

Hernani and others, don't censor yourselves. Not here. Write and engage. If we fail to be engaged (and to engage), then the blog will become quiet. But if our posts incite, no matter their length, then we'll continue to thrive here. That's fine with me. The ebb and flow is essential in life, both online and offline.

Voice has to come from an engaged person to be worth listening to, but that doesn't mean that what the voice says has to be about the person. Every great writer without exception has had a voice, but most of them use that voice to show us how the world looks to them. Some few focus on themselves as their subject. And the great exemplar of gonzo writing - Hunter S. Thompson - used himself as a subject far more than traditional journalists did. Even Thompson, however, wrote about his own exploits as a way of exposing truths about the world, whether it was Hell's Angels or standard party politics. The point about engagement and gonzoism isn't that you have to talk about (and thus promote) yourself, but that whenever you do talk, you're honest about the fact that you're writing from a point of view. That's how I understand it, anyway. Example: Benetton writing about death row inmates; it's gonzo because it's engaged even though the author doesn't show up in it.

Having said that, however, if you're writing in a gonzo way, there is obviously a strong temptation to put yourself into the center of your story. I just don't think that's essential to gonzoism.

The posting size is not relevant. Not at all! I really don´t mind about a prolix speech. Sometimes it is the space and time we have to develop an idea. And if I link to my personnal blog just a few would understand (it´s written in portuguese). I do prefer to blog without self censorship. The most important in the Gonzo idea is the voice reverbaration. We cannot do that without speaking freely.

To Mike's point/question about how Gonzo Marketing relates to self-promotion. My first response to that is that there is a direct correlation. Both the Gonzo book and the Cluetrain Manifesto consistently come back to "voice" as the seminal ingredient. A voice is not a voice if it is not speaking. One doesn't have to be an egomaniac in the process... there seem to be many humble postings going on out there, but how would you market if you didn't say anything (or write something)? You might also say that you are marketing something other than yourself such as a product or service, but in the Gonzo person-to-person style I think that self promotion goes hand in glove with the process. You may speak for the purpose of marketing, but in the process you as an individual become associated with the communication you put out there.

To honor Mike's request I'll keep this short and await echoes from the group...

I think this blog is getting under-utilized because we are not focused on discussing Gonzo. In addition, long posts tend to dominate.

I would like to suggest that we keep the posts short and point to our personal blogs for longer or off-topic posts. We might want to include a link to our personal blog to guide people to other thoughts we have.

I was wondering how does Gonzo relate to self-promotion?

Jeanne what a sweetheart you are. I didn't imagine that when I read Chris's suggestion that someone might want to take issue with that vacuuous review, that you would end up pasting into our own forum. On reading your note about it appearing twice I went back to look at the Amazon site to check it out. I say never look a free double-review in the mouth! And I liked the little one-liner at the top - "3 out of 3 people found the following review helpful". Let's hope that means they've bought the book.

Hey, there's no Eggnog around here, though I wish there were, and laced with Jack Daniel's as well. And there are not too many folks either, never mind that on a normal day there are only about five percent of the cubes and offices on my floor occupied. Today, on Christmas Eve, there are maybe five people and I hear a lot of laughter over in their direction. Perhaps they have some eggnog!

So Merry Christmas to all, And to All a Much Better Year than the last one! Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hannuka, Ramadan, Kwanza or a Holiday based on no particular faith whatever, have a very Happy One. There are hundreds of belief systems I know nothing about, but I know that most of the cultures of our blue and green little planet celebrate the changing of the seasons, and all of those aforementioned religious events fall on or near the Winter Solstice. Funny thing about that. Our Druid (and other forms of "pagan") forbears celebrated all of the solstices and the in-betweens as well and most of our modern holidays line up somewhat with those old traditions. Have a great year!

Ah--I see our own Jack Reed has posted a wonderful retort to the bag-o-wind on Amazon who thinks Gonzo Marketing is not book worthy. As good as the review is (and it is), it's even better that Amazon has somehow managed to post it twice in a row, nicely boosting Gonzo back up to four-and-a-half stars. Nice gonzo goin Jack!

Text below:
Sweep Away the Cobwebs & See What's Behind Them, December 19, 2001
Reviewer: Jack Reed from Bay Area, CA

I disagree with the recent review that thinks this subject only deserves an "article" instead of a book. The reviewer seems to think that because Locke does not provide a nice neat little well annotated map of the future of the Net as it relates to business and marketing that he hasn't done a service worthy of "book" status.

Just because you recognize that something is wrong doesn't mean you know precisely what right is. We all know that the torrent of spam that we are daily assailed with is the wrong way to market on the Web (how many of you have really bought anything that was so advertised). But while Gonzo Marketing does not spell out the precise ABCs of what is developing in this New World, he does a very exemplary job of talking about it's roots and realities. I think perhaps the most important single word that is used in both Gonzo Marketing (and The Cluetrain Manifesto) is "voice". The Net and it's derivitive, the Web, are forums for the individual voice to speak quietly but to a huge audience. It is this voice, this individual human communication that matters, because while we'll all trash a spam email within milliseconds, most of us will responed to a truly individual message from another human being. This takes the market back to what is originally was before it was usurped by corporations to mean masses of blank faces, and present it as the simple aggregation of people who wish to have discourse about their daily needs and perhaps exchange a few items for a few other items. Never mind that we're not really a bartering economy anymore, the character of that ancient market place is still deeply embedded in our psyches and most of us feel comfortable on that more personal basis. Locke even points out that Amazon is participating in his view of the current Net market by the very fact that it lets it's buyers review the books they purchase and thereby pass on to others a personal account of the value of the product.

So I say that you should buy the book if you are prepared to think for yourselves and project what Locke says onto whatever micro world you live and make money in. There simply are no books that can tell you extactly how to do it, although many claim to, but this book reminds you of lots of truths that you may have let slip into the sub-conscious realm, and once you have brought them back into view it is quite possible that you can apply Gonzo principles to whatever it is that you do with your life.

I'm sure it'll be a slow week over here on RGE, unless folks take time off from their eggnog to blog. Over in RageBoy land in his EGR and the Way It Was post, there's a really interesting reference to a book Steve Larsen is working on, "What Were We Thinking?" The best place to read it is over on Topica, where Chris posts the first chapter. For anyone into Gonzo Marketing or the end of business as usual, this is really amazing. Reading Larsen's recap of the smoke-filled brain-busting gatherings of the early net catalysts is like being a fly on the wall at a party for the coolest of the cool people. Better yet, a full-fledged RageBoy rant is recounted--sure to please rage-heads everywhere.

And to all a good night.... it is an oft too repeated truism that this Season and it's Spirit can create quite the opposite feelings in a lot of people. I look on Christmas in much the same way I did as a child, which is to say I hold it in my heart the way I did as a child. As for the present, to echo Christopher's lament, it can become way too blue and far too stressed out. In my case that's partly because I cannot completely recapture the innocence of Christmas Past. I still love to sing carols, and I get misty eyed at the strangest times, but I live alone and do not put up a tree because that would only emphasize the point that the family always decorated the tree together and I don't need yet another reminder that I will be spending this time of togetherness alone. Maybe the blues Chris was speaking of had nothing to do with Christmas (he did say they were for no particular reason), but Jeneane echoed similar thoughts and so have many others in my circle of friends. It is indeed ironic that I feel blue when I still feel that this is a season of great emotional depth, good tidings and joy.

And by the way, Jeneane, I do think the silence was accidental... a mere reflection of the ebb and flow of the life tides of it's members.

And Chris, I did read some of EGR and the Topica Archives (and wrote my own review of Gonzo with a bit of counterpoint to the item you mentioned). There is so much there to read and my time is not always my own, but it's good to know the archives are there whenever I do get a few minutes to do as I please.

So I hope your blues are a shade you can deal with. Put some Blues CDs on the changer and listen. The Blues are a tonic for being in a Blue Mood! Just lay back and listen to a great player bending those notes like the world tries to bend us. The notes always resolve and so mostly do our lives.

Good Cheer to all....

