A friend who DJs in clubs around Fairfield County Connecticut told me this story.
A DJ friend of his was working a club in Greenwich, CT. Unbeknownst to him, a record company exec was also at the club. At the end of the night, the exec went up to the manager and demanded payment for every song the DJ played which his company owned rights.
The exec then started shaking down other club owners in and around Greenwich, Stamford and Norwalk.
And now most club owners in Fairfield County are declining to hire DJs, preferring to bring in bands or just let the jukesbox play.
Real smart, don’t you think?
Yesterday morning, before my 10 hour dash through the wilds of Pennsylvania, I joined Benet Wilson of Aviation Week and Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines on a panel on new and social media at the ACI-NA Marketing and Communications Forum.
Benet, as I’ve noted previously, writes the Towers and Tarmacs blog. Paula shepherds the Nuts About Southwest blog. Attending were 250+ marketing managers for airports as well as folks from the airline industry, government and related industries.
I started off with my latest rant – that social media isn’t media and it isn’t technology. It’s what happens with the cost of global communication, publishing and mass organization drops to zero. it’s the cumulative impact of millions of people suddenly able to find others all over the world who share their point of view and the ability of those people to organize. I purposely tried to stay off of technology since this wasn’t a very tech-savvy crowd. From the reactions before, during and afterwards, it seems I made the right choice.
Paula told an interesting story about how the management of Southwest Airlines spends way too much time pondering the wisdom of their open seating policy. They finally decided to put the question to the blog’s readers. The overwhelmingly supportive response convinced them they are on the right track and they are (of course) happy they didn’t have to spend a fortune on some consultants to tell them that. And they are happy not being up all night wondering if they are making the right move.
The questions from the audience were all very well informed – people are definitely moving up te learning curve on social media. One woman asked us what she should tell her boss who is convinced that blogs and the Internet are the sole preserve of a small gang of edgelings (those kids and their Internet…). This is a vast improvement from the question I would get a few years ago… “isn’t blogging and the Internet just for tech geeks?”
All in all, it was a fun panel and we could have gone on for hours discussing the topic. That’s for another time.
Update: Pictures from the drive and the panel are here.
Benet Wilson is talking about blogs in the airline industry. She’s pointed out that American Airlines has a blog – but hasn’t updated it since April.
Ironically the last entry is titled “Let’s keep talking.”
Yes, let’s talk.
I had a nice drive along the Pennsylvania Turnpike yesterday – pictures are here.
After my panel this morning, I’ll be heading back out – this time taking the northern tier – Route 80. I’ll post a wrap up of my talk this afternoon.
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