More generally, I HAD to reprint the following call-to-action from the organizers of the NY Tech Meetup. For those of us who have witnessed the impact of technology and media businesses on the New York business climate, the proposed legislation is particularly disconcerting.

The future of the NY tech community is in jeopardy. The Internet and information technologies have created a renaissance in startup innovation in New York that now rivals Silicon Valley as a hub for economic growth. Tens of thousands of New Yorkers have been inspired to become entrepreneurs creating thousands and thousands of new jobs and offering professionals in many of New York’s traditional industries the opportunity to start new careers participating in the 21st century global economy.

However, Congress is in the process of rushing through legislation which will not only severely damage the Internet as a marketplace and platform for entrepreneurship and open innovation, but will also seriously impact the ability of our New York tech community to continue to generate jobs, grow and flourish. Within the next two weeks, the US Senate is planning to bring the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) S.968 to the floor for a series of votes to ensure its passage.

This legislation would give the government and corporations the ability to censor the net in the name of protecting creativity simply by convincing a judge that a site is “dedicated” to copyright infringement. PIPA would give the government and corporations the ability to shut down any site connected to an accused copyright infringer. Its companion legislation in the House, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261, contains many similar problems, as well as threatening ordinary users with jail for streaming any copyrighted work – even just video of themselves singing a pop song.

More importantly, the legislation amounts to a wholesale re-engineering of the open web in a way that would allow the US government to prosecute Internet users without due process, which in turn would discourage innovation, limit investment, and hurt the our economic future. You can read and hear more about this dangerous and hurtful legislation here: FightForTheFuture.org/pipa or AmericanCensorship.org.

As much as we agree that infringing on copyrighted material should be eliminated from the web as much as possible, the cure that is being proposed and championed by the lobbying power of major copyright holding organizations like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) will create a cure that is much worse than the disease and irrevocably damage the very nature of the internet and by extension, the future of New York.

We believe it is imperative that we stop this bill from passage!

Signed: Andrew Rasiej, Chairman — @rasiej
Scott Heiferman, Founder — @heif
Nate Westheimer, Executive Director — @innonate
Jessica Lawrence, Managing Director — @jessicalawrence
And the entire NY Tech Meetup Board — @nytm

Why? Because “community”, he said, was hard.

JCN outlined a hierarchy worth sharing (I am not sure he ever fleshed it out to this degree, but I’ve attempted to capture its spirit):

Level 1: Directory. This is what it sounds like. A listing of people or things with some meta data attached. Limited communication or other functionality.

Level 2: Network. Multiple virtual representations of people or things with meta data attached with the ability to communicate and/or interact in some way with one another.

Level 3: Community. All the features of a network, with the addition of actively expressed and shared interests, values and a collective sense of ownership and responsibility for the space.

True community requires a lot of time and hard work to develop – online or off, and the Indaba team has shed its share of blood, sweat and tears building its community of musicians. My friend and another Indaba co-founder, Mantis Evar, has been largely responsible for this effort – at first attracting musicians to list themselves in our directory, then spurring them to interact with one another inside a network, and finally setting an example of mutual respect and a shared love of music that others now follow, forming a true community online.

I think Mantis would say (although this is not a direct quote) that one of the reason communities are so hard is that even once you have built them, they require vigilant monitoring, maintenance and support. Someone has to set the example, and continue to set it over and over again. It takes highly involved and active leadership to maintain values and standards in the context of a community like Indaba’s, with its hundreds of thousands of individual personalities from all over the world who often do not agree with one another.

Why Community?

Whether or not a particular business really requires a true community to thrive depends on that businesses specific attributes and context. In many situations, having shared values and a common sense of ownership really does increase a product’s revenue potential. We knew community would be important at Indaba, because music is inherently social, collaborative, and perhaps most importantly, requires a degree of trust – both in a creative and critical sense.

