Post with 3 notes
Gamification, is it all good for us?
Gamification is super. It makes understanding and modeling human behaviour “fun and simple”. Gamification works on the principle of Positive Reinforcement which keeps the process of behaviour modeling all positive. Gamification is extremely impactful when transparently shared within a social network because Observation Learning is fundamental to modeling human behaviour.
One of the claims of Gamification apps for business is the ability to increase engagement and drive behaviour especially when shared transparently on a virtual social network. Gamifying an existing process can drive behaviour incremental to the behaviour that existed around that process, when it wasn’t gamified. E.g. incentive compensation has existed for the longest time for motivating a sales team to sell sell sell, sell more. Gamification claims to just make this pre-existing incentive-comp process simple and fun. But with gamifying incentive comp, now the Sales Guy works harder to get that Gamification Reward Badge in addition to working on achieving that quota for the quarter. The same Sales Guy is now also looking at all the rewards badges everyone else on the sales team (the social network) is being awarded…or not being awarded.
Which is why I want to look at both sides of gamifying life at the workplace.
- Taking away the “Why”
In the mad rush to be rewarded, in acting like other winners in the social network we may forget to ask why we are participating in a gamified process. What is the vision, the goal, the agenda behind this process that has been gamified that we are engaging in?
- Gamification in the wrong hands
Gamifying a process that isn’t aligned with organisational goals or apathetic to employee satisfaction will drive behaviour through positive reinforcements in an adversely negative direction for the entire organisation. Therefore it’s very important for the person designing and implementing a gamified process be experienced and trusted. This is a hard one, because experience and trust are intangible attributes which only come with time as opposed to standardised corporate certifications.
- Competition vs Creativity in the workplace
As with any sport or game, gamification can increase competitive behaviour. Healthy competition is a good thing. But unhealthy competition takes innovation and creativity from your best employees because they may engage in excessively competitive behaviour in a gamified process. David Brooks articulates this idea of Competition vs Creativity mush better with the GE vs Apple example.
It’s simple. We all want to look good in the social network. And we learn from each other in the social network on how to look better. It’s important to note that observational learning is fundamental to human social evolution. Gamification is a wonderful concept because it makes the “doing work” simple and fun. It is very impactful in driving individual behaviour in the social network. But we need to carefully consider employee satisfaction, innovation and creativity and big picture organisational goals before gamifying life at the workplace.
Thoughts, comments? Agree, disagree? Would love to hear!
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
I feel like Arthur Dent at the moment with what’s transpiring. I believe I have found the Ultimate Question. 42 may not be the answer. I also believe I have an answer. I’ll start from up-to-deep i.e. veneer to cerebral s!#@. Explain:
- Mural 1 complete. Picture:
What does one do? Start mural 2. It’s 1/4 done.
Drawing 100s of 1000s of lines for hours on end really clarifies the purpose of life. You draw the same pattern over and over again until something randomly steers you to draw new patterns. We are seeking patterns. But there may exist, none. There’s a bigger picture at play, patterns or no patterns.
- I am rebuilding the bathroom with a skylight in the middle just to discover my friend/neighbour has a lounging terrace above it (…VIEW) + I can’t sleep because the in-construction dusty bathroom is adjacent to the bedroom + new holes in the roof were discovered when it rained. What does one do? Make a living roof of it, until then place a bowl under the dripping roof and SLEEP. Here’s in-progress bathroom floor reflection:
Life will throw shit at you whether you create situations or not. It’s how you spin that shit. I am glad it rained, otherwise we’d never had found holes in the roof. Randomness/Luck/Fate/Destiny watchmacallit is one of the most common patterns. One of the more intense functions in computer science is RND i.e. find me a random ass number…even that’s not completely random. Random computation doesn’t exist. Random computers would be much more life like. We need the RND function for creating models and predictions. We create situations and then try to predict them. Because situations will happen. It’s how you spin it.
- I am getting anonymous letters about my child barking during day time. What does one do? They ask children “What does a dog do?” The answer is NOT “Fold envelopes in an interpretive dance sequence”. The answer is “A dog barks”. Picture:
I want my child to feel the freedom and happiness that life is bringing him. He eats well, he is a smart kid (knows all his 6 toys by name and knows when to sit-down-roll-fetch and chase after misbehaved human children - all very skillfully at the tender age of 7 months). I can only do the best and support him to find his happiness. When I hold up his leash and ask him “What does one do?”. Leo, my baby, sits and looks at me. He just looks at me. Just. Looks.