Good article: Independents Day: When it comes to Net news, small can be beautiful by J.D.Lasica.
"each created and operated largely by one person, show that you don't need a large staff and venture-capital seed money to do news on the Net.(...) What the creators of KenRadio, Kuro5hin, IWantMedia and Metafilter share is a relentless drive, a passion for their subject matter, and an abiding respect for the power of the Internet to reach thousands of readers cheaply and effectively "

You're not alone, Jeneane, grueling work and the holiday rigmorole have been a deadly combination for me this year. "No patience for reason, no time for truth" has been resonating all month. Also resonating in a more positive key, though, has been proof (?) that the gonzo model could work even in my own stodgy old profession, the legal one. As an appellate lawyer, I and my ilk tend to long unrequitedly for ways to forge genuine connections with our core audience - the judges who decide whether our clients deserve to win the cases we present. Do judges have passions too, that have nothing - yet perhaps everything - to do with how they go about their daily grind of administering justice? Boy howdy yeah, who knew? Here in my neck of the woods they seem to be downright taken with Winston Churchill (scroll down to "Local and National" and read on). Unsurprisingly, Sir Winston has a number of loyal fans here at The Firm, as well. Hmmm.... Further proof that gonzo lives in unexpected places is a wildly witty column that one of these Churchillian jurists produces every month for a local bar association magazine and Web site: A Criminal Waste Of Space. Bill Bedsworth clearly needs a blog.

Keep the Visine and egg nog close at hand and all will be well.

Hey, hello, I haven't died. yet. Actually, I've been putting a bit more time in on my zine, Entropy Gradient Reversals -- that's the link to the web page, but uh, mumble... I haven't updated it for about two years I think. Nothing like being a real on-top-of-it web goo-roo, eh? To see what I've been spewing forth elsewhere of late, you'll have much better luck checking the EGR Topica archive (please overlook the fact that the posts are in chronological order so that you have to page to the end to see the new ones. Duh! Topica is a little slow in the interface dept.) Of course, all this is assuming you give a rat's ass what I've been up to. Just thought I'd explain why I've been such a stranger here. Also, apropos of nothing in particular, I've got the dirty funky no-good low-down good-for-nothin blues tonight for reasons I don't even want to think about. But that's another story altogether.

Jack, I am sorry and guilty. I have been so consumed with family issues that I haven't paid attention to anything. When silence creeps in, I tend to go back and quote Gonzo...

"People tend to join into self-selecting communities online, but unless we’re talking about buying clubs, they don’t typically aggregate around products. Instead, they come together around common interests. They may 'consume’ products in the process, but this consumption is a side effect."

Just what we've been talking about, so let's talk...

And...

"As networking replaces broadcasting, communication must become richer and more interesting -- not just louder and more insistent. It must have character, invite participation. Must differentiate itself from the plethora of uncommunicative corporate blather, which by its sheer volume -- in both senses -- threatens to drown out all memory of life- before-the-brand."

I am so tired. There are several reasons why we don't do Christmas at our house--reasons of Spirit. Reasons of reason. Many reasons, actually. And each year the world proves to me why I think it's okay that we choose to focus on the words within the Word, the meaning on the inside and the other side of our selves. And still, stress is palpable. Can't blog much, can't write much, can't hear myself think.

It comes down to individuality--as in life as it is in this blog. Fuck uniformity. Oneness combined makes more than itself, but it is still the singular which is significant. Meaning propagating at lighning speed. That is the beauty of it, then. And if you know what I'm saying, you're one up on me.

But at least I said something. Jack is right. We are too quiet. Is it purposeful silence or accidental? Let's see.

ho.
-j.

Hey!! Where did eveyone go? I posted on the 13th and today is the 18th... did I drive everyone out of the forum, or are you all out "On Holiday"? I've been spreading the word, as it were, to various friends who I think are in a position to appreciate the material, such as web designers, etc. But I' miss opening up Gonzo Engaged to see the newest additions.... and there are none!! Get busy you people!

OKBye...

Denver, et al.... I'd be happy making money in any fashion, via any media, anyway, anyhow! Actually I spoke too quickly there. To slightly revise that statement I would say that I have found that there are people in the world who live to make money. They don't care how they do it, and if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune knock them out of one arena, they just climb up onto another one and make some more money. They are good at making money and that is their primary goal. My primary goal is to think, converse, be creative, make things, write and interact with my fellow travellers without constantly wondering if I am shortly to join the familiar American sub-culture of shopping cart pushers who scratch out their meager existence picking aluminum cans out of public trash barrels.

And I do understand about "getting one's A into G"... I have so many things that want doing... two web sites that I already have the domain names for but haven't found the time to actually create and mount on a server. But sometimes by the time I get home the day has been so long that I find myself adrift in a haze of inactivity, all the while reviewing my "todo" list in my tired brain!

I did check out the blackmarket site you mentioned... nice idea... I'm glad to see that it's working out. Seeing the success of others can leave one feeling either jealous or encouraged. Thankfully I'm of the latter inclination. When I see a good idea being well executed it encourages me to think along more positive lines.

So I guess I'd better overcome the ennui and get those web sites up so you can review them!

Oh, yeah, to reflect on another of your comments about the Net being no more the world than TV... I agree in the sense that it matches the concept that "the map is never the territory". In other words an abstract is always just that, some bits and pieces that in one's mind respresents something real. But I think that possibly the Net is a lot closer to the real world because it is interactive. You can talk back to it and it will respond, often with as much variety and un-expectablity that the real world has. Because anybody of any ilk can respond to what you put out there you can find every kind of response, hopefully more from kindred souls than assholes, but like the real world, there's no asshole filter, so you say what you say and you get what you get.

Go Voice!!!

Later...

Making Money On The Web? An esoteric mystery, a genuine five-star bamboozler.



JACK:
When I get my A into G and start my wee Gonzo rating service, I promise your site as good a review as it warrants. ;-)

Seriously, did you look at www.blackmarket.co.nz ? 250K in the first year, looking at 1 Mill in the second. No marketing other than word of mouth and voluntary signup to their list. (No Chris, they don't spam you with the first invitation. They let your friends do that for them . . . . .)

Would that do it for you Jack?

And recall Chris' own RageBoy example, one of the reasons we're all here is that somehow or another GM: WTWP clued us in to EGR or EGR clued us in to GM: WTWP. And GM:WTWP went way up the Amazon sales lists before it was printed purely on the strength of the perverse relationship RageBoy has with his readership.

Yes, your milage may well vary. I too doubt that there is the same market for stringed instruments as there is for cheap wines (more's the pity!) but I assume that there is sufficient market to keep an honest and competent craftsman in reasonable comfort if not splendour.

I imagine that Chris started EGR with so few readers it looked like no-one would ever listen to him. Right now I cannot for the life of me recall how I got onto his list, but I recall vividly the first one I read, and I am inutterably glad that somehow I did.


DENISE:
Are these the only possibilities? West Wing or What? (Why is West Wing assumed to be such a good thing anyway? I hate it. Am I a micromarket?) Anyway, I wouldn't trust the high priests of the proven business model to be thinking about radical new heresies in producer to market communications. Don't expect them to think outside the box when they're still denying there's anything outside the box at all.


JENEANE & ANDREW:
Underwriting is not intended, as I understand it, as some disjoint or isolate altruism. It is a marketing tool, and as such would be financed from a marketing budget. But it is a tool that is markedly different from the traditional broadcast media tools and therefore requires different handling to prevent significant harm to the user. Whether any big corpses* ever use it, or keep using it after experimenting with it, will depend to some degree (as you noted) on the return on their investment.

* What else do you call a body with no mind, no soul, & no heart?

But it seems to me that the issue is not one of efficacy, since Chris has already proven to some degree that "Gonzo Works", but of comprehension and maturity. We all have adolescent fantasies - hell, I'm 35 and I still have them!

But maturing is supposedly about dealing with reality as it is, and part of that for the corporate marketing department in the age of Internet-enabled vocality is the realisation that their target markets never existed anywhere but in their heads. The view they had/have about their markets is an artifact of the tools they use to explore their world, not of the reality of that world as it really is.

