Daily Reading 04/27/2008

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  • Marketing to Bloggers

    Influencer marketing is moving into the mainstream, with seven of 10 respondents to a recent study indicating that they’ll target influentials in the coming year. The trend is most pronounced among marketers the researchers classified as “leaders,” of those who use the most sophisticated tactics and tools.

    tags: influencers, marketing, daily_reading, social_media_research

  • 20 (Rare) Questions for Google Search Guru Udi Manber

    Google’s vice president of search quality gives rare insight into how the top-secret search algorithm works in an interview with Popular Mechanics. of all things.

    tags: daily_reading

  • U.S. Lags in Social Media Creation

    The US is a nation of online voyeurs, according to the author of a study on international online usage. A little over 60 percent of Internet users in the U.S. said they read blogs, but just 26 percent had created one, compared to over 70 percent of Internet users who blog in South Korea and China. There are more good stats in the article

    tags: daily_reading

  • Shopping 3.0 In A Web 2.0 World

    The CEO of ThisNext describes the concept of the “product graph,” in which influential early adopters help other people discover products they didn’t previously know existed.

    tags: daily_reading

Daily Reading 4/24/08

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  • Making Money, the How-To Way

    How-to videos are becoming a huge new Web 2.0 category, with lots of start-up activity and millions of views for top productions. Some instructors are making good money, too.

    tags: daily_reading, video

  • A Look at Friendfeed

    A new class of social media aggregation tools is enabling people to tie together their activities in blogs, social networks, Twitter and other forums. The resulting feed is called a “lifestream.” Dosh Dosh digs into FriendFeed, which is the current market leader.

    tags: daily_reading, social_networks

  • Facebook vs. Twitter and Communities in General – Direct2Dell

    Dell’s chief blogger compares Twitter to Facebook and tells why he likes Twitter better. Lionel Menchaca’s bulleted list of the pros and cons of each service will have a lot of people nodding in agreement. The comments are useful, too.

    tags: daily_reading

  • Twitter in Plain English

    Menchaca points to this instructive video that explains the appeal of Twitter in 2 1/2 minutes. I think there’s a lot more to Twitter than this, but for those people who just don’t get the appeal, this video is a nice summary.

    tags: daily_reading, twitter

  • Can User-Generated Content Generate Revenue?

    EMarketer says user-generated content isn’t a fad any more: “The number of user-generated content creators will rise from 77 million in 2007 to 108 million in 2012. The number of consumers of user-generated content will increase from 94 million in 2007 to 130 million in 2012.” The similarity of these numbers would indicate that the majority of people who are consuming user-generated content are the ones creating it. Still, eMarketer sees ad revenues for the category exceeding $800 million by 2012.

    tags: daily_reading, consumer_generated_media

  • Consumers in Chrysler’s Boardroom?

    Ted Mininni comments on Chrysler’s new Customer Advisory Board, which aims to bring 2,000 customers and prospects into a dialog about the company’s products. He asks what took Chrysler so long.

    tags: daily_reading

Not Optimizing For Search? Shame On You!

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From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

I meet with corporate marketers and their agencies these days, I’m frequently surprised to learn how little they think about search engine optimization. This is despite the fact that Google alone processes an estimated 750 million queries daily, and that IT professionals are some of the most active and advanced users of search engines.

One reason for this, I suspect, is that marketers are trained to be good at “push” marketing. Their craft has traditionally involved intercepting customers with messages that grab their attention and inspire action. Customers, however, are becoming more resistant to these tactics. Increasingly, they engage with companies and products on their terms when they’re ready to make a buying decision. That’s a much better time to reach them. The trick is to show up on their radar when they’re in this “pull” mode.

Google is now the universal homepage. Look at your traffic logs and you’ll probably see that search engines vastly outperform any other referral source. Yet many marketers devote lots of time and money to creating beautiful homepage designs that are rich in animation and graphics. Not only are these pages rarely seen by today’s web site visitors, but images and Flash animations are almost useless at attracting search engine traffic.

Successful IT marketers are learning to reverse the push model. They know that buyers start the research process in a search query box and that the sites that make the first page of results get 10 times the click-throughs of anything else.

The Great Equalizer
You might think search engines favor the big brands, but that’s not the case. Try this: Type “router” into Google and look at the results. Note that only four of the top 25 results are vendor sites. Now type “PC.” Note that the only vendor in the top 10 results — Apple — doesn’t even market its products as PCs! In fact, neither of the top two PC makers in the US market even makes the top 100 results on Google.

