This is Kate.

She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog (thesmallthingsblog.com) exactly one year ago. And like most of us, it was a labor of love without a whole lot of “community.” In fact, for the first eight months, she had a grand total of seven readers.  But between August of 2011 and today Kate has had over 10 million page views!  How did she achieve this amazing success in just five months?  Pinterest!

Pinterest is the hottest social media platform around right now. Created in March 2010, it’s still only available by signing up for a waiting list. Pinterest is probably best described as a “virtual pinboard.” Based on the idea that many people have magazine clippings of their dream vacations, weight loss goals, or perfect weddings, Pinterest allows users to create “boards” and share content by uploading images, “pin” from other sites, or “re-pin” from other user boards.

And there is an important social element too as you can comment, like, share, email content, and search based off of your customized interests.

If you snoop around Pinterest, for a little while, chances are you’ll run into a high-quality image of a beautifully coiffed hairstyle from Kate.  “My whole goal behind the blog was to share my ideas and information,” she said, “so I thought Pinterest would be a great way to share video tutorials of my hairstyles.”

“I pinned a photo of a completed style, which directed Pinterest users back to my blog to watch the tutorial video. And then I sat back and watched as the numbers rolled in.  I was stunned as I watched my blog quickly approach the first 100,000 page views! My husband and I sat at the computer, hitting refresh over and over until it hit 100,001. We were amazed.”   Since then, Kate’s success with Pinterest has continued to skyrocket. Thanks to Pinterest, Kate has now gained 16,000 blog subscribers and 14,000 Pinterest followers in just a few months.

“Almost daily I get a comment or email saying ‘I found you on Pinterest!’,” she said. “My top 10 traffic referring URLs are all Pinterest.”

Kate believes her success comes down to a careful balance between her original content and self-promotion for her blog and business.

“I think there is a fine line between self-promotion and obnoxious self-promotion. I decided to only pin hair photos to my own boards [from her blog], and a maximum of two per week.  The rest of the week, if any blog readers want to pin things from my blog, it’s up to them.”

“What I don’t want is for my 14,000 Pinterest followers to log on to Pinterest and see all the photos from my blog. I think that would be obnoxious,” she continued.  “I had one instance where I was following a blogger on Pinterest and she would pin things from her posts multiple times a day. I stopped following her.”

Beyond the blog numbers, Kate is also obtaining new business due to her Pinterest success.  In September, she took on her first blog sponsor. She also has had interest in her private hairstyling business. “It’s brought so many people to my blog who now want to be my clients!”

One of the reasons for Kate’s Pinterest success is that her hairstyling photos create intrigue.  If you pin an image of a dog, you know it is a dog. But with a hairstyle, a recipe, or a DIY project, there is a backstory.  You need to keep digging if you want to know how to do it. That “intrigue” is an opportunity to drive people back to your blog or website.

How about you?  Do you have an opportunity to create intrigue for your blog or business through Pinterest?

Lauren Schaefer is a recent college grad, NYC resident, and nonprofit event planner with an interest in all things social media. She documents her new journey as a young professional at her blog From the Fifth Floor. Twitter: @leschaef

For years I’ve admired the real-world insights and experienced perspectives of Steve Goldner, perhaps better know as @Social Steve.  I’m pleased that Steve has agreed to be the newest Contributing Columnist to {grow} and I know you’ll enjoy his work!

By Steve Goldner, Contributing {grow} Columnist

I head up social media at a performance marketing agency in New York City and I will tell you, everyone is interested in social media! But getting people to buy in and commit to social media takes MUCH more than having a shiny object.

It might be easy to get in the door, but you must show relevance to business KPIs (key performance indicators) to get commitment for social media. And budgets shift all the time so social media MUST show continuous measurable results. Social media accountability means delivering and demonstrating growth in all relevant parameters that are inputs and building blocks to stated KPIs.

So how do you even go about this?  Here are three simple suggestions that will definitely put you on the right path:

Understanding the Business you Represent
Make sure you know EXACTLY what your company stands for. Formally document a position statement, target market to serve, value proposition you provide for your customers, as well as the communication objectives of the company. Share this with stakeholders of the company and make sure you have concurrence.

This is an extremely important first step for social media because your “social” activities should be aimed at reinforcing your position and value proposition and be targeted to the right people. This does not mean that you are going to explicitly communicate these positions, but you should reflect on these formal documents and look to support your brand position and values when you design your owned media.