On the flip side, many web companies believe they need “community” simply because it is a hot buzzword, without truly understanding the actual benefits that will accrue. As JCN and Mantis know all too well, community is a really, really hard thing to build, so it only makes sense to prioritize if the benefit is clear. In that spirit, if you happen to have Hulu Plus there a highly applicable scene in this episode of my favorite show, The Office. Ryan attempts to explain why the new Dunder-Mifflin paper website needs social networking features.

First , I couldn’t help but notice that Sony has an incredible breadth of electronics with a major wow-factor. Walking through the store one can’t help but marvel at the 3D tvs, PS3 games, SLRs, etc. Apple stores are cool, but from a product perspective the only things you can really touch and experiment with are computers. At Sony, I picked up this virtual reality / 3D headset thingy, and started to play Gran Turismo. I literally had an ear-to-ear smile. It’s always fun when a piece of consumer electronics can elicit such an enthusiastic response.

Then the reality hit me. There was sticky glue from the nose piece of this thing stuck to my face. Evidently Sony used some cheap adhesive to attached a rubber piece to the device, and as it slid off my head it left behind a lovely residue. My first thought: Steve Jobs would have NEVER allowed this to happen. It was such a shame too – I was so captivated by this marvel of entertainment technology, only to have that feeling stamped out by some really careless product design.

I left the store to meet up with my fiancee, but returned once again when she decided to go shoe-shopping. I decided to return to the headset at Sony that had so wowed (and disappointed) me earlier, only to find little blank screens inside the headset. Upon asking an employee what the problem was, he informed me that the PS3 to which the headset was attached had overheated. Evidently the designers of this store, which is meant to showcase products like the PS3, failed to design cabinets with proper ventilation for high-power electronics, leading to their frequent failure. Again, Steve would NEVER have allowed this to happen.

If the products at the Sony store weren’t amazing, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered to write this post. But I was so upset precisely because I was having such a great time, only to have the experience ruined twice – first by poor product design, and then by poor store/experience design. I can’t help but think that Sony already did the hard work – they developed technologies that are truly innovative and entertaining. If they could only design a nose piece that remains attached to its device, or take simple product needs into account when designing their stores, they could be KILLING it. If Steve Jobs taught us anything, it’s that seemingly small details can make or break a product’s success in the market. In fact, they are sometimes the most critical factors for the consumer.

I titled this blog “Silicon Bowery” because my company, Indaba Music, has been located on the Bowery in lower Manhattan since 2006. We have space in a renovated building that used to be a flophouse called The Windsor Hotel. For those who don’t know, the Bowery is a historic area at the intersection of the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Soho, Noho and Nolita. For many years throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s it was a high crime area, and earlier in the late 19th and early 20th centuries it was a hotbed fornew immigrant communities (see The Gangs of New York for a dramatized account of the area).

When we moved in above a Bowery restaurant supply company in 2006 the adjoining Soho neighborhood was already filled with digital agencies and a number of creative start ups. And since then, we’ve seen the arrival of Whole Foods, Pulinos (a great Italian restaurant from the owner of Balthazar), The swanky Bowery Hotel, and the New Museum of Modern Art. There are even some snazzy art galleries now mixed in among the restaurant supply shops and the Bowery Mission, our local homeless shelter. And of course, great venues like The Bowery Poetry Club are still around. Unfortunately, we also saw the departure of famed CBGB across the street, and its replacement by a John Varvatos store.

For the first time, I really feel like a real tech community is coalescing around the Bowery. This year, Foursquare took office space in the old Village Voice building up the street towards Cooper Union. Scratch DJ Academy took space in the same building. And an unidentified start up has taken up residence in a building across the street from Indaba. We don’t know who they are, but they look young and tech savvy. We are attempting to communicate via hand signals and carrier pigeon. And today, J.J. and I were leaving the office and overheard a young man say the words “Amazon Web Services” into his iPhone as he nearly tripped over a homeless man. I don’t know which company he works for, but I know he’s part of the increasingly silicon Bowery.