The internet, with its emails, blogs, icq's and aim's, flash, shockwave, java and xml, etc etc, is a new toolbox for exploring the world.

It is no more the world than was TV, but while it is not the world, it certainly makes visible new vistas that were previously obscured to those inhabiting the corner offices in BlaBla Land.

They also need to realise that no consumer ever bought anything they didn't want just because of spamming techniques. The spammers convinced themselves of that to justify their existence. So that talking in a human manner to real people you know actually want what you have is not confining your marketing to some "micro" organism that is beneath the consideration of someone with a SuperBowl ad campaign budget.

Did anyone actually at or watching the SuperBowl really go and buy something just because of some slick multimillion dollar ad? Really? I'd concede the choice of make/model could be affected but I'd resist the notion that the ad could create a desire that wasn't already there . . . .



ANDREW:
Rave on Tropic of Cancer. Say what you wanna say, do what you wanna do. Don't let the bastards grind you down. Don't let them tell you how to play the game, nor which game to play.

Personally, I refuse to do a job I don't enjoy, but that's because I'm arrogant enough to believe I don't have to. Maybe at some later date I'll get scared of uncertainty and settle for wage-slavery without enjoyment, but not today.



HERNANI:
I think that (partly for reasons discussed above) some corpses will never get it. Many of the people I've encountered in high positions in business life have the emotional maturity of a buck rabbit. Hell, I may well be one of them. Fear and Greed are the cages in which they have voluntarily imprisoned themselves so that they can shut out the rest of humanity, or even the recognition of their own.


TEAM:
Your Output Is My Input. I leave you alone for a couple of days and you go ballistic. WeeeeeeLaa! I'll have to shut up more often. Now there's a Gonzo thought . . . .

I have something to say: It is better to burn out, than to fade away.
The Kirgan, from Highlander, plagiarising Neil Young.

A bit off-topic from the current discussion but interesting and chilling to consider: A Net Gain From Fewer Channels?. This article had some intriguing - and to my way of thinking, paradoxical - thoughts on how television networks might regroup in order to respond to micromarkets. The author thinks further media consolidation (as though there weren't already enough!) might be needed to let networks achieve economies of scale that will allow programming to keep diversifying and yet maintain quality. He thinks that as audiences become increasingly splintered, more consolidation is necessary to fend off the day when no one network will be able to garner "the ratings weight necessary to justify producing attractive, high cost programming...." Surely, putting all the eggs in one or a few baskets can't be the only solution?? I'd be interested in hearing this group's response to the economic question the article suggests - can a "microchannel" produce a "West Wing," and if so where does the $$ come from if not advertisers in search of a mass audience? Is pay tv a la HBO the only future option for quality programming?

Steve.... I couldn't agree with you more. I'm not in this for get-rich-anytime motives, I just want to try to understand how to fit into the changing paradigm and simply survive. Like I said in my last post, I trashcan all those entreaties to sell me spam lists. I don't want to send a single character of data to someone who is not potentially interested in what I have to offer, but at the same time I do not at the present time see a clear path towards the goal of finding those other individuals with whom I can engage in Conversation. I am reading the material... I completely understand, and am thrilled at the prospect, that what this is about is having a Voice, and using that to engage in dialogue with others. I do have contacts and conversations with others in my area of interest. I do belong to an association whose members have web sites with lots of connections to other URLs, etc.

I guess a measure of patience and continued conversations with all of the folks in this Blog is the way to go. I know that the question in my mind cannot be answered simply, or, as the poet said, "rolled up in a ball"... so I will continue to try to get bits and pieces of the puzzle and gradually something will come together.

Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

-- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, TS Eliot

Later...

Jack,

I for one would like to know more about your stringed instruments and would appreciate a link if you have one. - Thanks, Tom.

OK hands up everyone who received the spam mail.How about that for irony?

Fellow Bloggers and Gonzoids...

Please keep in mind that Gonzo Marketing is not some get-rich-quick Seth Godin infomercial scam. The Web is a micro-market with a niche of one. Gonzo Marketing is about how you use those micro-markets. The mass-market jedi mind tricks don't work on the Web. Not to get too philosophical...but all the Web really does is show us how the world really is....a bunch of small webs of interest and influence. Some marketers look at this as: "Damn, now we can't just fire off a bunch of advertising and hope something hits." (Super Bowl ads and Spam aren't that different) Other marketers look at this as: "Great, now I can just focus on the people who actually care about what I'm selling/buying."

So how do you get started? Start with your own micro-market. If you're trying to sell stringed instruments then there are a bunch of potential micro-markets to begin talking ("Markets Are Conversations") to. Get in there...start listening....start talking. The funny thing about micro-markets: You're already a member of several of them whether you realize it or not. And members can sniff out a phony in no time at all.

Andrew, et. al.

I would really like to think that you are right about Gonzo "making a killing" for small and medium businesses. I have two businesses, independent of software consulting that would fall under the heading "small & smaller", that I am certainly willing and eager to invest time, love and all the creativity I can muster. But I fear that the other edge of the Web sword is in how huge it is and how insignificant one's presence can end up being. Sometimes I feel like it's putting a bit of paper in a wine bottle and casting it into the Pacific Ocean to "market" myself to the Pacific Rim. I love the concept, and I am greatly enjoying the reading of both Chris's book and the Cluetrain Manifesto, but I have yet to understand the physics of it all. By that I mean how does an individual like myself, trying to make stringed instruments, create enough "mass" in the medium of choice (The WEB), to attract other bits of mass to it. I get literally dozens of spam per week trying to sell me large lists of web contacts for marketing purposes. I hit DELETE as quickly as I can. Mass lists are the antipathy of Gonzo marketing. In fact they are the epitome of the old business as usual. Send out 100 thousand letters and if 2% respond you've had a good day. Bullshit! That might work for someone selling some piece of trivial nonsense, but it won't work for someone trying to sell a quality product that has a price tag a few orders of magnitude higher than the usual mass mailing entreaty.

But I'll keep reading everything I can find time for, and keep up the dialogue with the Gonzoids of the world, and maybe one day one of us will find some way to make wine bottles find their way to some place meaningful.

OKBye...

Yes, but Jeneane we know these people. They want something for nothing - and preferably at a discount. At what point does underwriting not magically transform into another corporate sponsorship blag? I don't think the Gonzo bag of tools is at issue here. What I don't believe is that the majority of big businesses measure anything in other than pounds, shillings and pence.

Where Gonzo will make a killing is for the small- and medium-sized businesses who have two important qualities: love (and control) of the product; and the willingness to invest time in that love. The average company slave doesn't have that - at the top or bottom of the hierachy. I don't think big media is dead - yet. It'll merely change direction. They will get more up close and personal, but on their own terms. See the Nike web sites. They are doing it by being "interactive" ie more bells and whistles.

Me? I prefer the cheap and cheerful version we have.

I can show you an excellent example of Gonzo in action. It has micromarket interaction, the tone of voice, engagement - everything. Slowtwitch.com is run by Dan Empfield for the triathlon community. He has commercial interests in triathlon products but still reviews other companies' wares. He also offers advice for free, looks at the endurance industry from the man on the ground's point of view, but still has an excellent political overview.

That could not be done by a corporate. Can't and never will - at least until I contradict myself. Like this: Gatorade Sports Science Institute. But that's academic - they are always nice to each other in daylight and then the knives go in when the lights go out.

Andy A

ooooh. And on an added note, gonzo is catching the attention of mainstream media... a good and scary thing! See Chris' blog of today for more info.

Hello Andrew--interesting post of yours. I'm not sure whether the underwriting issue can be classified as either reasonable or unreasonable, but I do think when it takes hold, positioning and "sense of company" may be as important, or more important, than the realization of profit for participating organizations.

Somewhere a long time ago in this blog, I commented on what the whole underwriting notion can mean to corporate positioning. Rather than searching through the blog, let me see if I remember what I thought. The way I see it, as one or two companies decide to get gonzo and underwrite a site--say an auto-repair discussion--what would the draw be to subsequent underwriters? Well, besides giving something "more" to their customers than bland corporate speak and their own obligatory corporate web site, it would seem that underwriting a discussion like this could give companies an opportunity to gather into micromarkets of their own... to position themselves with organizational like believers. Don't minimize this potential phenomenon.