Don’t “Post” –  Publish
There are two missions when running a blog and/or community: 1) attract new readers/users, and 2) make sure the existing audience comes back. The nuance between posting and publishing is the difference between simply putting up some words (i.e. posting an article name and URL) versus gaining peoples attention and getting them interested. As an old (CMO) boss of mine would always say – “words are important.”

And if we look at the missions stated above, it is more than just using compelling, engaging words. Plan how your owned media will get easily shared. Build strategy and tactics to get earned media.

Deliver Metrics that Matter to Executives
Executives think in terms of a sales funnel. Yes, I think the funnel is dead (and I have covered that), but that does not really matter if your customer thinks otherwise.

You have to show results in a manner that is relevant to the stakeholders’ perspective. This means being able to measure awareness, consideration, loyalty, and advocacy. Notice I did not mention sales. Social media is generally a weak vehicle for direct sales, BUT awareness, consideration, loyalty and advocacy ALL contribute to sales.  Here are a few thoughts (there are many more) on how to measure each:

• Awareness – is typically generated beyond your digital assets. If someone is on your website, blog, or Facebook page, they have already become “aware.” So use a social media monitoring tool. Measure the number of mentions of your brand or website URL.
• Consideration – shows up by checking out your brand and from a digital perspective this can be measured by how many come to brand website. Look at onsite parameters such as visits, pageviews, and time onsite.
• Loyalty – comes when individuals engage with brands and literally say, “I want in.” Easy loyalty measurements include number of comments and interactions, sign up on sites, and the number of friends and followers. Individually, none of these items show loyalty, but looking at them collectively provides loyalty insights.
• Advocates – publically reference your brand. This can be measured by capturing the number of retweets, reblogs, mentions, and positive sentiment for your brand.

Let’s address how these numbers should be considered in context of an overall marketing program.

Looking at specific numbers for a given month really doesn’t tell you anything. And seeing a drop from one month to another or seeing a rise from one month to another should not necessarily alarm you or be cause for celebration, respectively. You will likely see zigzag fluctuations each month based on many confounding events and factors you cannot control.

The relevant information comes from a statistical evaluation of a normalized curve over a number of months, perhaps a 12-month sliding scale. Realistic and true social media success is captured over time and short term successes are probably not be a true indication of market reality.  Can you represent a 5-10% growth in each area month-to-month on the normalized curve? Now that’s meaningful success!

Winners in the social media space have a game plan, meaningful + relevant metrics, and the right people to both execute the plan and provide the appropriate analysis.  Do you have a plan?  Do you feel you have the right talent on board?  How is this changing for you and your company as social media matures as a channel?

Steve Goldner is the Senior Director at MediaWhiz where he leads the social media practice. Steve has been a marketing executive for the past 20+ years and engaged in social media for the last 4 years. You can follow him on Twitter @SocialSteve and visit his own blog at http://socialsteve.wordpress.com .

We’ve tossed around a lot of ideas on {grow} about how technology is impacting our lives, but I’m also really interested in how it is impacting the culture of our companies.

For example, what is it going to be like leading a new workforce that is conditioned to manage relationships through text messages and accustomed to the continual stimulation and reward of video games?   As they enter the workforce, are they going to change our companies?  Or, are our companies going to change them?  Maybe a little of both?

The intersection of technology, Generation Text, and corporate culture will have vast implications for recruiting and retention, training, compensation, HR policies … nearly every company-employee touch-point in fact!

With this backdrop, you can imagine how interested I was to read a report from McKinsey on a competition they held to identify how Web 2.0 tools and technologies are changing management.  From 143 entries, here are five big ideas:

1. Sharing common resources more efficiently

Employees of the Dutch government are using web-based tools to share offices, conference spaces, and other resources. The employees were facing too many bureaucratic hurdles, and even had to reserve meeting space in their own buildings through an outside agency!  One particularly frustrated employee tweeted her exasperation to colleagues, and they decided to form a group to build their own reservation system with open-source software.  They rolled it ou,t building by building, and now the system includes more than 53 offices and 554 work spaces across the country. The employees say the net result is a “shift from the focus of individual ‘ownership’ as defined by specific government buildings and offices to a sense of ‘stewardship’ shared across the spectrum of government.”

