If you are interested in attending the conference (which has tons of great content), save a ton of cash and get two registrations for $99.  The offer is only good Wednesday, September 9 from 12 a.m. EST to 11:59 p.m. EST. REGISTER NOW by using the promo code: GSB999 and clicking here! After 9/9, friends of the Geoff Livingston’s site “Buzz Bin” can get one ticket for $99 by using this code: Potomac929 (for BlogPotomac).

The you can enjoy the whole Chris Anderson interview over at our Grow Smart Business site. Go on and check it out.

“Chris Anderson is a well-renowned, engaging speaker and we are excited to have him join us at the GrowSmartBiz conference,” said Roy Dunbar, Chairman and CEO of Network Solutions. “He has a tremendous background in technology and innovation, and truly understands the importance of small business, as well as the unique challenges small business owners face. This keynote – along with a well-established group of panelists – will ensure that attendees leave with executable strategies and tactics to grow their businesses.”

The GrowSmartBiz Small Business Conference will be held on September 29 at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, D.C. The event is designed to help small businesses, from startups to well-established companies, successfully grow their enterprises and will include industry experts providing insight into key areas critical to small business growth and development.

Through keynote addresses, panel discussions and networking opportunities, attendees will leave the conference with:

• Insights into best practices of successful small businesses,
• Proven strategies for business growth despite the current economy,
• Executable, cost-effective ways to market and promote their businesses,
• Knowledge of what banks believe is the key to securing small business financing, and
• Actionable ideas for integrating and leveraging social media into existing marketing and communications efforts

Registration is open and all attendees who register before August 7 will receive $100 off their registration fee. For more information visit the GrowSmartBiz Conference site. All attendees will receive Chris’ new book, Free, for free!

And, don’t forget to suggest and select a topic for one of the conference sessions! Visit http://growsmartbiz.ideascale.com/ for more details

I haven’t read it yet, though I think we’re familiar with the basic concepts (many of which are laid out in his Wired article from last year); The emergence of online content and distribution has opened up a lot of products and services that are essentially free to a good chunk of customers.

There’s currently a hubbub going on around the book — as I am not an economist and have no MBA (which I’m sure will become evident), I will just share a few aphorisms that I think are relevant to the free debate:

* It’s not free, it’s free-ish: I think that many folks (including Anderson) are hung up on the word “free,” when we’re simply talking about “subsidized,” either by other parties, or yourself (as in deferred payments on  future purchases.)

As Anderson himself states in this blogged response to some criticism, it’s not about a free world, but a freemium one. In his words:

“Freemium is the inversion of the traditional free sample. Rather than giving out few percent of your product away for free as marketing, hoping to sell the rest, you give away most of your product for free as marketing, hoping to sell to a minority.”

In freemium models, the upsold pay the freight for the unsold.

That leads us to…

* The first and guiding principle: TANSTAAFL — There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Somebody, somewhere has to pay. It might be advertisers. (Then again, in this climate, it might not.) It might be you, in terms of attention, work or time. And it might be someone far enough removed from you as to be invisible (to you).

Looking at Craigslist, for example, the paid job and real estate listings in select cities subsidize everyone else’s use of the site. Even if you never use the job and real estate listings, you’re part of the dynamic: The free stuff builds the audience for the paid stuff; the paid stuff subsidizes the free stuff.

(Also, we can’t take free for granted. Even online, there are still hard costs for bandwidth and infrastructure — people are still watching the YouTube monetization question very closely.)

* Free for the sake of free is for hobbies and starvation. Clearly, the seller has to benefit from giving stuff away for free: Leaving out psychic benefits (this is business, after all), there’s got to be some sort of payout down the road, whether you’re using free as a loss leader, reputation builder, attention grabber, or audience accumulator.

* Free works. “Free” causes us to do funny things. As Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational showed, free breaches psychological barriers, and causes us to do strange, silly, different things.