How great would it be for a smaller company to underwrite a site and be seen along side its well-established household-name counterparts, sharing an inherent interest in supporting the underwritten group? What an opportunity to stake a claim on what your company stands for (and doesn't stand for). Likewise, how quickly a big stodgy company seeking to change what it's about could become "cool" by underwriting the same auto-repair site with nimble net companies.

So to me, the follow-on benefit of driving profit, though I think that benefit will come, won't be the initial benefit of site underwriting. The initial benefit will be a chance to turn the notion of positioning on its head. Instead of saying, "We are unlike our competitors because..." companies will be able to align with like-minded organizations of all types, implying instead (without beating us over the head with boring boilerplates), "We are like our fellow underwriters because..."

This is what I see as the inital benefit, followed by a more grateful customer base who reward companies they believe give a shit.

That's all for now. Punch holes as you will.

Thanks Jack.

I think what I was trying to say is the general direction of those who know about the web (god bless 'em) is that we can only be warm, cuddly and human to communicate. Pardon me, but fuck that.

If I want to comment on the previous position of a common household pet, I will say "The cat sat on the mat". Neither more nor less. There is a continuum of communication, from bald facts to emotional gushing and one size does not fit all. Now, I am all for dragging corporations further along the gushing axis, but I think there is a limit as to how far they will and ought to come.

I am really unsure about this underwriting idea in Chris' book. Isn't it unreasonable to expect companies that were formed to create profit to indulge in this casting of bread upon waters? It's not that I don't like the idea, but if my aunt had a beard, she'd be my uncle. You can't expect profit maximisers to take on the idea. I am sure everybody would be happier in the gonzo model, but nobody wants to pay for other people's happiness- (Except possibly here in Denmark where the average tax rate is around 46%).

Aren't we confusing work with life? That strikes me as a cultural "work to live or live to work" divide that is present between the US and parts of Europe (and other places). It seems to spring from the insistence of finding joy in work. Hell, if I find joy in my work that's great, but fer chrissakes don't tell me I have to find joy in my work. Pride in a job well done is sufficient, then I'll go home and find joy with my wife and kids.

On re-reading the above I can see the flaws, but what the hell, give me some stick, you know I love it!

For Andrew: I think the essentials are still the same, as expressed in your piece when you spoke of "telling a story", but it goes a bit beyond that. Communication is the key word as I see it, whether you're telling a story or just passing on a tidbit of data. When you fail to communicate, when a story teller loses the audience, it doesn't matter what the medium is, gonzo blog, print ad, dime novel or even a personal email. The 'wired' world of communication as we know it, web, internet, e-mail, etc. has certainly provided new forms into which we squeeze old paradigms, but in the squeezing new paradigmns are formed and I think we are all trying to figure out how to describe and interact with the newness. Some of it fits the old, like the formality of certain forms of written communication, and some of it is quite new, like the ;>} funny faces we create, and the sometimes quite strange shorthand that has become part of the email and ICQ worlds (LOL, AFAIK...). Sometimes the shorthand is almost necessary, or is certainly encouraged by the medium itself. No one wants to read Moby Dick on their cell phone or wireless PDA. One of the earliest forms of electronic shorthand that I can recall is from the Pager Days where people would tag 911 onto the end of their phone numbers to indicate that they want the call returned "right now"!

The web may indeed change the way we communicate... or the way we write, but for my part I think I'm trying to hang onto my own personal style (which began, like most of us, from handwritten on plain old paper, to typewriting when mistakes could cause you to re-type the whole damn page, to computers, which really did affect my writing style in the sense that it became so easy to edit and change things that before would have not been done because the effort was greater than the motivation to see it written differently) and at the same time keep up with the changing world. I really hope you dissuade yourself of the idea that you are over the hill at 35, because I have quite a few years on you and I'm not nearly ready to come to that conclusion about myself. At least not when the subject is writing and communicating. I used to work in the music business, and at the time (when I was about your age) I thought that I would never hear a genre of music that would completely turn me off. I worked in a recording studio and I heard everything there was to hear. I liked classical, rock, jazz, blues, be-bop, plain pop and could even tolerate a certain amount of disco. But there did come a day when I had to admit that I could no longer relate to everything. It started with certain kinds of particularly melodyless screaming 'hard rock', and went into full denial when with rap and grunge. So musically, those are areas in which I cannot communicate because I "just don't get it". In the world at large, however, when we're talking about commerce, and philosophy and personal interactions and entertainment I think that the "gonzo" movement is simply evidence that the world around us is always in a state of flux and at a certain level you have to either keep up or drop out.

Obviously the folks in this little crowd are trying to keep up, and in fact we are trying to forge ahead and understand not only what IS happening, but what is about to happen right around the corner from now. It is indeed a challenge, but one that we more or less have to take on.

Later...

I'm over on Locke's blog and I check out the long-delayed epic corporate up-yours called "Fuck Work" that Locke points to. Then I read the blogback comment, which says the procrastinating author's site is www.unamerican.com. Fascinating really--the guy's philosophy is some absurd combination of Doc Searls meets RageBoy (don't stomp on my civil rights, please--motherfucker). One pearl of wisdom from SRINI's "Self-Interview," which he conducted in 1997, is this:

"I'm no fan of humanity. There, I said it. Singular individuals have the potential to be warm, sensual, caring and exciting people. Humanity in general? It's like a fungus. It lives in its little corner of the universe. It eats, and eats, and eats until there's nothing left to eat. Then it dies."

Not so ungonzo, is it? Then, consider this little sticker Srini's concocted:



So I emailed him and said, guy, where's the book? We'll see what he says... -j.

Though Helen will doubtless disagree, I would like to suggest that what is at issue is about more than manner of speech, phony familiarity and the like.

One way of looking at "The Value Proposition" – (though Mr. Locke might not put it this way) is: If a corporation understands no value other than its core capital, then it is at war with everything on earth that does not form part of or enhance the core.

As Hernani noted, the book calls for corporations to invest in, to underwrite, enterprises that in no direct or measurable way contribute to the enhancement of its capital. In a sense, instead of the usual ho-hum mode of “invest x to get return y,” the corporation is invited to take a flying leap of faith that its capital, plowed back into the loam of people, ideas, enthusiasms, issues, communities - in short, values other than those of the balance sheet – will turn, twist, explore, resurface, appear rather odd, wither in part, explode, propagate and, much like the nonlinear mode of "the story" that is explicitly a structuring theme of Gonzo Marketing, yield unexpected fruit. This would appear to represent a substantive change in current business practice for most corporate capitalists.

Please excuse me, but I have got a real strop on at the moment. Don't ask me why, I just have. Something smells a funny colour.

The thought struck me today that the alternative to corporations speaking with a human voice (which most of them would claim is impossible, and we'd agree with them) is for corporates to speak with a reasonable corporate voice.

What if I don't want my bank advisor to treat me like an old friend? I actually prefer to be treated with distance and respect when it comes to my financial future (or lack of it).

I'm Jeneane would agree with me that there is a constant battle within communications departments (or ought to be) with management to say things in a better way. Perhaps Gonzo isn' t the solution for all problems for reasons I mentioned before - that it can only truly be used by those who own the means of production. Until my bank advisor can control what happens to my money ( or even understands fully), he can't speak to me in a completely personal way.

I don't think I'm ready to go the whole way yet. As proof, Ladies and Gentlemen, Exhibit A. This rant/nostalgic whinge has been lurking on my hard disk for a while so I thought I had better put it out there so people can give an opinion.

I have originally written the article "Being Gonzo (Marketing Hacker é Gonzo)" in portuguese. Brazil is a different market. People here loves to talk anytime. The conversation is plentyful of joy. The blog phenomena has spread very easy and fast. Of course the article´s foccus mirror this diversity. But I found it interesting to the RGE debate. I thank to Jeneane who help me to translate it to english. Hope you enjoy.