2. Global training with local experts

Essilor International, a global maker of ophthalmic lenses, created an internal training program that mixes in-person and Web 2.0 formats to transmit best practices among 102 sites in 40 countries. The company says that a mastery level that once took three years to achieve can now be reached in about one.  A lens-processing center in Thailand, for example, developed a game to teach new workers how to understand the shape of a given kind of lens; now it’s used in Brazil too. A social-network feature enables coaching across multinational locations. The system is called “Entangled Talents” because the company said “the talents of individual employees across the globe have become entangled, creating a web that supports the company’s daily operations.”

3. Powering continuous improvement 

Best Buy has more than 1,500 locations and more than 100,000 employees on the frontlines of customer service.  In an effort to make sure that senior managers learn what those employees are hearing from customers, the company created an online platform that rewarded employee feedback on what they are hearing from customers.  The platform allows everyone to see collated information from all stores in a useful and searchable format. This information is powering a movement of continuous improvement that has affected things as simple as the signs in one store and as complicated as decisions about how to implement a national promotion.

4. Social networking for new product development 

Rite-Solutions, a software company, built an internal idea marketplace that has so far generated 15 new commercial products that account for 20 percent of the company’s total revenue. This system goes far beyond a typical brain-storming platform. The internal website connects potential new products with the resources, experience, and expertise that can bring ideas to life. The internal social networking site enables communities to organically develop to further improve, develop, and commercialize new product ideas.

5. Using internal communities to reduce time-to-market

The Mexico-based cement giant Cemex introduced an internal-collaboration platform called Shift, which has helped the company reduce the time needed to introduce new products and make internal process improvements. Shift uses a mix of wikis, blogs, discussion boards, and Web-conferencing tools to speed problem-solving.  When employees use Shift, ideas, suggestions, and  recommendations bubble up across the network. Communities of interest are form to tackle challenges common to their locations, markets, and skill sets.  Projects can move forward without the barriers posed by traditional hurdles, such as over-reliance on e-mail and live meetings. The payoff is lower cycle  times, faster time to market, and real-time process improvement.  The company has 500 active internal problem-solving communities.  An example: Cemex invited 400 employees involved with its ready-mix products to help figure out which worked best and which were redundant. The result is a slimmed-down product line offered in a constantly updated catalog available globally.

How is your company using social technologies and Web 2.0 tools to manage smarter?  Any case studies and successes you’d like to share?

I’ve spent some time this week attending a few online webinars and catching up on my blog reader and I noticed an interesting trend. The conversations, research, presentations, and case studies focused entirely on large corporations.

For example, I sat through a Forrester presentation on new social web marketing analytics and their ideas on measurement took resources that were way out of reach of the small business owner, meaning … most of us.

Look through the success stories in your blog reader. Nike. Ford. Coca-Cola. And of course the ever-present Zappos. Is anybody paying attention to the little guys?

We keep hearing about the great opportunity for small businesses to “take part in the conversation” but is that really true?  In the daily dogfight for consumer attention, are they being overwhelmed by the big brand mega-productions, online promotions and games?  Are small businesses going to be crowded out by the big chains and big marketing budgets?

No!  It’s time for the small business owner to rise up and embrace the social web!  Local businesses CAN have an advantage through social media for these three reasons:

Local angle — Social media’s greatest power is when it is used in a way that is targeted and local.  I could care less about a tweet from a mega-brand, but I would certainly be interested to get to know a local shop owner in a personal way.

Here’s an example.  I don’t follow Starbucks on Twitter and probably never will. However, I do follow Brian Myers, the owner of JaVerde Coffee here in Knoxville. We became friends over Twitter.  Although his shop is 15 miles from my home, I go out of my way to support his small business entirely because of our personal Twitter connection. That’s how business works!

Personal touch — One time Brian saw this tweet come through: “On my way to JaVerde Coffee but forgot my wallet!”  The shop owner replied, “Come on by, this one is on me.” He just won a customer for life.

Even though companies like McDonalds may fill a room with tweeters, I don’t think they  could ever match the connection and loyalty a local business owner can drive with its customers.  If Bank of America tweets every minute of the day for the rest of my life I am probably never going to connect with a real person.  And for a small business, that is everything.  It’s not just about coupons. It’s about caring.

