Technology has made many things possible, and is enabling unethical people to pay as little as one quarter cent per word for their writing. The Internet is the great democratizer. It is also the great enslaver of the disadvantaged and the marginalized.

Freelance writers, often students, mothers, and older people, are the victims of a global conspiracy to pit people against each other to auction their skills and time for as little as possible.

One of the culprits is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT). Amazon didn’t invent microworking, which is the practice of paying independent contractors by the task instead of by the hour. But they are the first globally recognized company to put their name on the practice, thereby endorsing it and making it an acceptable business practice.

Amazon MT is a service that allows businesses to contract with Amazon to have people perform very brief, discreet operations like manually forwarding an e-mail based on subject matter or moderating blog comments. My son, a student, worked for MT moderating pictures for a social network at the rate of a few pennies each.

ShortTask is another example of a service that brings together businesses and people who want to do microcontract work. In addition to facilitating this process, ShortTask often has questionable tasks like paying for positive product reviews and blog comments, Diggs, Twitter followers, etc.

And last night, someone tweeted a link to Article Slash, which had this posting:

“Hi, I need a group of writers or writing teams who can deliver 20-30 articles of 300 words every day. Payout will be made everyday through paypal.. 0.75$ for every 300 word article.”

Seventy-five cents per article! That’s .0025 per word, one quarter of a penny! If you could write 1200 words per hour (I’m a professional writer and I can’t), you could make $3 an hour doing this.

Our current minimum wage in California is $8, and the federal minimum is $7.25. As bad as that is, there are millions of Californians who would think they had died and gone to heaven to get $8 an hour. The rate at which people work and the quality expected by buyers varies, but the wages offered by these services, like the 75-cent, 300-word article, are equivalent to under $2 an hour. The last time the federal minimum wage was below $2 was in 1974.

Both California state and federal law require* that pieceworkers be paid a rate that is equal to or more than minimum wage, except for students and “new learners” (people who have never done the job before) who are paid at 85% of the minimum wage. Of course this is for regular employees, not contractors.

Some of the inevitable byproducts of this trend are:

• Devaluation of good writing, research and analysis
• Illiteracy
• Theft of editorial content

Microworking is an area in which the law has not caught up with technology and common practice. And the marketplace for these services is mostly underground, so the average person isn’t aware of it or upset by it. The operators of sites like Article Slash and ShortTask may argue that they are merely facilitators, and not responsible for the behavior of their users.

Ours is supposedly a free market economy, but we also have checks and balances so that everyone from the soup kitchen to the boardroom is protected from abuse. As the economic recovery slowly ticks up, one can only hope that supply and demand moderate the wages for microworkers so they are fairly paid for their effort and intellect. Unfortunately, the practices, which may have been made necessary by the downturn, will be status quo for some companies who will be unable to resist the appeal of continued lower operating costs.

* This is based on my research and interpretation of government documents. I am not an attorney and could be wrong about this.

Tags: Microworking, Article Slash, minimum wage, piecework, Amazon, Mechanical Turk, ShortTask, writing, writers

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is unquestionably one of the best, and first, CEO bloggers in the world. He’s not only a pioneer, but an intelligent, articulate, engaging writer who sets a difficult standard for others to match. I was writing a column on CEO blogging this afternoon and noticed that Jonathan’s blog has not been updated since May 18 of this year.

As Jonathan writes on the blog, in the May 18 post:

“I recognize it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog. For reasons why, just click here to read the background. And before you ask, SEC regulations and securities laws limit what I can discuss about the Oracle transaction, so don’t expect any insights on the topic.”

Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun on April 20. Whenever companies are in this mode, strict SEC regulations govern all communications material to the deal, so silence is sometimes the best policy. It’s interesting that Jonathan was still active nearly a month after the announcement. Sun’s Twitter account linked to the blog was tweeting six-month old blog posts up until October 15.

I look forward to seeing Jonathan, one of the industry’s unique voices, blogging again.

Full Disclosure: I worked for Sun Microsystems for five years and knew Jonathan. I am a huge fan of the company.

Tags: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, CEO, SEC, blog, blogger

I had the pleasure of speaking with Joanne Kisling and a group of Sun people this morning about my book SocialCorp. Joanne asked me about the barriers to corporate social media adoption and how communicators can help overcome resistance from company gatekeepers. Give it a listen over on Sun.com or download the MP3!

Tags: SocialCorp, social media adoption

In my book, SocialCorp, I identify what I think are the Six Valuable Attributes that make social media a powerful tool in a corporate communications. These are:

• Authenticity – Social media lets the real voices of real people come through, allowing an intimacy never achieved before in corporate communications.

• Transparency – There are two kinds of transparency in corporate social media. The first is traditional financial transparency, the ability for shareholders and regulators to see how well a company is performing financially. The second definition, closely related, is that through company blogs, communities and other vehicles, the rest of a company’s inner workings can also be made visible to the public.

• Immediacy – Immediacy is the ability of companies, bloggers, journalists and members of the public to communicate, and to engage in online conversations at unprecedented speed. A blog post can be written, formatted and published in minutes. Twitter updates happen in the blink of an eye. Live video is now within reach of anyone with a handicam, or even a cell phone with a video camera.

• Participation – Once the domain of company authorized communicators, a useful, current definition of corporate communications recognizes that anyone can participate in the conversation, whether on the company’s blog, independent forums, personal blogs, Twitter, Slashdot, or any of a thousand places online.

• Connectedness – Through a multitude of mechanisms for sharing information, social media allows millions of connections to take place, amplifying the impact of company communications. RSS feeds allow information posted in one place to be instantly displayed in thousand of other places. Social bookmarking sites like Digg allow users to easily share stories with others.

• Accountability – While one of the characteristics of the Internet is supposedly anonymity, and this is true in some cases, people who use social media are more accountable than they might realize. Many companies, and their PR and marketing agencies, have tried to “game the system” through unethical practices like astroturfing, the practice of falsifying grassroots support for a product, company, service or point of view by having paid company representatives leave anonymous comments. Over and over again, these companies are caught and publicly vilified. Seemingly anonymous postings leave a trail of IP addresses and other clues that are detected and publicized by vigilant users.

In a recent blog post, Rob Whetzel of Rottman Creative, talked about his experience easing into participation as he learned each social network and social media tool.

Do you agree that these attributes are important? Which are the most important? What would you add?

I was quoted in today’s Launch magazine in Do’s and Don’ts of Using Social Internet Sites for Business. In the article, I offer the following advice on adding and interacting with contacts on various social networks:

“Don’t forget your manners.

While nearly all social networks have rules for participation (don’t post obscenities or copyrighted material, for example), the etiquette for adding people to each network is defined by the mores of those on the network, Postman says. He offers a few guidelines:

• Users should be particularly careful to avoid the appearance of flirtation and inappropriate comments and messages. Use the same rules as you would in the workplace.
• Don’t send blatantly commercial messages. Business networking is OK. Shameless promotion and cold calling is not.
• If the network allows, give the person you are inviting some context for the invitation.
• Do not take it badly if someone declines or ignores your invitation to connect. That’s their option.”

The full article can be found here.

Tags: Launch, Grow Utah Ventures, social network etiquette, Facebook, Twitter