Now look at what dominates search results for both terms: sites that provide definitions and helpful how-to advice. This should tell you something. Your search engine performance will be greatest when you deliver content that helps customers make good decisions through practical, impartial guidance from knowledgeable sources.

Search is the great equalizer. The leading engines’ proprietary algorithms are designed to screen out material that their developers consider uninteresting. Your challenge is to match your content to their preferences.

Start by choosing the search terms that really matter. Be specific. Get general agreement that these are the terms you want to dominate in search performance. Marshall all of your internal web site contributors to reinforce those terms every time they write.

Discard terms like “industry-leading” and “innovative.” No one searches for those words. Start a blog or discussion forum. Both are search engine magnets. Pick up a copy of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. by Mike Moran and Bill Hunt. It’ll tell you a lot of the ins and outs. Make SEO a basic consideration in every marketing campaign. Then let those buyers reel you in.

This article originally appeared in Network World’s ITiki newsletter.

How New Influencers are Reinventing Journalism

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From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe using the sign-up box to the right.

Meet Ben Popken. You’ve probably never heard of him, but I recommend you learn what he’s all about. He and others like him are rewriting the rules of journalism and, with it, the practice of media relations.

Ben sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog The Consumerist. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn’t very big – only seven people – but Consumerist’s reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month, a number that has roughly doubled in the past year. Perhaps more importantly, it’s closely watched by mainstream media outlets. For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist gets picked up on the popular social bookmarking site Digg.com constantly — 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and just wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader’s Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.

That’s right, no journalism background; at least not as that concept is traditionally defined. Prior to joining Consumerist two years ago, Popken’s professional career had consisted of a variety of entrepreneurial sales ventures and odd jobs. He worked as a delivery man not long before joining Consumerist. He only got the job because the previous editor’s mother read his blog.

What’s even more interesting than his background is the way his staff reports the news. Consumerist gets about 100 e-mails a day from consumers talking about their horrible encounters with businesses of all kinds. Big box retailers, banks, cell phone providers, cable companies and airlines are popular targets. Editors read and respond to each and every e-mail and write up about 30 of those submissions each day for the site. They also monitor a variety of news services looking for important stories that affect consumers.

The New Journalism?
Consumerist editors do little fact-checking. They don’t have time with the volume of material they process. If something is wrong, they expect readers to quickly correct it. This direct reader input is the heart and soul of the Consumerist model, which Popken describes as “to empower consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day. We give them a voice by directly publishing their tips and e-mails and then following up on them as warranted.”

A lot of journalists shudder when they read words like these. No editorial oversight? No verification of facts? It sounds like an invitation to disaster. But so far it’s worked. Consumerist gets the occasional legal threat, but it’s never amounted to much. And its laser focus on reader interests has won it a fanatical following. Have you ever sent a letter to a newspaper about a story you read and failed to get a response? At The Consumerist, you are the story.

With his site having already passed the venerable Consumer Reports in traffic, by some accounts, you’d think marketers would be beating down the door trying to get Popken’s opinion. Yet surprisingly, he told me he gets few invitations to speak or consult. Some companies that the blog has repeatedly spotlighted have taken proactive measures. Sprint, for example, set up a dedicated support line for Consumerist readers, but only after the site published direct phone numbers for many of its executives.

With no formal journalism training, no editorial oversight and none of the trappings of conventional media, Ben Popken is becoming one of the most powerful voices in consumer journalism. And what’s funny is that if you ask him about the secret of Consumerist’s success, he uses the same words that any good editor uses: “The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We’re really just a curator of consumer-generated content.”

Get used to this. It’s the online journalism model of the future.

Bookmarking Enhances Personal Productivity

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From my weekly newsletter. Subscribe by filling in the box to the right.


Here are a couple of tricks I use to shave hours each month off the process of organizing information and publishing it on blogs and websites. Publishing features are some of the least understood and most useful services that bookmarking sites offer.

There are more than 50 social bookmarking sites on the Internet, including such popular brands as Feed Me Links, Linkroll, Ma.gnolia and Clipmarks. A good list is here. Most share a common set of features: You can quickly save and annotate Web pages, share them with others and subscribe to new entries. Most offer some added value on top of those basic functions, such as page previews, e-mail and ratings. All the services that I’ve found are free.

I use two sites that each excel at different things. For basic bookmarking and sharing, del.icio.us has the largest audience and the best browser integration. I can bookmark any page to del.icio.us by hitting a control key combination, entering tags (the autocomplete feature is a nice touch here) and then hitting enter. There are no mouse movements required (I’m a keyboard junkie) and the process is fast and simple.