The ROI advantage — Culturally, I think it is difficult for many large businesses to do anything more than check a box on social media because they expect all the results to be neatly assembled on an Excel spreadsheet or infographic. If you have a moment to spare, I encourage you to watch this three minute news story about a small bakery’s use of Facebook.  Here are some of the social media benefits described in the clip:

• Higher customer loyalty/number of visits
• Higher rate of spending
• Frequent customer connection
• A channel for customer service
• Emotional connection to the brand
• Source for new product ideas and customer polling

Now if a customer provides an idea for a great new pastry, how do you measure that?  I suppose you could create a pie chart.  Pie chart!  Get it?  Oh, never mind.

For a local business using an essentially free social media platform, this list of benefits is pretty impressive.  In fact, it’s revolutionary.

So while small businesses may not be getting the spotlight on the blogosphere, there is no question that, done right, there can be great opportunity in this critical segment of the economy.

What is your experience? Do you have any great case studies from your city you would like to share?

I had my eyes opened to the massive growth of the crowdsourcing industry at a SXSW panel earlier this year.  Ever since then, I have been looking for an opportunity to bring more information on this trend to {grow}. I’m fortunate today to have an expert on the subject, David Bratvold, provide a guest post:

If you’re not yet familiar with crowdsourcing, it’s a new work process that involves getting a crowd of people to help with a task typically performed by one employee or contractor.  Imagine needing a new logo for your business.  Rather than hire a freelancer, agency, or in-house designer, with crowdsourcing you can post your need and several designers will compete and create a custom logo just for you.

While this is a common example, today crowdsourcing extends far beyond simple graphic design and can be broken down into four main subcategories:

• Microtasks -
  Taking a project and breaking it into tiny bits as seen on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (“the online marketplace for work.”).  Each crowd worker can only see his little bit of the project. You could hire one person to label 1,000 photos or hire 1,000 people to each label 1 photo.
• Macrotasks -
  Similar to microtasks, however, workers can see more, if not all, of the project and can get involved with any portions they are knowledgeable in.  This form is most common with solving complex problems such as the X-Prize or seeking out a better recommendation algorithm for Netflix.
• Crowdfunding -
  Getting a crowd to help fund your cause or project.  It’s unique because you set a monetary goal and deadline and you must get fully funded by your deadline or you’ll get nothing. Here is a list of 13 crowdfunding sites.
• Crowd Contests -
  Asking a crowd for work and only providing compensation to the chosen entries. Commonly seen in design sites like 99designs, and the graphic design example in the opening paragraph.

(For a more thorough explanation, read “What is Crowdsourcing.”)

As the early stages of crowdsourcing continue to gain momentum, there are a few megatrends worth keeping your eye on.

1) Curated Crowds

The bigger your crowd doesn’t necessarily mean better output when it comes to crowdsourcing.  This has been made apparent with the early days of crowdsourcing design sites.  A design contest yielding 1,000 designs can become simply unmanageable.  If you offer a prize large enough, any monkey with a crayon could contribute.  I’m not saying a large crowd produces bad results, I’m simply stating there will be bad among the good.  Luckily, there are almost always a lot of great designs, but it takes extra time to sift out the bad.

Sites like Genius Rocket have begun shifting to a curated crowd model.  Anyone can request to join their crowd, however, they must prove they’re talented before being able to participate in some projects, or even at all.   LogoTournament has been silently curating their crowd since the early days.

2) Quality Improvements

As microtasking gains in adoption, more crowdsourcing platforms are seeing success with adding an extra level of quality control on top of the basic input – output model made popular by MTurk.  If you’ve used MTurk, you’re fully aware the results you get may be less than correct.  Sites like Serv.io & Microtask have added extra redundancy and QA checks to ensure high levels of accuracy.  If a client requests it, Serv.io can maintain perfect accuracy when needed.  As this option becomes more available, people will be demanding 99.9%-100% accuracy, considering it doesn’t incur a lot of extra expense.

3) The Standardization of Crowdsourcing

As it’s been pointed out, crowdsourcing is not an industry, it’s currently an undefined space.  The current leaders in crowdsourcing are working to define this space and standardize as much as we can.  Groups like the Crowdsortium are for players within crowdsourcing to discuss what’s going on.  Daily Crowdsource, along with David Alan Grier, are leading the pack towards standardization.  Grier has been pushing for a trade association for quite some time, and recently has begun publicly discussing it.  Daily Crowdsource, Grier, and other leaders are working to define the official taxonomy of crowdsourcing.  All these recent motions are to help standardize crowdsourcing in order to ensure a healthy future.