The plan I outline in this post comes very much from a scrappy entrepreneurial perspective – what are the easiest, highest-value things a company can do for the least (if not zero) amount of money to start acquiring users? As an entrepreneur, I am always looking for the low hanging fruit. This question is asked and answered very differently at big companies and business schools however, and I don’t claim that it addresses those contexts fully. This post is not a checklist for academia, instead it is a rough guide for the cash-strapped tech startup.

Prep Work

Before marketing any product it is important to sit down and hash out thoughtful answers to some seemingly simple questions. Make time to discuss these questions with your team, with target users, with anyone you can think of. Get as many opinions as possible.

What is the product’s value proposition? Think about the real benefit people are going to get. What problem does it actually solve? Sometimes entrepreneurs think they are building a product for one thing when in fact it is really for something entirely different. Discuss use cases, brainstorm, and be creative. Challenge your assumptions.

Who is your target user/customer? This question is similar to the previous one, but here you will want to test your assumptions about the customer to whom the value proposition is really important. A good process, but by no means the only one, is to develop profiles of example users, sometimes called “personas.” Include everything from their demographics down to the websites they frequent and the music they like. This information will be critical to your marketing program. Without it you won’t know who to target.

After you answer these two questions, you can develop the marketing messages you will use to tell people about your product. Get these organized – there’s a lot to do in the following plan and you need consistent, effective messaging that tells the right story to the right people.

1. Generate Buzz with Early-Adopters (PR)

Secure high-visibility digital PR. Early adopters reach blogs like TechCrunch and Silicon Alley Insider. The right story, good relationships, smiles, and handshakes can get your product coverage, sometimes even prior to launch.

Line up key influencers with significant social media reach. There are now tons of influential technologists, celebrities, and others who are brands in their own rights. These people have tremendous marketing power; a celebrity with millions of Facebook fans can successfully hype a product with a single post. Getting them excited and committed to trying and talking about your product can be a big win.

2. Launch with Built-In Reach (Business Development)

Source a small number of key pre-launch product partners. This one is a big deal. If your product can in any way be embedded in, bundled with, or linked to by partner products with existing reach to target customers you can potentially launch with a lot of eyeballs on day one. This isn’t easy – especially if you don’t have a fully -baked product, and you’re trying to convince partners with screen shots and partial demos, but it is always worth pushing hard on.

Line up high-probability post-launch product partners. You are going to have leftovers from the first push; partners who said “that’s great, but come back after you launch it.” Immediately after launch, these are the partners to go after aggressively. There will also be partners you didn’t approach in the first round because you knew that without a working product they’d be unlikely to sign on. Post-launch is the time to approach these potential partners as well.

3. Leverage Available Channels to Go Straight to Target Customers (Direct Marketing)

Typically direct marketing tactics like email and advertising cost money.  That said, there will be partners you develop relationships with that may not give you the product integration you want, but will give you access to their customer lists / audiences in exchange for some non-monetary value. Partners can be persuaded to promote your product through their e-mail lists, ad inventory, and social media channels if you can offer them some special access to your product or an exclusive benefit that they can get value from. Be creative with these sorts of deals. If there is media reaching your target users, you should do what you can to access it.

Even if you have a great product, doing all of the above doesn’t guarantee that it will be a runaway success with viral adoption on day one. What it will do is guarantee that you will get a sense of what users/customers initially think of your product. It will give you a timely sense of whether you have something with potential, or something that needs to be tweaked or even re-thought completely before gaining the legs to spread more widely.

As any industry observer now knows, the tools of creation have been democratized, so that increasingly anyone, anywhere can create and distribute high quality film, music, or literature. These new decentralized content creators are bound only by their passion and talent. The degree to which they are empowered to create and distribute content varies by media type, as well as by more mundane variables like internet penetration and income, but the trend is the same across all media. We are now creatures of creation, as well as consumption. Increasingly, we do not consume media without also altering it.