Being Gonzo

"The paradox is not mine, the paradox is me."
Fernando Pessoa


While some people view the Net as the latest and greatest way to carry on business, it is also a way to catalyze voice. More than a business tool, the Internet is a medium—an environment that efficiently amplifies messages.

For a moment, let’s not think “macro.” Let’s think micro. Micromarkets consist of very small audiences that elevate the common voice beyond digital borders. I used to say that the Internet is a place for publishers, and through this editorial strength, we show the teeths to the traditional markets.

The concept behind the Net does not corroborate with everything we have learned about marketing up to now. Surfing on the digital ocean demands that we destroy some thoughts and agglutinate others with new ideas. “When paradox becomes paradigm, worst practices work best.”

Christopher Locke introduces the Gonzo Model in his new book, Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices. Gonzo Marketing offers some of the best thinking in Marketing since Theodore Levitt’s 1960 "The Marketing Myopia." Locke is aware of the tortuous paths of the Net. He understands that the micromarkets live within communications micro channels, where personal publishing versus the press and mass propaganda.

These micro channels (the Marketing Hacker itself and more than hundred projects included in this denomination) are creating a very specific and powerful micro audience. People who forge opinions, the press itself, and many individuals who otherwise would not have a voice, are using this channel as a source of inspiration and communication, each and every day.

Locke proposes that companies must not only pay closer attention to these projects, but that their very survival depends upon their willingness to embrace micromarkets. More valuable than market research, more powerful than mass marketing, and more effective than any propaganda campaign, micromarkets consist of people talking to people using human language that transcends the boundaries of the corporation.

So why don’t most companies “get it”? First and foremost, corporations are not human. They don’t breathe, don’t make love and don’t know how to talk as people. But companies do have the potential to talk through people.

In Gonzo Marketing, Locke unveils the concept of underwriting, in which people do talk as people. Underwriting more closely resembles the concept of mecenato of the gold time of Florence than to today’s practice of commercial sponsorship. Locke’s underwriting model does not presuppose any commercial link; rather’ it’s free and independent.

Underwriting brings continuity to the pure expression of voice, and at the same time brings organizations the real possibility of participating effectively in the virtual bazaar. It means confidence and reputation exchange. Corporations can reach their markets through their underwritten sites. More like anti-marketing than marketing, these underwritten sites represent the market’s point of view.

The Marketing Hacker is this type of site. It is my proposal. Of course I haven´t realised the marketing viablelity through the mecenato. But it´s incredible thinking, isn´t it?. My proposal is spreading the voice diversity through out the Net. Like everybody talking to everybody. Using this bloody mess as reference of information. I called it Creative Information. In the same way, the relatively new phenomenon of blogs are increasing conversation in many ways. Blogs are the catalyzing agent that, until now, has been missing from this.

The Creative Information is more peripheral. Corporations must understand the web from the perspective of the digital people. They must accept the diversity within micromarkets and underwrite their activities. Companies must call these voices to their sites, turning viable the personal projects that span across the Net. This model is a rough approximation to the open source movement, with people working and creating in teams and in tandem. Within micromarkets, our products are already packaged in blogs, sites and debate lists. The next step is for corporations to understand that our products are good, stable, and reliable, and to invest in this media to assure their own survival within the digital jungle.

I'm going to drop out of gonzo themes here for just a minute and take time to pay homage to George Harrison. He was a brilliant musician, and a thoughtful and caring person. I knew his wife, Olivia Arias, before she met George (or Jeffrey as he was called by family and close friends), and then George signed a band I was managing to his Dark Horse Records label. I got to meet half the Beatles because most of the parties were held at Ringo's house. George was more private and didn't have big bashes at his house much. I haven't had any contact with that circle of people for almost twenty years, but his passing has flooded my mind with memories, mostly of good times and laughter. Once, when he was being sued over the "My Sweet Lord" melody line he flew in from London and was bubbling over with excitement about a new song he had written on the airplane, so he sat us all down, grabbed a guitar and sang us the early version of "Sue Me, Sue You" blues. And he went through all that with a smile on his face despite being very annoyed at having to pay royalties for that brief snippet of notes that comprised the suit.

Farewell, Jeffrey... your music and your kindness will be with us forever! Jai Sat Chit Anand!

I just love reading you guys!

I dunno if you've noticed, but I've been quiet, and I've been noticing. Man, I am constantly surprised and thrilled by the sheer brilliance of people you "meet" on the net.

Talk about echoes and rhymes, lights and shadows, contrasts and comparisons; the biggest deja vu I get is just noticing again and again how amazing people can be.

And then I start to get a bit of that zing that I got from reading Gonzo for the first time, that sense of expanding mind reaching out, rushing out to meet a huge and ever expanding universe.

I gotta tell ya, I'm excited. I dunno where this is going, I dunno what happens next, but let's show these people a world with no rules, no controls, borders, or boundaries.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

Wow, you know people dig what you're doing when your book is translated to Hebrew. Such is the case, now, with Cluetrain, thanks to Hanan Cohen over on the Cluetrain list. Shalom for sure!

Long absence acknowledged. I have been elsewhere. Gracias to Hernani for reminding us of David Weinberger's insight into the promise of voice. And to Mike for reintroducing "joy" a la Rageboy. I like to imagine that joy can arrive in the use of voice or in the sharing of it. This is not so different, to me, from what happens in reading a good book: The flash of recognition that someone, elsewhere, has had a moment in the world that echoes, shares, illuminates or transforms some moment of my own. As joys go, this is not trivial, whether in a book or on a blog, or email, or what have you. The point, in the quaint parlance of today, is that the productivity of the Net in delivering the voice-and-joy piece of the human being market outperforms the efficiency quotient of the for-profit, mass manufacturing-jollification niche generally distributed via broadcast news, entertainment & information commodities.

McGuffin anyone? (I need the darned net just to decipher what Locke is on about half the time.) Maybe blogging is a device that captures the viewer's attention, drives the logic of the plot, and can be ignored as soon as it's served its purpose. Which would be...

Still figuring that out, but I'm certainly captured and driven by the explosion of prose going on in these things, and I wouldn't be privy to it otherwise. Stories told in words require no cameras or canvas. Just a "publish" button.

The conversation originates from the heart... from elsewhere. Because the spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice. The blogging is not an entertainment. The Internet at all is plentiful of joy. The joy of the amateur.

Mike, I'm just pretty much glad that I'm not the only one who has make believe conversations with our rageboy.
To which Chris might respond, our conversations are very real, Jeneane. Where the fuck have you been?
To which I might respond, No, I'm talking about the ones going on inside my brain.
To which Chris might respond, good conversation doesn't originate from the brain; it originates from the heart, the gut, the soul.
To which I might respond...

Jack. Your answers to the why blog question closely parallel my thoughts.
One thing that is missing is Chris "Joy of Blogging" response yesterday on his blog.

How does joy fit into this equation and how do we feel or think about joy?
To which Chris might respond, we don't think about joy we just feel joy.
To which I might respond, everybody experiences thought and emotion differently and it might be misleading to project our own interplay between heart and mind onto others.
To which Chris might respond....

How is that for a dialogic monologue on the half shell?

Honor & Recognition... I do prefer the word reputation

I come slinking in with my tail between my legs. I have been working for the corporate Man, but what a rich learning experience it has been. Much more will be revealed, hopefully, when I get a minute.

Meanwhile, small blog considerations at Ordinary Daze

Jeneane: How about both a "They Get It" and a "They Don't Get It" section?

Sort of the carrot and the stick approach.

I mean, both of them are no more than our personal opinion, but opinions put out in public are what voice is all about, no?

Jack shoots! Jack scores! Jack stays! Nice comments, Jack. Mike, check out Jack's take on your why blog questions.

Denise, thanks too; you definitely passed go. Collect your $200 at a lucrative blog near you. (And if you find one, let me know.)

For the rest playing the home game, cogent thoughts needed. Send care package soon.