4) Corporate Acceptance

Crowdsourcing isn’t just a fad for early adopters.  In fact, several Fortune 100 corporations have taken a big step into crowdsourcing.  General Electric is leading the charge with multiple million dollar open innovation projects. Others like General Motors, Procter & Gamble, and PepsiCo continue to execute crowdsourcing projects (not just one-off publicity stunts).  Amazon even built one of the largest
crowdsourcing platforms.  It’s not often a new process is adopted so quickly by large corporations, but this will make it easier for other Fortune 100 corporations to begin crowdsourcing, which will trickle down to smaller corporations.

5) Early Adoption

Although you may be familiar with the term, crowdsourcing is still in the early adoption phase.  A very small percentage of people are familiar with everything  crowdsourcing can do.  Sure, any tech geek can name 99designs, but can you list 10 other uses of crowdsourcing?  Were you aware you could build a car, stress test your website, or volunteer your “waiting in line” minutes to a charity all with the help of crowdsourcing?

Have you tried crowd-sourcing yet?  What are your favorite applications and success stories?

David Bratvold is the founder of Daily Crowdsource, the #1 site for crowdsourcing news. His goal is to educate business professionals on the benefits of crowdsourcing.

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Many people dream of writing their own book and the exciting news is that today, you don’t necessarily need a literary agent or book contract to experience publishing success.

One very viable option is self-publishing. That was the decision I made for my first book, The Tao of Twitter, and here are some lessons learned that can help you get started on your own effort.

The essential question

There are many good reasons to publish a book: awareness, income, self-gratification, an entry point for speaking opportunities, etc. Before you decide which way to publish, think about WHY you’re doing it.

For me, I was looking to solve a problem. The number one question I was asked was “Can you help me understand Twitter?” That is just not something I could do in a phone call or over coffee. The available Twitter resources were too long, too boring, missed the point, or were out of date. Plus, I wanted to go through the learning experience of publishing a book.

I had been approached by three publishers about doing a book but the timing wasn’t right for me. They all expected a book tour and  promotional efforts and I did not have the time in my life to do that.  Also, they expect a book of certain “heft.” The length of a book is associated with the price point. The book I had in mind was going to be short and aimed at busy people. I didn’t want to make it as long as what they wanted and it would have required a lot of fluffy filling. That’s not for me. So self-publishing became a viable route.

Getting organized

Obviously you need a chapter-by-chapter outline for a book.  Here’s a technique that worked for me. I literally had easel-pad pages for each chapter “decorating” my dining room.  On each page I had sticky notes with ideas, resources, and assignments for each chapter.  This is very low tech but it helped me visualize the entire flow of the book and what was going to go where.

Challenges

It’s much different writing a book than a couple of long blog posts.  Obviously there is a significant time requirement. I wanted to make sure my wife and family was on board and understanding that this would be ON TOP of everything else.

My biggest challenge was keeping focused on the continuous flow of the book — much harder to do than stand-alone blog posts.  One of the things that helped was blocking out large chunks of time, primarily over the holidays, to write. At least for me, I couldn’t write the book in small increments because I was spending too much time having to ge re-acquainted with the flow.

Picking a platform

I did a lot of research on picking the right publishing platform. I ultimately chose CreateSpace, a division of Amazon, and I’m so glad that I did.  I highly recommend this company. They have an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process with lots of help at each stage.

Also, they offer paid assistance at each step.  For example, if you want an editor, they can provide that.  If you need help with cover art, they can do that. Marketing? Same thing.  And their customer service is superb!  It was quite painless to get both the print copy and the electronic copy ready for Amazon.

Unfortunately I had to go through another company Lulu, to get it produced as an iBook. Nine months after I paid them, it is still not produced. This company has been a nightmare to work with. Their service is awful.  Avoid them at all costs.

My out-of pocket costs

One advantage of this model is that it is an inexpensive path forward.  You don’t have to sell too many books to break even. Here were my approximate expenses:

• Upfront CreateSpace set-up costs $99
• Licensing fee $99
• Graphic design $150
• Proof-reading assistance $120
• Website for book $300 (www.thetaooftwitter.com)

So basically I was ready to go for under $1,000. Of course you can get into a lot more expense if you use the CreateSpace paid options. I saved money by using my own trusted freelancer friends.

Profits

You have complete control of the pricing of your book.  CreateSpace charges you a flat fee for producing the book (usually between $3-$5 depending on length) and after that, the profits are yours. If you actually sell books, this can be much more profitable than going with a publisher. You can also change the price of the book at any time.