In music, the major labels touch only a few thousand artists, but over 12 million indie acts have uploaded music to MySpace. The market of creators who haven’t yet recorded their art is even larger – in the US alone, over 90 million people play an instrument (Gallup). The same is true in film and video. On the high-end, over 2 million indie filmmakers have uploaded content to the prosumer-targeted service Vimeo, but 1 in 7 U.S. adults has uploaded video to the internet, over 34 million people (Vimeo, Pew).

A few years ago the phrase “user-generated content” was all the rage – my business partner Dan and I were even invited to speak at the “User-Generated Content Expo” in San Jose. Nowadays I hear that phrase less and less. I think perhaps because it is becoming redundant. All content is somehow “user”-generated, or at a minimum, leaves itself open to some form of user modification or interaction. Increasingly the laws of quantum mechanics apply to the media we consume – we cannot observe the content without also altering it. Schrödinger’s cat is simultaneously both dead and alive, until of course we observe it in either state. The same might be said of an unfinished stem package posted online for remixing, or a movie trailer released without music for the masses to score (both real examples from Indaba Music). None of us know what this media will become until we engage with it and observe the outcome.

Nowhere is the power of consumer creation more observable than in the recorded music business. Over the last few years we’ve seen a $13 billion industry cut in half. But at the same time, we’ve seen consumers spend upwards of $7 billion / year on the stuff used to create music – instruments, software, cables, etc. This means that 2011 will likely be the first year in which U.S. consumers spend more money creating music than they do consuming it. This shift obviously has huge implications for media businesses, because an increasing share of consumer income is flowing to content creation rather than consumption. But it also has fascinating implications for culture and society as well.

What does it mean to be a culture of content creators? Ironically it might mean that even as more of us are empowered to be creators – musicians, filmmakers, artists – fewer of us will be empowered to actually make a living creating media. It’s simple arithmetic: When consumers had fewer choices, their media spend flowed to a smaller number of content creators. Each creator received a greater share of every dollar. Now, consumers can quickly and easily consumer media created by innumerable creators, so less money flows to each creator.

I for one think that this irony will be short-lived. More people creating and interacting with more media will mean more opportunities for revenue generation. Content creators just need time to figure out what those revenue streams are. More on this to follow.

“We’re simplifying the Fifth Avenue cube. By using larger, seamless pieces of glass, we’re  using just 15 panes instead of 90.”

Would be cool if they said “and we’re using the old panes to construct a homeless shelter, albeit a see-through one.”

Someone was paying attention, because the WSJ is reporting that advertiser complaints are forcing Facebook to make changes to the newsfeed. Supposedly these will make it easier for more content to show up – a boon for advertisers and brands trying to get noticed.

I think this is a serious development, and potentially a really bad sign for Facebook. Remember what happened to MySpace when they plastered ads everywhere? For a long time it seems as if there has been a healthy tension at Facebook between the product folks (led by Zuckerberg) and the sales/monetization folks (the “adults”). Media companies all need this tension, otherwise they risk becoming amazing services that make no money, or cheap, tacky billboards that sacrifice long-term value for short-term revenue. We might be seeing a shift in this power dynamic at Facebook…

I promised I’d talk more about the importance of content to websites and platforms, so that will be my focus in this post.

It probably goes without saying that if you’re a website, you’d better have damn compelling content or functionality, because that’s the only reason people will come back. The New York Times isn’t really a platform because it doesn’t add utility to the functionality of a variety of other websites, but it is a compelling website in its own right because its content is top-notch. Same thing with a website like Pitchfork (for music), or Funny or Die (for comedic video). Regardless of whether content is still king, you can be sure it’s still very important. No one goes to a website to listen to bad music or watch boring videos.

