How sparkleponies might just save the world
One of the most dangerous things about a consumer-focused material goods economy, from an environmental perspective, is that in order for you to have a sustainable business, you have to consume resources. Not only do you have to consume resources, you have to consume a lot of them. That’s at odds with the long-term environmental goals we need to reach in order to keep things habitable for us on this little blue marble called Earth. There are other worlds out there that might sustain us, but moving the human race 600 light years to Kepler 22b isn’t really an option at this point.
So how do you keep a consumer economy running while mitigating its impact on the ecology? Here’s one answer that came up last night in World of Warcraft: sparkleponies. Its proper name is the Celestial Steed, which you can buy for your in-game character for $25. (on sale now apparently for $10). Here’s another variant, called Tyrael’s Charger.
Yes, it’s a shiny pony with angel wings that your character rides around.
What does this have to do with anything? In this case, it’s getting consumers to buy a virtual good, a consumer item that has no manufacturing cost of real world resources except electricity and the server farm that World of Warcraft runs on. What’s more, once the infrastructure is in place, there’s almost no actual cost to make one more sparklepony or one million more of these. They’re just rows in a database.
They’re rows in a database, however, that people will pay money for. Things like convenience and status in a virtual world are just as important as in the real world, and as we integrate technology into our lives more and more, these virtual goods become just as valuable as the physical goods we’re used to buying.
This trend can only accelerate. The faster we deplete natural resources, the more expensive it will be to manufacture physical world commodities. Thus, if you want to be ahead of the curve and taking advantage of consumer willingness to purchase virtual goods, figure out some way to add digital products or services to your current offerings. You’ll save the environment and make money at the same time.
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The foolproof way to win
There is such a thing as a foolproof way to win. There is no easy button for it. It requires you to act bravely, egolessly, and boldly. The foolproof way to win is to help everyone involved win.
Here’s an example from earlier today. I was having a discussion with a friend about an intellectual property issue in which there were multiple valid parties who could have claimed ownership of an idea. The way to lose? Lawyer up, whip out your cease and desist letters, and go to town. I’d win the battle but lose the war.
The way we won? We took the idea in its original incarnation and improved it. Bent it enough that the original, very generic idea became better, stronger, and more unique. Now everyone’s happy. The original IP holder has their idea intact and doesn’t need to go to court. My friend can enjoy their new and improved version that will stand on its own and be different and better. Everyone walks away a winner.
Why doesn’t this happen more often? Why has the term “win-win” become so cliche as to be meaningless when it’s actually a perfectly valid strategy? The reason why is that you have to be willing to let go of winning in order to win. If you’re tightly clenching onto the idea that you are right, that you must win, and that everyone else must lose in order for you to win, then “win-win” is as much a dream as it is a cliche for you. That’s why so many people mock it or make light of it: they simply can’t do it.
If you can let go of the desire to win in order to free your mind to bigger possibilities, “win-win” can manifest itself.
In ninjutsu, the pinnacle of achievement, the height of martial prowess, is working in such a way that everyone wants you to win, knowing that they win in the process. When you can find a way to win that helps the people around you, the entire universe will work hard on your behalf to see you succeed. It isn’t easy. It isn’t simple. It isn’t obvious. But it’s worth it.
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Should you opt-out of Klout?
More than a few people have posted recently about opting out of Klout. Here are a couple of pieces that are worth your time to read:
- Read Liz Strauss on why Klout violates 3 important principles to her
- Read Martjin Linssen on how many people have de-Klouted and lack of trust
Given some very well thought out pieces about opting out of Klout, should you consider it?
If you’re like Liz and Klout is operating against your principles or ethics, then it’s an unequivocal yes. One of my favorite tenets is by the musician Jewel, who famously said, “No longer lend your strength to that which you wish to be free from”. Depart Klout and don’t look back.
