This Friday (February 3rd) will be the fourth anniversary of smays.com and I’m going to mark the occasion by attempting to drink four cold beers. I invite any bloggers and/or readers to join me at Chili’s right after work (five-ish). If I succeed in drinking four beers, I probably shouldn’t drive so please bring this phone number (Checker Cab) with you: 636-7101. It’s possible you’ll be the only one that shows up and I don’t want to throw up in your car.
Category Archives: Blogging
Naked Conversations
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel co-authored this excellent book on “how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers.” Just a couple of chapters in but finding a nugget on almost every page:
- Tool Lust –People develop emotional attachments to things that empower new, faster, easier or cheaper activity (blogging)
- Interruption Marketing — Unanticipated, impersonal and irrelevant ads, repeatedly hurled at involuntary audiences. (Seth Godin)
- “First there were phone books, then web sites and [businesses] know that if they don’t have [one], it works to their disadvanatage. Blogs are just the next logical step.” — Betsy Aoki, Microsoft blogger
- Corpspeak — An oxymoronic hybrid of cautious legalese seasoned with marketing hyperbole. Corpspeakers talk to people when they want to speak, not when people want to listen.
- If you’re afraid to share ideas, you shouldn’t blog. One time someone asked Walt Disney if he wasn’t worried about telling so many people about his ideas. And Disney said, ‘Those were last year’s ideas.’ (pg 94) If you’re paranoid about your ideas being ripped off, don’t blog.
- If the company culture is manipulative, employees are not treated with respect, and customers are thought of as commodity items, then that company should not blog. That company should close its doors. (pg 95)
If you’re not sure if your sales proposal or corporate brochure or news release is corpseak, stand in the middle of a room with some of your co-workers and read the copy aloud. If they laugh, it’s corpspeak.
I’ll update this post as I move through the book.
Death Row Blogger
“Vernon Lee Evans Jr. — amateur advice columnist and convicted murderer — is scheduled to die next month by lethal injection. He is one of the very few death row inmates to have a blog and, activists say, perhaps the only condemned man worldwide to use a blog to take questions from readers.”
— washingtonpost.com:
Who are your “alpha customers?”
Chris Anderson (The Long Tail guy) looks at why big companies should have public blogs. Among other reasons, they serve as a peer-to-peer product support channel for “alpha customers”, whose opinion can sway others.
Does Learfield (the company I work for) have “alpha customers?” Who would that be? Our university partners? Our advertisers? Our affiliated radio stations? I would argue that the correct answer is: D) All of the above.
Those charged with knowing and influencing “alpha customers,” whomever they might be…might argue that we are already doing a fine job of this. No argument here. But “deep in my heart, I do belive” we could do it even more effectively with some savvy blogging.
Which brings us to a DWR moment: Pushing your company or organization to blog before they are psychologically ready or have the will and talent to pull it off, is like showing motion pictures to the indigenous tribes of Borneo. They might cheer and make you Tribal Witch Doctor, or they might stab you to death with tiny little spears.
Anytime you see this little robot, you know you’re reading something that could get me –and you– in a lot of trouble.
J-School head poo-poo’s political blogs
Cub Reporter Bob Hague sends along this link to an interview with James Baughman, head of Journalism/Communications at UW Madison. Bob says what started as a discussion of celebrity journalism spread to political blogs. Baughman thinks they’re going to be great for political geeks, but is pretty pessimistic about new media’s impact on the electorate. [Thanks, Bobby.]