- I met Jean Paul Gaultier for a hot minute. Grand and everything. It was such a huge deal for everyone. Yes we met. Yes we went. Yes there’s all this art. Yes. Yes. More Yes. But, what does one do? I always wanted to write music. I am. Yes. Yes. More Yes. But I chose to do it differently than my music school peers. I always had a job I loved. Starting as that food sample boy at Costco selling the most Tortellini in all of Costco stores in California to working for one of the most successful enterprises on the globe. Every step of the way I kept pushing just that little much into the music. We went on the road. We released records. We put clay masks on stage in full body leotards. We did our little thing to cause social change. Every morning as I snap my cuff links in lock and knot up that skinny tie, I wonder if my dad knew. And if he did, was he proud? I wonder if I did it right. Or wrong. Or anything. There’s no measure, not a bar, not a reference. It’s a scary place to be, but a land of great opportunity because you make your own. Because you trusted your instincts. And they never failed you. And now? What does one do?
- I am working really hard. But I always feel there’s more to be done. More. Mas. MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS. What does one do? I was in San Diego for the day job where I stepped on a jelly fish and a sweet but complete stranger asked me to call my mom. What does one do? I don’t know. The jelly fish had washed ashore and probably already dead. It was too late anyway. I buried it in the sand, said a little pagan prayer and continued on with the beach run.
Perhaps it’s turning 3 decades, all the excitement, anxieties, frontal lobe developments, emotional prudence, getting ready for a whole new phase of first world problems. I am finding myself faced more and more with the question:
WHAT DOES ONE DO?
The irony is that the question is bookended by “What” but the real question is “Why”. We are more cerebral than most other living beings + our feelings are often tangled up with thought + we believe we have such control over our lives = WE ARE FULL OF BOLLOX. Artists are more so, they just know how to put proper frosting on all of that bollox. Amy Tan, whom I quite respect, is no exception to this profound finding.
So, here’s the first BIG RESOLUTION:
Question: What is the Ultimate Question?
Answer: What does one do?
The answer is a question, just like life.
Question: What does one do?
Answer: It’s not a one part answer:
- You can only trust your instincts
- You can only spin it positively
- You can only do your best
- You are only an infinitesimally tiny part of the big picture
- You need to be friends with luck, good or bad
- You have to follow your happiness, otherwise all the bollox really isn’t worth it
- Just be. And it will all be ok.
Loves,
SS
How Sir Surrey CD sales donated $1000 to Non-Profits
Sir Surrey has donated $1000 to Non-Profits as the 407th “City of Rocks” CD was sold yesterday.
From the very inception of Sir Surrey, I wanted to give my customers a way to donate 30% of their spend on my product to whichever Non-Profit (without political or religious affiliations) they liked. The goal was to support Non-Profits, but I never had a set target donation amount to hit. Crossing the $1000 milestone makes me really happy.
Here’s how I did it. Find out how you can do it too:
* I picked a few Non-Profits I cared about who accepted micro-donations i.e. donations < $10 via their website. My CD $8 via my website and the Non-Profit had to be able to accept donations of $2.4 (30%) for each customer’s purchase. The short list came to be: salesforce Foundation (through which I increased donation to 50% during the Japan Tsunami), mPowering, KQED, Oxfam, Water.org, National Endowments for the Arts.
* I chose not to set up a formal partnership with these organisations. My goal was only to support. I didn’t need their logos or permissions to make this happen. Also setting up a formal partnership can be a pain, as was with American Cancer Society. ACS required a certain upfront $ commitment to even start donation to them. Check out their amazing campaign with names like Rhianna. I can’t garner that kind of commitment just yet as an Indie Musician.
* I used Google Checkout. It’s easy for even the non-technology types. I configured it so my customer could pick which pre-selected non-profit they wanted to divert their money to. If they didn’t find a non profit, they had the choice to specify the Non-Profit of their choice.
* I shipped every CD with a label with a unique serial number on it. The label had instructions for the Customer to return to the Sir Surrey website to select, change or pick a new non-profit if the donation hadn’t already been made.
* I configured salesforce.com (free edition) to manage my sales and donations. Each time a CD was sold through Google Checkout an integration would create an order in salesforce.com and generated a unique serial number. This is the serial number I’d print on the label I mentioned earlier. I would then pay out the Non-Profit per the Customer’s choice and track the donation in against that CD Sale Order and Serial Number in salesforce.com.