There’s a flipside to not being a part of Klout: anyone and anything using its algorithm is going to exclude you. Why? Here’s what Klout’s API returns when you pull a Twitter user ID that doesn’t exist:
{“status”:200,”headers”:[],”body”:{“error”:”No users”}}
And here’s what the API returns when you pull a Twitter user ID that opted out:
{“status”:200,”headers”:[],”body”:{“error”:”No users”}}
They are identical. When you opt out of Klout, you effectively declare that you no longer exist.
Publicly, that will mean little things like +K votes (and the associated Tweets that come along with them) and exclusion of pointless ads like Klout Perks for body wash and test drives for cars. That’s no big deal, and if that were the only consideration, there’d be no reason NOT to leave.
Privately, however, the Klout API is being used fairly heavily. I can tell you as a developer that I run into “Service too busy” notices more often than I’d like. Klout’s API gives you at the free level 10 calls per second, 10,000 requests per day, which is a tremendous amount, and people are using it. I know I certainly am. How is it being used?
Here’s an email service provider that pulls Klout score into lists so that you can segment your lists by Klout score. If you’ve opted out of Klout, you obviously will show up in the segmentation of unknown user.
Here’s an integration with Zoho, a small business CRM, to pull in Klout scores:
And here’s one that is probably the most eyebrow-raising of all, a plugin to integrate Klout scores into the Salesforce CRM, the gold standard of large enterprise CRMs:
You may say, rightly so, that you don’t especially care how you show up in someone’s email platform or CRM, or that your other behaviors such as purchase history should matter more. I don’t disagree. I think generally marketers do a lousy job of using the data they already have access to. The caveat with that position is this: right now, marketers and businesses like Klout enough to be using it and integrating it, even if it’s a terrible measure of actual influence.
That means that without a Klout score, you show up to these systems as an unknown user, as a second class citizen (even if you are clearly not, like Liz Strauss).
If a call center has two emails in queue to respond to and an automated customer importance priority system, and one customer has a Klout score of 25 and the other is a zero, your average minimum wage customer service representative isn’t going to care about your ethics or principles. They’re just going to get to you last in the queue because people with scores higher than unknown will be automatically ranked and queued ahead of you.
Here’s the huge problem: neither I nor anyone else except maybe Klout’s IT department have any idea just how many systems are using Klout’s API. Mark W. Schaefer has indicated that in anecdotal data, HR systems are integrating it now.
If Klout doesn’t violate your personal principles, then the safe, conservative choice for now is to leave your account as is. You definitely don’t need to participate with it or give it any mindshare, but removing it outright might have deeper impacts in third party systems than might be overtly apparent at first. Ignoring Klout’s existence it is a safe, no-effort strategy.
For those who did choose to opt-out, there’s this to give you hope: people are using Klout right now because there isn’t a better, more accurate, more insightful measurement. In the absence of good metrics, we often choose to rely on bad ones even knowing they’re bad. There is both incentive and demand for someone to create a better social media influence metric than Klout, so you have that to look forward to.
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Believe none of what you see
Much has been made of various attempts at illustrating how distorted our sense of self-image is (especially for women’s self-image) by the trade media using programs like Photoshop. However, if you truly want to blow up someone’s preconceptions about how manipulated everything is, there’s no better way to do it than to do it yourself.
If you have Photoshop or access to it, fire it up and pick a good image of yourself. Like most things, the better the source image (from a technical perspective), the easier it is to manipulate. For fun, we’ll use author Julien Smith’s photo that I shot at Podcasters Across Borders. I want to emphasize that I am not a Photoshop professional. I’m at best an amateur who can Google and follow directions. Everything we do in this little example is something you can do with almost no training besides learning where the individual menu items are.
The authentic Julien Smith
To start, hit three buttons: Auto Tone, Auto Contrast, Auto Color. This will fix up 90% of photographs. Remember that at any time, you can hit undo if a change isn’t quite as good as you’d hoped.
Next, hit up the spot healing brush tool and click on any blemishes or skin imperfections. With just one tool, you can change someone’s appearance fairly drastically, if subtly.
Julien minus minor imperfections
Next, let’s make him clean shaven. We’ll hit up the Dust & Scratches box and simply melt them away by making 2 layers and “painting” over his stubble with the blurred layer.