"Stayin' Alive" i.e. to keep from being dropped as a lurker, I have a couple of responses to recent posts. Firstly, Jeneane, I totally understand the massive pull between the major 'gravity wells' of your life (mother, wife, worker, blogger). I have similar aspects to my life, and when I cross one of the Event Horizons I get pulled completely into that activity. Where this metaphor diverges from real world physics is that our individual Gravity Wells are overcome by the neighboring Gravity Wells and you get sucked from one to the other as demands mount and are met. In plain english this means that sometimes a few days go by before I can get away from other activities and do something fun, like maintaining a presence on this Blog.

And now to segue to Mike Sanders list of questions about the nature of Blogging. At first I was tempted to say "all of the above", but on closer examination I find that I need to put a scalar value to each of his parts. I also recognize that my rendering of these values is completely personal and everyone will have different notions about what Blogging is. So here goes:

A Better World: cool idea and probably true, but for me it just comes with the territory. More people talking with one another is bound to benefit all.

Build Relationships: definitely! The very idea that you can build relationships with people you would have no other reason to communicate with, and will likely never meet in the regular course of your life is a fantastic bonus. One could say much more about this topic, but I want to finish in a timely manner.

A Form of Expression: definitely again! People used to literally stand on soap-boxes in the public square and wag their tongues to all who would listen, and annoy those who don't give a damn but are forced to listen, at least at the 'noise' level. I would feel completely foolish doing that in the physical world, but in this world I can express myself and know that my haranaging will not fall on ears that would rather not listen to my babble. People will stop reading a Blog the microsecond that it becomes disinteresting to them. Those who keep reading do so because they want to.

Honor & Recognition: Possibly. If one takes a moral stand that is read by others and this affects their behavior in a positive way, then perhaps honor is served. Recognition is easier... every pass through the Blog implies some level of recognition, and some satisfaction in participating in the discourse.

Riches: Forget it... not here.... not likely...

Entertainment: In a sense because I am often amused, moved, angered, etc. by things I read in Blogs. The unique thing is that it is not a passive form of entertainment, and because each of us participates in it the level, or quality, of entertainment is altered as compared with TV or radio or any other passive form.

Okay, Jeneane, I've stuck my finger in the pie again (mmmm, tastes good), so 'Bye for now...

Hey, they get it.
I started out thinking I'd post something here about those who might not get it but nevertheless are eager to co-opt the lingo. See "Choice. Voice. Attitude." The official tagline for AARP makes the outfit sound more like a place you can read about The Bombast Transcripts than the benefits of aqua-cize... Not one to make unsubstantiated leaps about whether money is being put where mouth is, however, I nosed around a bit on the AARP site, and truth be told they are awfully engaged over there. My search on "viagra" turned up this article about "better sex through chemistry," and my search on Geritol returned just one hit - no pitch or product description, just a metaphor for the performance advantages associated with cleaning up your computer's startup folder. In fact, by the end of my visit I was forced to conclude that the self-proclaimed voice of America's seniors is perhaps the epitome of gonzo. Their writers take a stand, express opinions, and spark familiar-ringing discussions concerning, for example, the risks v. benefits of social marketing:

"The best tool for closing [the information gap in healthcare] is advertising. Economic research has consistently shown that advertising improves markets, bringing better informed buyers and better products. Now advertising is doing the same thing for prescription drugs. A 1999 survey by the Food and Drug Administration found that consumers use ads to get essential information about both the risks and benefits of drugs. Twenty-seven percent said ads caused them to talk to their doctors about conditions they never discussed before. On the other hand, the survey found that only about 4 percent of consumers have had bad experiences with their doctors when they talked about the drugs they see in ads. Direct-to-consumer advertising is here to stay, and that is a good thing for AARP members." (By John E. Calfee; Mr. Calfee got quite an earful in response to that one.)

I guess all this is just a sign that gonzo is here to stay, and with any luck will keep turning up in places we may not necessarily expect it. (Thanks to Norlin for describing his discovery of voice, promising metaphysical substance to come, and causing me to giggle when AARP's tv campaign proclaimed its weirdly parallel course.)

Since I seem to be the only one blabbing this weekend, let me weigh in on Denver's idea below--the gonzo rating service. I'm not too sure there's enough to rate yet, but there is a way we could start 'endorsing' (propogating) sites that are doing it right. As you may have noticed, I can add infinitely to the left-hand menu bar. If you guys see companies or sites that "get it," I can add them to the RGE blog. When the prospects for this spread beyond our own little circle (the lockes, weinbergers, searls, norlins, etc of the cyberworld), who knows, some underwriting possibilities may even emerge. And wouldn't that be nice? I have extra space over on earthlink where my other site's hosted, so if we need to add pages/expand eventually, we can do that.

Anyway, send your favorite "hey, they get it" sites to me and I'll add when I get bunch. Or blog some other ideas, folks. Comeon, it's getting way too quiet over here.

On a related note, Don't Make Me. I'm gonna have to start dismissing people who won't pipe up. This is supposed to be a gathering, ya'll. It ain't much of a party if only two or three people are talking. So Lurkers, get busy. Fair warning--pipe up this week, or else...

Oh, and I had to mention to Martin Jensen that I'm out of my Triptophan fog. Mostly due to his nudging. Thanks for bringing me around, Martin. On his fulcrum blog, Martin shares those amazing moments of the first snowfall. Nice.

jeez, get me started and you can't shut me up, huh? I really like Hernani's observation about the thinning borders between work and liesure: "We work as we play the video game." That's true for me, especially, as I live in a constant hyperlinked state of mother/wife/worker/blogger. I raise our daughter at home (four years and counting) while at the same time working full-time (and then some) from home for a pretty big PR company. At the same time, I juggle free moments between my husband and my blogging, and somehow that doesn't seem quite fair to my husband or my blogs. But right now, it's my reality.

So for me, especially, the connected world of the Internet is erasing the lines between work and home, between creative expression and ABCs, between online earth mother and offline wife-lover. And when the stars are aligned, it all works like magic--like a good search on google when you find JUST what you were looking for. And when the karma's bad, it all goes awry at once, like when the laptop dies, my daughter decides to etch her name into the baby grand, I piss my husband off, and I'm late finishing a really sucky article on something I still don't understand for a client that wouldn't know gonzo if it bit them in the tush.

So I'm not sure if the end result of all of this will be a collision of online and offline worlds, or a merging of our connected and unconnected states of being. I think for the near term, for us all, it will be an odd mix of collision and integration. And I wonder what it will be like for my daughter and hers. And sometimes, I wonder what she'll think when she's sitting there while her children etch their names into some family heirloom as she searches me up on google, finds this blog, joins in the discussion, and the whole thing comes full circle.

We indeed live in an amazing time.

night, -j.

Required listening for all RGE bloggers--Locke on the Todd Mundt show. Definitely the most in-depth gonzo interview we've heard yet, as Chris educates on what gonzo is, why gonzo is *not* personalization, and why companies should embrace micromarkets and online communities (among other things). He hardly swore at all. I think he sent a stand in.

Mike, great stuff and food for thought. As I return from a week on the gulf (Pensacola Beach), I'm deep in a quandry about what I want, how I feel, where I'm going, what I've been doing. My recent deprture from Atlanta amazed me. How easy it was to leave the laptop and the blogging behind. After a few zings of panic on the drive down (jeez, what am i gonna do without my laptop? I'm sure there's an Internet cafe somewhere on pensacola beach. I'll just get online there. don't worry, it'll be okay), I totally and completely forgot I was connected to anything but the heated beachside pool. All of the connected online world--so much a part of my daily experience--completely disappeared, and I didn't give it a second thought for five days, until we were about two hours outside of Atlanta. (Unlike my offline "work" responsibilities, which I didn't think about until *after* I got home.)

So what were my thoughts once I hit the 75/85 connector? "Wow, I wonder what's up on RGE? Wonder what everyone's been talking about. It'll be nice to talk to everyone again. I wonder if I have any EGR sends. I wonder if that stinking editor has gotten back to me about my article abstract (not)." Short and simple, I had something to look forward to. A reason to come home. Blogging gives me a reason to get up (a reason to stay up), a reason to connect, and someone(s) to connect with.