* Once the Non-Profit confirmed the payment, I would send the donation confirmation email to the Customer whose email address I had through Google Checkout. The Customer could then use this as a tax deduction on $2.4…
* This Non-Profit donation applied only to Physical CD sales and not sales via iTunes/Amazon etc. That’s because, I use CDBaby (aggregator) to sell through channels like iTunes/Amazon etc. Neither CDBaby or iTunes can disclose individual customer information.
There’s some work required to set this up. But I have most of this packaged using salesforce.com, so if you want this set up - I can help!
Hope you found this useful. If you did, leave comments. Follow my blog on tumblr, on @sirsurrey and like on facebook or drop a comment/follow on soundcloud. Or do all 4. You’ll be helping an indie artist out and you’re cool.
XO
SS
PS: The “City of Rocks” CD is out of print, so I’ve closed online sales with the new web redesign of Sir Surrey temporarily. If you would like to purchase the CD, send me a message on the Sir Surrey website.
Post with 1 note
Music Submission Opportunities: Taxi or Reverbnation or Musicxray?
If you are an Indie Musician who wants to get placed in film, networking/word of mouth is your best bet. Next comes direct submissions into your network. Most Labels or Production houses do not accept unsolicited material…which is why I turned to services like Taxi, Reverbnation and MusicXray which will submit your music to A&R they are networked with on your behalf.
I’ve signed up for all. Here’s how they compare:
In the end, it’s about quality of listings. Quality I define as what submission at least garnered a non-generic i.e. individual, timely response regardless if your submission was picked or not. I’ve gotten best results from Musicxray so far. Granted I’ve been actively using these services for about 3 months, but I love Musicxray for free signup, free focus group, $ credit towards first submission and UI is easy to use and real responses to opportunity submissions.
On the other hand, while Taxi does much more handwaving with success stories but the copy on their website and print material sounds a bit douche-y. Look Taxi, you can still do business without making Indie artists feel like crap before having them pay you a $300 sign up fee on top of which your old school paper print welcome letter tries to upsell you for “Taxi Dispatch” for another $200. I am an artist and to shell $300 upfront is just ridiculous - money leeching from unsuspecting indie artists…sorry Taxi, you are overpriced and your interface sucks arse. In Taxi’s defense, they have a Taxi convention which members attend for free. But it’s not nearly as well attended as a Noisepop or Ascap/BMI convention or Namm from a networking perspective.
Reverbnation provides for many more services (particularly around fan outreach, services for artist mgmt, labels, venues etc.) than what I’m comparing them on, but my comparison is specifically around online submissions of your music.
Hope you found this useful. If you did, leave comments. Follow my blog on tumblr, on @sirsurrey and like on facebook or drop a comment/follow on soundcloud. Or do all 4. You’ll be helping an indie artist out and you’re cool.
XO
ss
Source: sirsurrey.com
tumblrbot asked: WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN YOU ARE IN A BAD MOOD?
music
Mechanical Licenses and Copyright
ATTENTION MUSICIANS! I got into legal copyright trouble in selling my cover of “La Vie En Rose” in France, because my mechanical licenses only covered limited number of sales in the United States. I am doing a cover of “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone on “Fruit of my Lions” out in March 2012 (hopefully!)
WHY you need Mechanical Licenses?
If you are an artist who did covers of songs by another artist, dead or alive, you probably will need a pool of “Mechanical Licenses” before you can publish your cover/re-interpretation of another artist’s work for commercial use.
WHAT is Copyright Lifetime?
Some works are “Perpetual Copyrights” while most works the copyright expires after a certain duration. In the United States copyright holds for Artist’s life + 70 years (works published since 1978 or unpublished works). Europe is different. More about Copyright Expiration here.
HOW can I get Mechanical Licenses?
I buy Mechanical Licenses here: Harry Fox Agency. They are quick, simple and not too expensive.
As I am checking off boxes on my Musical Go To Market plan as blogged earlier at http://sirsurrey.tumblr.com/post/15939843031/indie-musician-gtm-checklist
I am realising I have to add another task of obtaining Mechanical Licenses for the cover of “Sinnerman”. Hope this helps!
XO LOVE BYE
Aish/Sir Surrey
Source: http
Page 1 of 4