Julien minus stubble
Now let’s get into some truly warped things. We’ll apply puppet warp to his face, pin down all the sections we don’t want to move, and adjust his jawline. This step is so easy that a six year old can do it.
Bone warp!
So in just a few clicks, we’ve altered reality significantly enough that the photo of Julien is no longer an accurate representation of that moment or of him generally. Doing bone warps changes the actual geometry of his bone structure, something that only drastic surgery could do.
The enhanced Julien Smith
Want to empower someone – including yourself – to understand how absolutely false our perceptions of body image are? Learn these simple tricks in Photoshop, try them out if you can, and then any time you see a photo of someone, look carefully at it. Ask yourself which of these techniques were used (I guarantee at least one, if not more, in every media publication), and realize that pretty much everything you see on the cover of a magazine is fake and has been manipulated.
Even better, teach your kids how to do this and then make a game of spotting the tricks when they see photos of celebrities and other pop culture icons. The secret of this is the same as a stage magician: once you learn how the trick is done and can do it yourself, it loses all of its power over you. You realize it’s just a cheap parlor trick, some digital sleight of hand, so simple that you and your kids can do it. That realization shatters the perception of perfection that the media outlets and appearance-based industries desperately want you to buy into.
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How to get started with affiliate marketing
Lots of people want to make a little extra money, and affiliate marketing is one of the simplest (remember that simple != easy) ways to go about doing it. If you’re interested in adding some beer money to your bottom line, consider getting started in affiliate marketing. Here’s a step by step tutorial on getting started with one of the most well-known and reliable programs: Amazon Associates.
Amazon will pay you around 4% of any item’s sale price for stuff that’s sold through your tracking links. Obviously, unless you can sell a whole bunch of MacBook Pros, this is going to be solely in the realm of beer money and not mortgage money, but every little bit helps.
Take note that you don’t need anything other than a mailing address and basic financial information to sign up – no inventory to manage, no having to do anything other than recommend stuff you like.
You’ll start by signing up for a free account. Once you’ve gone through the basic account process setup, it’s time to start putting together things you want to talk about.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, or any marketing for that matter, your best bet for long term success is to market things you already use, love, and want to talk about, things you’d recommend even if you weren’t getting paid. Why? From time to time as an affiliate marketer, you’ll get customers of your affiliate program asking you about products – and if you own them, you can help them. You can also make honest, true recommendations about the products and services you market because you already own and use them.
Once you’re signed up, create an aStore – one of my favorite ways to showcase the things you want to talk about and share. Use Amazon’s built in guide to get going, by setting up a tracking code:
Then by adding products individually or by category to your store:
After you’ve picked the things you want to market, configure the store to wear your colors and logos. When done, hit publish and your store is live and available to the world:
Now you’ve got your own electronic store online without a square inch of inventory or real estate.
Decide how you want to share it – with a simple standalone link, or embedded on your web site/blog.
You’ll also notice when you’re browsing Amazon and logged in that there is now an affiliate toolbar above each product or service. This gives you quick links to use for things like newsletters or blog posts. Any time you reference an Amazon product, you should use these links rather than just the URL of the page.
Don’t be lazy! Use these links for the extra few seconds it will take you to copy and paste them rather than the URL in your browser. Why? One of the great benefits of Amazon is that if someone reaches the site during their session from one of your links, everything they buy during that session counts towards your affiliate marketing profits.
For example – and this is real – one of my referral fees from this quarter was for condoms. I don’t market or refer to them anywhere on any of my digital properties (except for this post, I guess), but because someone bought them while browsing Amazon from one of my links to a different product, I get credit and $1.11 in referral fees.
Incidentally, this is also some interesting market research to tell you what else your existing customers like.
Affiliate programs are a great way to start earning some beer money, some extra cash, and if you find you have a knack for it, you can earn a lot more than beer money in time, but this tutorial and guide should help you get started with your first program and help you decide if you enjoy affiliate marketing.
Good luck, and please let me know your results in the comments.
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