For Mike's "what's the purpose" questions, I weigh in this way:

To make the world a better place: not really, because I don't want that responsibility. too tired.
Deeper relations with others: kind of--others like me anyway. not the other kind of others though.
New avenue for expression: yes, my voice has been sequestered too long.
Honor, recongition: guilty with explanation--I think "acceptance" is a bigger need for me than honor or recognition. At least that's what my shrink says.
Rich and famous: well, shit, it sure would be nice if this blogging paid off eventually. I think, regardless of whether or not you blog for the hope of money, blogging or some Progeny of blogging will one day pay off for us, especially as more and more smart people are "involuntarily separated" from their jobs and take up arms against the corporate model.
Entertainment: it's fun, yes, but it's a lot of work too, isn't it? so more than entertainment, I'd say for the artistic, creative joy of it all.

So that's where I'm at, as I struggle to lift the fog of vacation and come to terms with the idea of once again being land locked.

More later. sorry i'm so down. keep up the good fight. -j.

Mike, I do think it is a new consumer form of entertainment. :-) However we are living in the knowledge age, aren´t we? The hacker ethic claims that our life is closer to Sunday than to Friday.

The trend is to dismantle the border between the working time and leisure. We work as we play the video game. It´s all together now!!!

I recently blogged some entries on truth and purpose in blogging that may be of some interest.

One of the questions I have is "What are our individual and collective purposes as bloggers, internauts and gonzomaniacs?"

Do we want to make the world a better place?
Do we want to form new and possibly deeper relations with our fellow Earthlinks?
Do we need a new avenue to express ourselves to satisfy an innate human need?
Is it honor and recognition that we crave?
How about great riches, financial independence, to make a living, or some extra pocket change?
Or maybe we are just wasting our time with another consuming form of entertainment?

Some of the above questions are purely personal decisions while others would probably benefit from some discussion.

We are breaking the wall... the firewall. That´s an hard job to make the corporations understand the simplicity of the Gonzo model. The Internet is media; the micromarkets are the audience and the people, not the corporations itselves, has the right to the voice.

Is there anybody out there?
Pink Floyd, The Wall

Team: just finished Gonzo today. About to start again, slowly, and this time with feeling.

BTW, when you buy ZoneAlarm's personal firewall online you also get a free copy of AdSubtract, which kills cookies, banner ads, etc, and also has a nice little tool for managing the cookies you want to let in.

Great Gonzo product, we should applaud loudly and support them with our custom.

Speaking of which, I was especially tweaked by Page 202 today. It occurs to me that what I would really like to do is run a Gonzo Ratings Service on the net. I'd call it a "GRating Service", because it will alternately shred and/or annoy the hell out of the admeisters, assuming any of them ever notice it.

I suggest we use the "X out of 7 Gonzo Bullets" as a graphic indicator, and then link to a more full Gonzo analysis of the site.

We could do it on a blog to start off, but I'm sure that with the talent we have assembled we could do a pretty bang up website of our own, and webhosting is pretty cheap. I'm not sure how we'd generate any revenue yet, but hey, I can't think of everything.

For our first beneficiary/victim, I'd like to proffer www.pcdj.com, who I'd give 2 and a 1/2 bullets.

Firstly, they have only two frame tabs, "product" and "community". The community side is a bit thin relative to the product side so no more than 2.5, but at least it is there, and the beginnings of a Gonzo marketing effort is evident. The product side is far richer and deeper, but the whole site is nice and slick, and there doesn't seem to be that air of intrusive shouting about the community side that would really bug me.

Thems my thoughts, but I'd be interested in responses from all of you.

I figure we could cut our teeth on some others (ZoneAlarm would be another natural) and then move on to outfits like Saatchi & Saatchi, Disney, etc, especially all those given honourable(?) mentions in GM-WWWP.

The way I see it, the day that S&S try to bribe us will be the day we know we've made it.


So, Who's in?


"Are you ready, are you ready for this? Are you hangin on the edge of your seat? From out the doorway the bullets rip, to the sound of the beat! Yeah . . . . . "
Another One Bites The Dust, by Queen

Denver and the bunch--Hey, I'm game to start a gonzo endeavor! Only thing is, I got no ideas right now, the main reason being that I am all about taking a break this week. SOOO we're packin up the family and heading to florida for a week to get a little R&R. When I get back, I bet I'll have lots of ideas. Stuff to blog. Asses to kick. Names to take. Oh man, I can't WAIT to get out of here. Does any other city's traffic helicopter guy radio guy describe the daily commute as "Draconian"? Sometimes I wonder why we live here. But hey, that's what vacation's all about.

So blog on while I'm gone. Keep up the spirit and the great conversation. And stuff yerselves with turkey too. See ya soon!

Andrew writes: "They want me to reflect their values; the values they use to market themselves. The problem is I can't 'be' them, they are hardly theirselves. So the best I can do is strike a neutral, best fit tone. But it don't inspire me."

Boy, are them ever true words. Bingo!

But the gonzo plan, Andrew, is not for workers to talk about products, as you seem to assume. If that assumption were what I was proposing, I'd have to agree with you that it was unworkable for precisely the reasons you give. Instead, the gonzo model calls for employees to talk about things THEY are passionately intereseted in. In such cases, amatuers are the best "experts." As I wrote in the book, "When paradox becomes paradigm, worst practices work best."

The idea of doing something completely gonzo, both in the sense of taking a big leap into the unknown, and in the sense of that unknown being itself a gonzo initiative, has got my juices flowing (if that's not too damply organic a metaphor for you).

Can a completely-gonzo-from-the-ground-up company exist? How many voices can one company have?

clocky has it easy, there's only two people in his head and they each have a business of their own.


"... oh yeah, at least one of his heads is now saner than an emu on acid"
Ford Prefect, speaking of Zaphod Beeblebrox,
in The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

Jack, the last NZ wine I saw on a restaurant wine list in the US was about US$80, which is about NZ$200 9hence the Pacific Peso . . . . )

Which means I could buy the whole dozen for the same price here.

You guys are being ripped off, that's why I suggested you might like to see if blackmarket would package for international delivery - you'd still be saving heaps. Hell, you could probably supply to your local restaurant trade at those prices!

But I don't really want to sell wine, I just used www.blackmarket.co.nz as an example.

It also answers (at least partly) your question about how - they didn't do anything other than set up the website to keep their friends off their backs, but they did say that they really didn't want to piss potential customers off so they deliberately didn't spam anyone. They just told their friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on.

They're turning over a quarter of a mill this (their first) year and at current growth rates expect to do a mill next year. That's in a population of about 3.5 million and using only word of mouth! OK, word of email.

That's the viral power of gonzo marketing: no sooner had I bought a crate of a good red than I sent off 5 emails to friends of mine that I know are also into a wee drop now and again.

(I wanted to make sure they didn't deplete the stock, so I made sure my order had been confirmed before I emailed them! I may well be ignorant, but I'm not stupid!)

But I'd rather not go too far into the how until we sort out the what: I have no real idea what we collectively have to offer that some benighted fools might be willing to part with their hard-earned for, but I know we've got a group of pretty clever people assembled (and me, as well) and I know that we're the ones presently with the insight and the motivation to explore how we might build a completely gonzo business from the ground up, so my basic question is;

if not us, then who?

if not now, then when?


"What's that? Who's driving? Where we going? Who knows? . . . ."
Talking Heads gettin gonzo on the album Speaking In Tongues

S'funny that you've raised the idea of a Gonzo company as it coincides quite neatly with the thoughts I've knocking around for the past few days.

Gonzo won't work in traditionally organised companies. Why? Because there is more than one voice involved in the production of the message. Gonzo works becuase it is one distinctive voice. Big Companies operate by splitting up tasks into tiny pieces and then reassembling them after going through various "filters" ( most of whom know what they want, but don't know what they are talking about). The voice is lost, confused - unreal. You can't pretend Gozo. You either are or you aren't.

This leads to the conclusion that Gonzo must own the means of production. Chris Locke is a great product because nobody but Chris Locke is allowed to be Chris Locke. Any attempts to be Gonzo by Big Companies is doomed to failure.

Multi-skilled, eclectic individualists should therefore be the ones best placed to harness Gonzo Marketing.