* Free doesn’t work for everything. Clearly, it doesn’t work with a lot of physical goods (the whole “bits vs. atoms” thing) — not everything fits into the “give away the razor and sell the blades” model. Even looking at bits, in the already pretty free realm of shareware and freeware, we’ve seen software creators who just can’t sustain that model. (Not to say that they would have been able to sustain a paying model, either — just that free isn’t a panacea.)

* Free doesn’t work for everyone. We’ve seen free work for folks like John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, and Radiohead. However, not everyone is John Scalzi, Cory Doctorow, or Radiohead. I’m not convinced that free scales to infinity, even with low to no marginal costs of online distribution. After all, there’s still a limit to attention, and it’s possible that we’re in a “free” sweet spot right now because of the pendulum shift from aggregation to disaggregation.

Anyway, I suppose I should actually read the book at some point. To anyone still blowing a gasket over this whole thing, I suggest using repeating “TANSTAAFL” as a calming mantra to help put things in perspective.

Got your own thoughts on “Free”? Leave a comment. It’s free!

* Airline transparency pays off: This BBC News article (link via… everywhere, it’s been making the rounds) tells the story of vacationers returning from the island of Menorca (off the Spanish coast, in the Mediterranean), who faced an eight-hour delay because a mechanical problem popped up, requiring an engineer to be flown in from England.

After the flight crew made the groan-worthy announcement, a qualified (and eligible) engineer stepped up, fixed the problem in about a half hour, the flight took off, and Bob’s your uncle (as the Brits might say).

This is, admittedly, an improbable event, though I will use it as an example (okay, a wildly extreme corner case) of corporate transparency paying dividends to all involved. As airline passengers, we feel powerless enough as it is (beaten down through security, our fate in the hands of the people in the cockpit), so getting any bit of true (even truthy) information is usually enough to help quell incipient passenger insurrections — or at least make us feel a little better, like we’re all on the same side.

Of course, navigating this can be tricky business — we don’t want to be condescended to; we need to be told enough detail to be useful, but not enough to lead a layperson to a wrong conclusion. This may sound a little paternalistic, but there’s still a role for expertise and experience as it intersects with honesty and empathy on the way to not just transparency, but useful transparency.

* Yet Another Article about food trucks using Twitter. Only instead of taco trucks in LA, this one is about every other kind of food truck — only it’s in New York, so it’s a completely different story.

Folks, I know it’s Twitter, and it caters to technically-savvy hip urbanites and all, but let’s not get overexcited. Granted, using Twitter and mobile devices means it’s more convenient, flexible, targeted, etc, but ultimately (as the article notes), it’s just an updated version of when the coffee cart lady (she happened to be a lady) used to ring her bell as she made the rounds in the office building where I used to work, or when the ice cream truck goes around playing Turkey in the Straw (or In da Club, or whatever ice cream trucks play these days.)

Sure, it scales a lot better (that is, it’s a whole lot less annoying, you can include more territory, plus it’s completely user opt-in), and you can hear it from your enclosed, air-conditioned cubicle, but let’s not lose perspective here.

* How Free is Free? Lastly for right now, we’re in the middle of a bit of sturm und drang as to the limits of free as a business model. I, along with many others no doubt, are still percolating on this. There are many aspects, as well as many aphorisms to regurgitate, so consider this  a teaser for an item later this week. (Sneak peek: The acronym “TANSTAAFL” will most likely make an appearance.)

Have you had a run-in with a Twitter food truck? Do you have “Turkey in the Straw” stuck in your head now? Is the airline transparency story a useful example or a one-off fairy tale (or both)? Please leave a comment.

Network Solutions has experts that are staying abreast of these changes. They are offering webinars to help you respond & maximize your presence.

Search engine optimization & search marketing are important for a number of reasons. It offers:

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Additional Reading for Search Engine related topics:

6 things from Search Engineers by Marketing Pilgrim

The five goals of a search optimized page by DazzlinDonna

Free Links to Your Site by Matt Cutts, Google