The amount you make is also affected by the distribution channel.  The most profitable source is selling right from CreateSpace. If you go with Amazon, they’ll nick you for another $1 or so per book. And big distributors force even lower profits.

By the way, all books are not automatically picked up by Amazon. It has to go through a review process.  Thankfully, my book was selected for their channel and nearly all my sales come through Amazon. It’s evenly split between paper and electronic copies and I have priced it so that I make about $3/book.  It won’t make me rich, but most important, it’s priced fairly so even students who need it can afford it.

Another advantage to this model is that there are no inventory costs.  The books are produced on demand. So whether you need one book or 100, they can be shipped to your door, or the customer, in a matter of days.

Marketing the book

Probably the biggest irony of my career is that I do a lousy job marketing myself. I’m too busy helping other people and it is ever so much more interesting to market something other than me! So, I’m not a best practice in this category!

Sadly, my entire marketing plan was to write one post and put a little ad on the blog. Thankfully the book became very popular despite my shortcomings.  Many people have been kind enough to write The Tao of Twitter and recommend it without my prodding. You know why? Because the book rocks.  It really does. I believe in it. And that is important. If you don’t have great content, you’re not going to have much of a marketing plan anyway, no matter what you spend on it.

Another key idea is having a built-in network.  Again, it all depends on your goals, but I have a friend who has high hopes for a self-published book but he has no online network.  His goal is make money from the thing so he is basically hoping for a miracle unless he is ready to plow a lot into marketing.  There is no marketing more powerful or cost-effective than an engaged network of fans.

Results

• Despite the lack of proactive marketing, the book has reached number three on Amazon’s list of business communication books.  Through word of mouth alone, it is selling well enough so that it would be considered a “best seller” in the business book category.
• It is being translated into Spanish, Mandarin and Portuguese.
• The Tao of Twitter is being used as a business or PR textbook at seven universities.
• I am planning an updated and expanded second edition of the book in 2012.
• It is providing a nice passive income stream. I broke even in six weeks.
• Most important, it has met my goal.  Anybody, anywhere can read this book in about 90 minutes and have a path forward on Twitter.  The people who have read it, LOVE it and I get wonderful reviews and feedback on it every day.

I am working on a new book (announcement soon!) and have decided to go with a traditional publisher (McGraw-Hill) for this work because of the scope and complexity of the topic.  So, I’m in the middle of another learning adventure I will be able to share with you when the project is completed!

Are you thinking of self-publishing?  What questions do you have about it? What’s holding you back?

Why am I waving my fist in the air?  You will just have to click on the video to see!

I’m just not much of a video guy but hey, I’m trying!  Here’s a little story about a wide web of social connections coming together over a period of two years to create extraordinary new economic value for me, a university, a client, and several valued business partners.

Social networking for business — it WORKS!

What is your best social networking story? Would you share an experience in the comment section?

This is a video of me sleeping. Holy crap what a lousy picture.

Nevertheless, you are going to love this video. Jay Baer and I usually see eye-to-eye but when we were on a panel at the recent Social Slam event we discovered we had radically opposing views of the future of how social media is integrated into a company. We decided this was such an interesting topic that it would make an interesting debate … so here it is in video form.

It’s a short video but it covers a lot of ground!

Will social media marketing be absorbed into the every day workplace or will it stand alone as a distinct career? Or both?

What is the future of social media consulting?

What is the most economical way for companies to deal with the frenzied pace of change in social media?

What do we make of Chris Brogan’s prediction that social media consultants will be irrelevant in two years?

I think you’re going to love this video, and of course it’s OK to disagree.

With Jay.

No seriously … I enjoy dissent and hope you know that by now. How else will we learn and grow?  This is a GREAT discussion.  Let me know what you think!

Last Friday, the 159-year-old New York Times, arguably the nation’s most important newspaper, announced it would be charging a subscription for the online version of its product.

In an email to current subscribers, the newspaper announced a hybrid plan that would still allow non-subscribers to read breaking news:

• On NYTimes.com, any one can view 20 articles each month at no charge. After 20 articles, you will have to subscribe.
• On smartphone and tablet apps, the Top News section will remain free of charge.
• The Times is offering three digital subscription packages:  $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year); $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year); or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year).
• New York Times home delivery subscribers will receive free access to NYTimes.com
• Readers who come to Times articles through links from search, blogs and social media like Facebook and Twitter will be able to read those articles, even if they have reached their monthly reading limit.