Content is important to platforms as well. They require a critical mass of people or companies within the platform to produce content people want. A platform is useful because it offers people some pervasive utility – like sharing or embedding content (Facebook Like button, Google +1, YouTube player) or easy log-in (Facebook Connect). Content is still critical here, because without it, there is no reason to use a platform’s features. However, if you can attract enough people to the platform, publishers (content producers) will follow, because content needs an audience. This is why most publishers and brands now accept that they must syndicate at least some of their content via platforms like Google and Facebook, so that the masses of people using them will discover it and visit their websites.

Content or functionality always drives the success of websites. The degree to which investment in content drives the success of a platform depends on how pervasive its utility is online. Think about it this way: if a platform is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of the web that you can’t avoid using it, then it’s need to invest in content it controls is decreased. People will be forced to use it, and content producers will be forced to deploy content within it. In Google’s case, the browser (Chrome) and mobile operating system (Android) are incredible examples of this principle at work. Google made their browser good enough that a critical mass of people wanted to use it. They made their mobile operating system good enough, and executed the right deals with manufacturers and carriers, that it surpassed the iPhone’s share of the U.S. smartphone market. So now Google has control over a wealth of advertising inventory, and it doesn’t actually need to produce content because it controls the platforms that enable us to access other companies’ content.

The more pervasive Google and Facebook become, the less they rely on any single publisher to drive traffic within their platforms. To date, Facebook has been winning, as it commands over 40% of all internet traffic (cool infographic here). But 60% of time spent on Facebook is spent playing games, and Facebook does not actually control any of its own gaming content. To me, this second stat could point to the beginning of a decline in Facebook’s pervasiveness. The data from Nielsen is informative:

Facebook dominates the two largest categories – social networks and online games. Google has a more diversified traffic base – spread across e-mail, videos/movies, search, and others. And ironically (or intentionally), Google is also a major investor in Zynga. Facebook finds itself heavily reliant on gaming, and if Google+ makes real inroads in social network traffic, then this dependency makes Facebook even more vulnerable. 

All this leads me to a spectrum of scenarios for Google and Facebook, both ends of which are driven by the future of content and content consumption:

A) At one extreme, Facebook could become a website, not a platform, because it is a place you go to play games, not a pervasive cross-sector utility. Simply put, Facebook becomes too reliant on a single form of content from a small number of publishers. If Google maintains diversified traffic across all sectors while also grabbing social network market share, it then becomes the ultimate platform, generating ad revenue through embedded utilities which pervade the majority of all our online activities.

B) At the other extreme, social network traffic and game-based traffic could continue to grow and become the majority of all activity and content consumed online. Facebook maintains its lead in both sectors and doesn’t grow much in others, but it becomes the ultimate platform for publishers of the only content categories that really matter.

You could certainly argue that there’s a third scenario in which Facebook grabs more non-social, utilitarian traffic (like e-mail) and diversifies, but I think it’s easier for Google to go social than for Facebook to go serious given Facebook’s history, brand, and most common use cases. I just don’t see people trusting the context of Facebook with the kind of data and sensitive information people generate and share everyday within the context of products like Gmail, Google Analytics and Google Contacts.

In a world with diversified content consumption, the winning platform needs diverse relevance across traffic sectors (scenario A). In a world dominated by social networking and gaming, the winning platform need dominate only these categories (scenario B). Laid out on a spectrum, I find something closer to scenario A to be more likely. The fact that 34% of all web traffic is spread across 74 categories speaks to the diversity of our interests and the unlikely scenario in which a majority of traffic focuses on 2 sectors alone.

That said, obviously many things have to swing completely in Google’s favor for scenario A to play out in full. We love to paint the world in black and white, either-or terms as I have above, but the truth is that reality is usually more complicated, and it ends up somewhere in between. Over the next few years, it’s probably more likely that there will be enough consumer attention for everyone. After all, growth in global internet penetration and usage shows no signs of slowing, so we will likely see absolute growth in most sectors of web usage – including gaming.