The reason why this all came about is that I am writing a website for a large Nordic company. They want me to reflect their values; the values they use to market themselves. The problem is I can't "be" them, they are hardly theirselves. So the best I can do is strike a neutral, best fit tone. But it don't inspire me.

Mind you I could of course be writing bollocks. We'll find out tomorrow what the ad agency has to say.

I have started a blog by the way, but I have been too busy to do anything with it. It's here, though.

The Pacific Peso, that has a great ring to it, despite the less-than-stellar reputation the word 'peso' might have in the Western Hemisphere in general. So what are we talking about here... a Gonzo Group Multi-Product Garage Sale Internet Nexus of Commerce? I live near California's premiere wine country, but I've had some of the New Zealand stuff and will attest to it's fine quality!

In a think out of the box sort of comment, someone I know recently suggested I try to market my children's sized mannequins as dress-up dolls for little girls who could put their own clothes on them and 'play house'. Hmmm... would certainly extend the potential market. Is that a Gonzo concept?

As for basses... no way I'm going to tackle a standup double bass. There's way too much specialized knowledge in making those very large acoustic instruments (but boy do I love to hear someone who can play the hell out of one). But there are two other types I am interested in building one of these days. One is the typical electric bass, and the simple truth there is that there is as much going on in the electronic side in making an outstanding instrument as there is in the woodworking side. After all, most electric guitars are a slab of wood and a fingerboard until you get to the electronics. The other is a guitar-bass... an acoustic (perhaps with a pickup installed as well) instrument that looks like a big-bellied guitar with four strings. They're great for a small room and just jamming with friends, but don't do too well in a larger venue because as soon as you amp them up very much they tend to feedback a lot.

So back to actually trying to market something... what else besides NZ wine might be on the list? And how would this experiment work? I know that the existing paradigm is to send of email to a zillion people, but that's really Old School and exactly the kind of spamified crapola that we are trying (I think) to get rid of. So how do we make ourselves visible to other's who might be interested in whatever we have to offer?

Back to you guys...

Well, shit, I'll do the backing vocals.

Jeneane: No money down, easy payments - honest! ;-)

Seriously, I wasn't contemplating some monstrous investment thing, just a modest real life experiment in the viability of Gonzo as a foundational theme for a business.

See the website I discussed below, other than some semi-formalised ordering and payment relationships, that website is the sum total of the business.

Hell, if you look at the wines on sale, and you know something about New Zealand wines (mostly they're damned good, I shit you not) and you like wine, and you like the fact that our currency is known as the Pacific Peso (sigh), then you might even be able to convince them to look into packaging for international delivery.

Shoot, if they won't package it for you, let me know and I'll do it.

That, my friend, is viral marketing - the transmission of an idea as opportunity, with the only dis-ease caused to your credit card account.

The trick (forgive me Chris!) is to make it work for us.

"look at that yoyo, that's the way to do it, he's bangin on the bongo like a chim-pan-zee!
aw, that ain't workin . . . ."
- Dire Straits

Denver, man, you're gonna make me run for the Xanax with the what are you going to DO question? Hell, I don't know what I'm going to do. What am I supposed to do? No extra cash to "launch" with... lookin' into private school for the little one... you know. Whatever it is, it's gotta pay. So I do this. And this is something. And it will pay one day. And for now it's free. So you see, I'm not-so-subtly using my marketing know how to position myself smack dab in a microcommunity with other really smart people who have all manners of connections and interests and ideas...

So I guess what I'm going to do is "play it by ear." It took more than a decade of marriage to a musician before the depth of that old saying hit me. Play it by ear=improvise. Listen, hear, respond, relax, flow, let it happen, leave gaps, add fills, give and take, let go, dig the process... So that's all I'm going to do right this second I think. Jamming along and waiting to see how far out we can take it... Every now and then I get a solo or two... and I'm happy. For now. Then I'll get bored. Just like you guys. And then we'll make it even better.

(Note to Big Corporation I work for, and Big Fish my clients: All this shit has made me an even better worker, because my brain is now on overdrive. I think more clearly. I can invent again. I write better. I feel better. I'm all about energy. Lucky you.)

And now, a case study on gonzo. Jack, I didn't know you built guitars too--I checked out your wooden folks a while back. I hope I wrote you like I meant to about how freaky and cool they are! Now, tell me more about the guitars... and whether or not you do basses... hubby's a multi-instrumentalist. we're always looking. And gee, that Locke has been known to beat on a roland guitar synth or two... shit, chris, did you know this guy makes guitars?

So who knows Denver, we may all go off on one big gonzo adventure together, or we may, as I suspect, connect, intertwine, and engage in intracommerce within our own little microcommunity (and others like us), exchanging wampum when we can, and adding our strings to the complex web of online interconnections. And eventually, maybe that's all we'll *need* to do. And how cool would that be?
;-)

Denver (et. al.) - I know what you mean, at least I think I have some idea about what it's like to have something to offer and no place to offer it. That's one reason why I became interested in this topic. My copy of the Gonzo book just arrived over the weekend, so I've only read a small amount by now, but my motivation is both practical as well as philosophical. I have a small side business that has, as you put it, "no marketing media in the traditional sense". It has a website (www.woodenfaces.com), but the target clientele is limited mostly to boutique type shops, and there's nothing much more than chance that leads them to my site. I also make guitars, and one of these days will, in some manner or fashion, try to "market" them, but there's no way to do it in the traditional way, so I have to be one of the guinea pigs of Gonzo and step off of terra firma into something quite unknown. I assume that's why so many existing companies are so slow to change and evolve. They are using what has worked so far and aren't willing to trade their predictable (so far) buggy for some sportier new model that might not work at all.

I'd be interested in this topic even if I didn't have anything I wanted to 'market', but it's doubly interesting to look at it both from the perspective of an extra-terrestrial anthropologist and a very earth bound (would be) merchant!

On top of that, there are other things I'd like to use this marvelous media we're all involved with, and that is to publish some semi-personal history wherein I am not interested in making any money in the process, but would like to publish things of interest that I have collected over the years, for instance the history of certain military aircraft. This small Gonzo group has managed to coalesce around a theme in a vast ocean of ideas that are in existence on the web, and I find it amazing in a sense. Anything that I would 'publish' by way of creating a web site would be just one more piece of flotsam in that ocean, and unless I took some action, some form of Gonzo Marketing, there would be nothing more than pure happenstance that would get that site up on someone's screen. While waiting for the ferry the other day I saw something that is ordinary in our cultures legends, but extraordinary in that I had never actually seen one... it was a clear whiskey bottle with a note in it floating on the bay. I just stood there amazed at the thought of it... at the UN-likelyhood that it would ever actually make a journey of any distance... that another person would actually fish it out of the water and read the message... it took me on quite a metaphysical journey imagining that someone in some remote place had surrendered to the idea that despite incredible odds this was the only way that there was any possibility whatever of getting a message out to the world. Phew! In reality it was probably some kid doing it for a joke, or some thoughtless yacht driver throwing his garbage overboard, but to me seeing that bottle bobbing listlessly in the bay it became a parable for a much broader set of ideas...

Jack, I do know it, thanks. As you say, I think I've almost always known it, but my employer doesn't.

In fact, my employer would explicitly and emphatically deny it, and probably castigate me for suggesting it, and probably ultimately fire me if I persisted an asserting such an idea. And the Marketing department would probably approve wholeheartedly.

[sigh . . . . . . ]

What I was trying to say to Jeneane, since she's the only one here I know is "in marketing" in the traditional sense, is what if her dreams come true and the War On All That Is Not Gonzo finally tracks down and kills Osama Bin Hustlin, well, WHAT THEN?

What is she going to do?


See my last mangled post for a company that not only has no marketing department, but has no marketing media in the traditional sense, just a website that invites you to sign up, and invites you to invite your friends to do the same. You can't get there unless you (or someone who knows you) know where you're going already. Gonzo, and they don't even know it! They started the site this way because they had no money and to placate their friends who were always asking them for cheap wine deals.

Chris: I've just sent them a copy of your book. You see what you've done to me!!


Still haven't got that blogBuddy hyperlink sussed. Bugger!