My response is, “Hurray!”  We need to keep journalism vital in our country and to do that it has to be funded.  When my subscription offer hits my inbox this week, I will be the first to subscribe.

The risks in this plan are significant.  The company might jeopardize its huge online reach and drive away advertisers, which now represent more than a quarter of the newspaper’s revenues.

Plus, it has already failed at this attempt once before. The Times had experimented with a pay model from 2005 to 2007.  That program brought in 227,000 subscribers at $49.95 a year, generating about $10 million in revenue.

But after they commissioned a study to examine how TimesSelect was working, company executives became convinced that restricting access to the site was constricting its potential for more readers and more advertising.  When that program ended, traffic to the site almost doubled. It now stands at more than 30 million unique domestic visitors a month.

With the decline of their traditional reader base, this new subscription model is the most urgent development since the advent of the Internet itself.

What’s your take on this?  Are people going to pay for content or are they permanently conditioned to find their news and information for free?

Note: This morning Mashable reported on Twitter-based scams individuals are setting up to get around the 20-article limit. Is this enterprising or is this stealing?

Then unexpectedly, your hear your composition in a television commercial. You didn’t even know about this — let alone have compensation for it!  Then you hear your song covered by another artist — just ripped off! They won’t even acknowledge that it’s your song and THEY’RE making money from it.  Suddenly, your song is everywhere. There is no way to stop it. Your work is lost, hopelessly spread over the world forever.  It makes you feel like you never want to write a song again.

This is what life is like as a creative individual on the Internet.

Content is ripped off wholesale. There is an expectation that any type of creative output is free and should be freely distributed.

As the popularity of my blog has grown, so has the popularity of ripping it off. In the past month, my blog posts have been:

• Reproduced in their entirety on other blogs without attribution of any kind.
• Used as promotional content on other people’s revenue-producing websites, blogs and eNewsletters
• Taken in their entirety to populate SEO scam sites.

This is not unusual. It happens all the time to any blogger of note. It’s sickening and depressing.  It’s the dark side of “viral.”

The economics of the Internet are broken

This “content harvesting” I’m describe occurs with art, music, movies, games, software … any creative output on the social web. So I’m not alone with this problem but that doesn’t make it right.

There is no way to stop it. I’ve tried addressing individual occurrences and it’s like playing a global game of social media Wack-a-Mole. And I’m sure for every one rip-off I learn about there are 10 that I don’t.

For more than 15 years — really since the dawn of Napster – people have been creating an Internet culture of entitlement. If it’s on the web, it is fair game for free use and distribution, no matter the implications for the creator.

There have been promises of new revenue models falling into place to support these artists but it hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it will.  Any form of protection like Creative Commons is essentially toothless.

Taking a stand

I can’t address this widespread problem, but I can take a stand in my own little piece of the web. So I am making two changes on {grow} in response to this issue.

First, I am featuring a modest amount of advertising on the side column of this blog. This will never seep into the editorial portion of the blog. You will never see affiliate links or sponsored posts. These are organizations I believe in, and in some cases, the ads (like for Amachi or Habitat for Humanity) are posted at no charge. It is a small way to support good work.

I am a consultant and teacher. The only thing I have to sell is my time. While there are indirect benefits of blogging, having some modest direct income will help justify spending more time on content and comments.  It will make it a better blog!

Ending guest post slavery

I will use advertising revenue to pay four contributing writers.  If you haven’t noticed them yet, they are:

• Sidney Eve Matrix – Culture and technology professor at Queens University and a blogging inspiration
• Stanford Smith — Blogging intellect and the sweetest writer on the web
• Neicole Crepeau — Ex-Microsoft-er who sees the social web in an entirely different and humanistic way.
• Srinivas Rao– He’s interviewed 130 bloggers. “Nuff said.

They are among the best writers and diverse thinkers on the social web. Period.

And while exposure on {grow} will undoubtedly help their own blogs and businesses, it is time to break this cycle of slave labor expectations of guest bloggers.  It is unfair and wrong to build and monetize a community or business on the free labor of others.

I’ve thought about these issues a lot and I think it is time to take a stand against this destructive “free” mentality in a positive way.  I also hope I am accomplishing this in a manner that builds on the integrity of the blog, my deep respect for this community, and an urgent desire to provide the most insanely great content on the social web.

It’s an experiment.  Let’s see if it works.

As always, I would cherish your thoughts on these issues in the comment section.