First, I have come to believe that the competitive dynamic between Facebook and Google is really just a war for attention. Does Facebook messaging compete with Gmail? Perhaps. Does Google+ compete with the social features of Facebook? Almost certainly. These questions and many others like them are really just details however. The real question is now about which company will get a larger share of internet users’ attention. Both businesses are largely ad-based, and there are still only a limited number of humans with a limited number of hours in the day to look at ads. Facebook and Google are so big and command so much advertising market share that the battles between their individual products are really just components of the larger war for consumer attention.

So who wins in a war for attention? Facebook and Google think it’s all about the platform. It would seem that both companies believe in the same answer. Facebook and Google both strive to extend their positions as platforms, pervasive utilities that extend into the architecture of almost every site on the web. By defining a platform as a pervasive utility, I am claiming that a platform must have features of significant usefulness that are ingrained in and pervade the fabric of the web. For Facebook, the vanguard was positioning the Like button as a universal way to share content. Social widgets for commenting and other functionality followed. Facebook Platform, the system that enables developers to build applications within Facebook and actually bears the name “Platform” isn’t really a pervasive utility because it brings other functionality and content into Facebook, rather than enabling us to do things elsewhere. Facebook Connect is certainly platform-ish, since it enables us to use other utilities throughout the web.

Being a platform is inherent in Google’s DNA, best expressed through its M&A and product strategies. Following the original search product, Google bought or built products fundamental to our use of the web – email (Gmail), photo sharing (Picasa), etc. From the start, Google was a utility that sent people to other websites and served you ads once you got there. Google is a platform because its tools have a high degree of utility, and because they pervade many other aspects of our activity online – either through directly embedded functionality (YouTube videos), or indirectly through the Google ad network.

The difference between a platform and a website is where you “go”. You go to a website. It’s a destination, and it has content or features that you use while you’re there. You can’t go to a platform, because it’s everywhere. It’s like in Terminator 3 when the protagonists try to find and destroy the system core of Skynet, which of course doesn’t really exist because Skynet is everywhere. Herein lies my point – which I fully expect to be at least somewhat controversial. You still go to Facebook. You can’t go to Google. Sure, you can go to Google.com (for search), you can go to your Gmail, you can go to your Google calendar, and so on. But you can’t go to Google because like Skynet, it is increasingly everywhere, and in control of everything you do online. Facebook Connect has similar attributes, except that it points activity back inwards to Facebook.com, whereas it doesn’t necessarily matter where Google’s utilities send you, since wherever you wind up, there will inevitably be either some Google functionality or a Google ad unit.

Android makes incredible strategic sense when viewed through this lens, because the operating system is the ultimate platform – it powers, enables, and is embedded in everything you do on your Android-based smartphone. And Chrome? Forget about it. If you’re a Chrome user, then Google controls your gateway to EVERYTHING online. There is perhaps no better example of a pervasive utility than the browser. Google+ only reinforces this position. Sure, it’s “social”, and in that vein it is like Facebook. But Facebook is a destination – you go there to see, read, hear, and interact – to be social. Google+ is more like a social layer that rides on top of or is embedded in the fabric of the web. I saw this clearly once I added the +1 button to my Chrome toolbar and +1′ed a page I liked (lowercase like, not Like) on Facebook.

Platforms will always get more attention than websites. Platforms, as I have defined them, are needed to do other things online, and therefore by definition will always get an equal or greater share of our attention than the “other things” we are doing (gaming, watching video, listening to music, etc.). So, Facebook and Google clearly have the right answer to the competitive question. How can one win a war for attention? Be a pervasive utility. Be a platform.

In Part 2, I’ll talk more about websites as I have defined them, the importance of content to websites, the importance (or lack thereof) of content to platforms, and I’ll share my view of Facebook and Google’s respective content strategies (or lack thereof). If I am feeling especially provocative, I will also try to put a stake in the ground and defend the position that Google is more platform-y than Facebook.