Judging from the response to my last post, some of my readers are itching to find a comment field on my posts from now on. I can’t do that for you, alas, and I thought I’d tell you why.
I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters. I’m already itching to rewrite my traffic post below. So, given a choice between a blog with comments or no blog at all, I think I’d have to choose the latter.
So, bloggers who like comments, blog on. Commenters, feel free. But not here. Sorry.
June 3, 2006
My friend Fred, a talented blogger, asked me for advice the other day. Here's a partial answer, with a few apologies to Swift: (and when you're done with this list, feel free to read my post about shark attacks).
- Use lists.
- Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
- Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
- Break news.
- Be timeless… write posts that will be readable in a year.
- Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
- Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
- Announce news.
- Write short, pithy posts.
- Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
- Don't write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
- Write long, definitive posts.
- Write about your kids.
- Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
- Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
- Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
- Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
- Coin a term or two.
- Do email interviews with the well-known.
- Answer your email.
- Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
- Be anonymous.
- Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
- Post your photos on flickr.
- Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
- Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
- Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
- Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
- Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
- Point to useful but little-known resources.
- Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
- Write about Google.
- Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
- Don't include comments, people will cross post their responses.
- Write posts that each include dozens of trackbacks to dozens of blog posts so that people will notice you.
- Run no ads.
- Keep tweaking your template to make it include every conceivable bell or whistle.
- Write about blogging.
- Digest the good ideas of other people, all day, every day.
- Invent a whole new kind of art or interaction.
- Post on weekdays, because there are more readers.
- Write about a never-ending parade of different topics so you don't bore your readers.
- Post on weekends, because there are fewer new posts.
- Don't interrupt your writing with a lot of links.
- Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
- Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
- Don't promote yourself and your business or your books or your projects at the expense of the reader's attention.
- Be patient.
- Give credit to those that inspired, it makes your writing more useful.
- Ping technorati. Or have someone smarter than me tell you how to do it automatically.
- Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
- Write in English.
- Better, write in Chinese.
- Write about obscure stuff that appeals to an obsessed minority.
- Don't be boring.
- Write stuff that people want to read and share.
This is the biggest one, and the reason for the whole series.
I now believe that almost all marketing decisions are first and foremost made without the marketplace in mind.
That’s a pretty bold statement, but here goes.
I think that most marketers, most of the time, make their marketing decisions based on what they think the committee, or their boss, or their family or their friends or the blog readers with email will say.
When I speak to groups, the folks who are stuck, or who are not finding the growth they are hoping for, rarely say, "we don’t know how to get the market to respond." Instead, they say, "my boss or the factory or the committee or the design folks or the CFO won’t…"
Now, of course most of this is whining. Most of this is nonsense. It’s not everyone else’s fault. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you market intending to please those people, you only have yourself to blame.
Great marketing pleases everyone on the team, sooner or later. But at the beginning, great marketing pleases almost no one. At the beginning, great marketing is counter-intuitive, non-obvious, challenging and apparently risky. Of course your friends, shareholders, stakeholders and bosses won’t like it. But they’re not doing the marketing, you are.
June 2, 2006
I’m a little obsessed with the Tabasco story.
First thing: people have a bottle of Tabasco in their house and in their restaurant. It solves their "hot sauce problem". If someone asks for it, you’ve got some. This is a very good thing for the Tabasco people.
Second thing: people only buy more Tabasco when they run out of it. Which doesn’t happen so often, at least in most blue states. Replenishment only is not as good as people buying something because they like buying it.
And the third thing, the biggest change, is that there are now thousands of brands of hot sauce, many of which are far better than Tabasco, and millions of people are buying not one flavor, but several. And they buy more varieties because they want to, not because they have to.
Mark Ramsey is usually right. This time he’s wrong, twice. "Podcasting" has a bad name.
Mark says "podcasting" is a bad name, and that something understandable, like "audiomag" would be better, because more people would know what it is.
I guess TV should have been called "pictureradio".
Not only is podcasting one of the great names of our generation, but it could have been even braver, not less brave. If you’ve going to invent a new product that is more than just an incremental improvement, then that new product requires a new slot in the mind, a new way of thinking. Giving it a name that permanently links it to old thinking doesn’t help. "Sneakers" is better than "athletic shoe".
Sometimes, you’re able to come up with a name that manages to be incremental to a tiny, very influential portion of the population and just strange to the rest of us. So, in this case, "pod" referred to iPod–but just to the 5% of online techies that were instrumental in spreading the word in 2004 (two very long years ago). In other words, the architecture of the name perfectly matched the vector the word needed to travel to make it. Compare that to the brave but foolish "RSS." (Really Stupid Slogan).
Sure, "email" couldn’t be anything but email, and that was a pretty chicken name. But in general, if you need people to think differently, it helps to be brave when you name something new.
June 1, 2006
I can count on one hand the number of marketers I know who get to do "Marketing" every day. (with a capital M).
Accountants do accounting all the time. Salespeople spent a lot of time selling. But marketers, it seems, have a long list of things they do (budgets, coupons, projections, photo shoots, bizdev meetings, meet and greets, etc.) that is technically marketing–cause I think everything an organization does is marketing–but is hardly in the sweet spot.
Think about the giant marketing successes of our time. From Disney to CAA to Boston Consulting Group… from Ronald Reagan to the Mormon Church to Habitat for Humanity… in every case, these organizations won big time because of a kernel of an idea, a marketing insight that they built upon.
There are more than 50,000 restaurants in New York City. Perhaps 200 of them are marketing success stories. Yet at the other 49,800 restaurants, the owners spend very little time working on their breakout idea, and tons of time doing stuff that feels a lot more important.
Once an organization is up and running, it’s almost impossible to carve out the time to find the marketing vision that will make all the difference. Are you too busy working to make any money?
May 31, 2006
In case you haven’t been keeping up:
Emily graduates from art school. She builds a myspace page, builds a blog (Inside A Black Apple) and starts selling her art on etsy.com.
I was trying to figure out Etsy, sorting the paintings by "times viewed" and was completely stunned by the fact that some paintings have 500 times as many views as others. And not because of the price, or, apparently, any obvious difference in quality.
Instead, you’ll notice that certain artists (like Emily) have hundreds of views. By my calcuation, she’s sold more than twenty thousand dollars worth of paintings so far. (she’s sold over 400 works of art, at 10 or 50 or more dollars a pop).
This isn’t a post about blogging or myspace or even etsy. Instead, it should be proof to you that the whole thing is raveling (which means the same as unraveling, in case you were curious). That all the systems that kept all the processes in place and leveraged mature industries and experienced players are slowly (or quickly) filtering to the masses. Faster than you thought it would happen.
Markus recommends: MoMB. Tomorrow’s web stuff, right now.
Chris Mallon refers us to this incredibly honest and humble anti-portfolio (the companies they turned down). Bessemer Venture Partners – Our Portfolio.
Ann Michael points us to the Cordless Jump Rope .
What else could you leave out?
