Archives for the 'Notes' Category
Message to Tony Mase of Constructive Science
Following is a copy of the comment I left today on Tony Mase’s marketing blog promoting the writings of a turn of the (19th) century self help guru, Wallace D. Wattles. You can find Tony’s site at ConstructiveScience.com. I fully recommend him as a purveyor of Wattles publications as they can be hard to find.
Tony, being a blogger, reading, posting and commenting every day, I have to say how ashamed I am for you and your usage of blogging as a promotional tool for your Wattles’ products. Yes, I am absolutely a supporter of using the technology in marketing purposes. Yes, I feel with effective linking techniques a marketer can direct traffic from their blog to the promotional sales site. Yes, using the RSS or ATOM feed syndication methods works much, much better for those in the know than the email protocol.
And YES, I have bought several products from you, and am likely to do so in the future as you have demonstrated to me the trust factor I need when making a decision as to where to spend my self-help investment money.
However, the challenges arise in this post with the obviously overlooked editing process and several repeated sentences. Not just one word here or there, but several complete thoughts. Maybe you were trying to drive those points home, however, I’ve never read this “technique” from you prior.
Your “liberal” usage of linking back to your sales site is complete off the boards, ridiculous to the point that I am very nearly considering canceling my RSS feed. As such, I would never get another message from you since I no longer get your emails (because I get the message in my preferred format of news feeds). Yes, I’m but one person, however, if you allow this comment to go through, I would heartily urge others to express their dissatisfaction with the having to see every other word linking back to the same web page. Are you thinking all of these extra links are some how going to increase your Page Rank and subsequent search engine / blog search results? They won’t!
You have a clean blog design. You present effective articles that are clearly enticing to the user, however, if someone has subscribed to your blog, they probably already have one or more Wattles products from you, or one of the other reputable proprietors of Wattles words. Why not leave the marketing messages for the email blasts that I know you do, and leave the blog posts for actual, real insight from you, someone we want to know and trust, to be delivered to those of us that sign up for RSS for value add? Of course a marketing message with each post is perfectly acceptable. And yet, you simply take the very, exact same content that you use in your bulk email marketing and send in out to the RSS subscribers.
Just not cool, my friend. And I say this with total respect for someone that has demonstrated success online with his marketing of Wattles materials for a long time. Please learn that marketing messages DO NOT translate equally across different communications technologies.
And please have someone putting more effort into reviewing and editing your content, whatever it ends up being.
Finally, my guess is that you won’t post this comment, as is your right being the site owner. I will however be posting a copy of this (admittedly too long, apologies) comment as a post on my personal site.
Customer service should transform to self service
What the hell was I thinking? I live in Cottonwood. The only two places to get office chairs?
- Wal-mart: 2 chairs way over priced no adjustable features
- OfficeMax: a bunch of chairs, only one that I would have wanted. Was willing to pay the $179 to get something of relative quality and feature set. I take the ticket to the register. Dude goes to get chair. Stops to talk to chick walking in the store. Stops to help another customer. Finally, 6 minutes later brings up chair in box on dolly.
Box literally looks like it had been dropped off the truck at 60 MPH. I say could I get a box that doesn’t look like this? Dude says they all pretty much look like this. I say good bye and leave.
Advertising is great for companies. Too bad the people they employ don’t get a copy of the marketing materials to learn how to provide decent customer service. Geesh!
Howard and Lindsay are a riot!
My apologies for being a supporting cast member in the echo chamber, but viral dissemination is a part of the coming age of all things Open Social, Web 2.0, yadda yadda yadda.
Good thing I have a wireless keyboard, cause I am typing this post while finding myself on the floor after having LMAO (not literally, however. I still have plenty of “A”, so don’t cry for me, okay!?!)
[via Howard Lindzon]
and
[via Lindsay Campbell]
Twittering the Dog!
Now, I’m not saying definitively that the question asked during the press conference was definitely mine
, however, when Robert Scoble sent out a request for questions 
on Twitter I responded to him pretty quickly. As did a number of others.
I guess my question actually did get asked! Technology is sooo cooool!
(follow up)Looks like Znet is getting in on the conversation. Coolness.(/follow up)
Mashable.com ponders on leaking of American Gangster
Kristin over at Mashable.com writes on Denzel Washington Film Leaked: Whose Fault is it This Time?
My question would be just how many people will actually end up viewing this “leaked” film prior to (or after) the release of the film in the theatres? My guess is not nearly enough to make a single dent in the box office gross.
Another relatively “educated” guess is that the people that do end up seeing the leaked film are NOT people that would spend a dime to see the theatre version. And if that (risky) assumption is true (lets just agree for now it is) then again, the film is not losing any money from the fact that it was leaked.
In fact, I believe there is a certain amount of “leakage” (not sure why I’m fixated on leak today!) that is allowed to transpire solely for the press coverage that gets afforded to the act itself, and consequently to the project. Now I’m not saying this is the case with AG at all. But think about it: if my above assumptions are true, and Universal is NOT going to lose any real money to speak of, and will net a bunch of media placements (this mashable story is but one of the many to come) then the only other derivative aspect of this “leak” (there it is again!) is that the people illegally viewing the film early are going to talk about it to all of their friends.
So, my conclusion (long and drawn out as it has been!) is that the only way (in this case) Universal is really going to be upset about this film showing on the Net early, is if it is not a very good film. If it’s bad, it will get negative “early reviews” and THAT is what will really hurt the box office sales; not the fact that a dribble of folks downloaded and watched it ahead of time.
Of course these are just my thoughts. I could be in left field (on Pluto!)
Wendy’s growing her blog network
You should definitely read eMoms at home founder, Wendy Piersall’s “What have I learned in 6 weeks of running a mini blog network
” if you have ANY desires whatsoever of growing your blog into something larger than a singularly focused collection of posts.
Why do I recommend this to you? My friend and former business partner, Joseph Cizek and I had hoped when we launched this site at the beginning of 2007 to immediately be able to have our own mini blog network focusing on 8 areas we had decided were core, necessary “attributes” that would allow for one to get better at doing whatever they wanted to be doing online (or offline for that matter).
We spent a lot of time figuring out our game plan. We spent even more time figuring out how to highly modify our WordPress Themes in order to display our content in unique and interesting ways. We spent a lot of time discussing the focus of the 8 bgAttributes and what sort of content should be generated in each area. We spent a lot of time learning that we wanted to make a distinction between shorter posts, which we decided to call “Notes” and longer posts that would be known as “Articles”. We thought long and hard about how we would monetize the site, and eventually came up with the idea of our very own marketplace called Trader Jim’s.
In case you’re not catching the drift here, we spent a lot of time doing everything but what Wendy and countless others have done with their online endeavors: create content. There’s no way eMoms could even consider creating a mini network of blogs if they didn’t have the bloggers in place creating the content they have been doing for as long as they have been. That was our challenge.
And now the “magic is gone”, and Joseph and I have decided to go our separate ways on the blogging network stuff. We continue to develop on client projects together, as well as collaborating on some potential business ideas. But what we don’t have is a growing thriving blogging network.
And that’s okay. Not everyone can create and maintain such beasts. Wendy is right to be a bit outside of her comfort zone, but I say good for her. Go for the expansion of your sphere of influence, and grow your business, whatever it is. I look forward to her continued success and am very excited that she has problems like whether or not to take on a partner (with money, I imagine!), a loan or equity financing. If you are building a business, you want these sorts of “challenges”. Trust me on that one!
View from Verde Santa Fe Driving Range
Still learning how to use the new Samsung NV7. It does SOOOO much! But like my golf game, I just have to continue to work on one small thing at a time. Master each element and then move on.
And I definitely hit the ball very nicely today (well, about 85% of them, anyways!)
Pay attention to the river of (garbagey) news!
While agreeing mostly with Anne Zelenka in her post today, “A World of Information Possibility
” my impression is that she really states the obvious with her comment “think of watching a river rush by”. She’s specifically referring to how to best consume all subscribed news and blog posts. Supposedly, according to Ms. Z, there is just too much information and that “most of it is garbage”.
Now, I don’t think that most of it is garbage and if it is and you have a lot of it in your feed reader of choice, what does that make you? A garbage man (or woman)? We all subscribe to a sites feed only to later remove it when we become disillusioned about the quality (or quantity) of the content. Heck, I’ve removed feeds because I have found that the truncated posts did not provide me enough motivation to click through to their site to finish the read. Is that a source of garbage? Probably not. More like an irritation if nothing else. But not garbage.
Oh, and since my subscriber numbers are pretty much non-existent, my words evidently fall into the garbage heap as well. Not sure how one would ever get off the heap if what they post is all crap and no one is ever to subscribe to them, and their numbers never grow to the Scobleizer level.
Onward. My friend Eric Norlin of defrag fame 
has an interesting, short post about a new activity coming to be known as “lobbyconning“.
Now anyone who subscribes to the very non-garbage posts of Robert Scoble realize he spends vast amounts of money to attend conferences all over and seems to NEVER actually attend any seminar or speech, but just hangs out in the hallways. I’m going to have to go to one that he is at just to see if he even rents a hotel room ;).
Isn’t this sort of focusing of attention the same thing that Anne Z. is referring to in her post? Aren’t those who are lobbyconning simply choosing what part of the river they want to consume? I think so. And the water is more expensive from those rivers than from the readers (but I’ll assume the after parties are better too!)
Finally Nick Bradbury somehow got into my river of news stream (thanks to Scoble’s shared feed) with his talk about various feed reader applications supporting APML. Nick captures the sentiment of this post and its referrer posts when he states “I’ve long been convinced that RSS aggregators can help people overcome information overload by first paying attention to what a user is reading, and then using that information to make better decisions about what might (or might not) be important to that user.”
Admittedly, I have to learn more about APML and just exactly how it will help me to know what “everyone is paying attention to…” but clearly this will help to “uncover new and potentially important trends”. But will I have to do that? Or will there be a new wave of helpful garbage men women that will sort through the trends and help me to pay more attention to what I should/need to be paying attention to?
Very interesting day. And it’s just the start of the week!
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