What I don’t like about del.icio.us is its 255-character limit on annotations. That’s because I like to attach comments about the articles I read and upload them to my blog. There isn’t much you can say in 255 characters. Diigo plugs that gap. It’s a bit clumsier to use, but I can annotate to my heart’s content. Any annotations that I choose to make public are shared with other Diigo users who visit that page. I can also highlight passages and attach sticky notes to sections of the page that others can see.

The real value that I get out of both of these tools, though, is in publishing. I maintain three blogs and two Web sites, so I’m posting new material all the time. Web-based content management systems are slow and awkward to use, so I like to prepare and pre-format as much content as possible before logging on to the server.

Del.icio.us has a delightful feature called “link rolls” that enable you to automatically group bookmarks according to tags that you specify and feed them into a Web page. All you need to do is plug a little piece of JavaScript code into your website. Every time you add a bookmark, it’s dynamically displayed on the Web page.

For example, on my site’s speaking page, the list of recent appearances is nothing more than a bookmark list from del.icio.us. So are the “Latest News” and “Recent Articles” sections in the two sidebars. All I have to do to update those lists is to add or modify my del.icio.us tags. My site simply grabs the latest feed and displays those entries.

Diigo has cool tools for posting to a blog. When I read something interesting online, I bookmark it with Diigo and write my description and commentary in the annotation box. I attach the appropriate tags and save. When I’m ready to post to my blog, I simply check the boxes next to the relevant bookmarks and Diigo automatically produces a page consisting of every bookmark I’ve selected, along with my annotations. I can edit the entries in the site’s simple editor and then copy and paste the whole thing into my content management system. Here’s an example of what the final output looks like.

Both del.icio.us and Diigo also offer you the option to tell them to post certain bookmarks and annotations automatically to your blog on a daily schedule. There’s no logging in to your content management system and the whole process is transparent. You can read instructions on how to do this on Diigo’s tools page or del.icio.us’ settings page. Here’s an example of what the finished product looks like.

According to bulletjournalideas.com del.icio.us does a better job of auto-posting, but I still can’t get around that 255-character limit. Given a choice between writing more briefly or settling for a little less than the optimum format, I’ll stick with Diigo.

American Airlines Quietly Launches the World's Worst Corporate Blog

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You can spend months analyzing, planning and choreographing your company’s entry into the blogosphere – or you can do it because there’s a gun to your head. Looks like American Airlines is taking the latter approach. Under pressure because of massive flight delays and cancellations due to equipment problems, the carrier has launched a simple Blogger blog to tell its side of the story. The lack of comments indicates that it hasn’t told anyone about it. Given how bad it is, that’s probably a good thing. Thanks to Shel Holtz for the heads-up.

The AAConversation blog does nearly everything wrong. See my next post for a list. It’s a revealing look at how buttoned-down corporations can stumble and fumble when seized by naked panic. This is AA unplugged and very unpackaged.

Build a Culture of Sharing

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From Innovations, a website published by Ziff-Davis Enterprise from mid-2006 to mid-2009. Reprinted by permission.

Last week I spoke to a group of technology executives about the value of social networks. My presentation on this topic is full of optimism about the value that organizations can achieve from sharing the expertise of individual employees with internal and external constituents. The online knowledge maps that companies are now creating truly advance the cause of the corporate intranet.

Afterwards, a manager from a major technology company buttonholed me in the parking lot.  His company is often held up as a shining example of progressive thinking in social media and it has made Web 2.0 a foundation of its marketing plans.  In light of that, what this manager told me was a surprise.

His company was trying to encourage employees to blog and use an internal social network to share information and expertise fluidly amongst its huge global workforce.  But it was being frustrated by the intransigence of many people, he said, particularly older employees. They simply refused to participate.

After overcoming my initial befuddlement, I realized that this situation is all too common in big companies. The reason senior employees resist sharing is because they believe it’s a threat to their job security.  These people have spent many years developing their skills, and they fear that giving up that information may make them irrelevant at a time when companies are all too willing to replace expensive senior people with low-paid twentysomethings.

The politics of sharing

I was reminded of a recent conversation I had with a friend who works in the IT department at a venerable insurance company.  She told me that the manager of that group instructed employees not to share information about the best practices the group was employing in managing projects.  The manager feared that disclosing that information would threaten his value to the organization.

As troubling as these stories seem, the motivations behind people’s behavior is understandable.  Few companies give much credence to the value of institutional memory any more.  In fact, in today’s rapidly changing business climate, too much knowledge of the way things used to be done is often seen as a negative.  But it’s really a negative only if people use memories as a way of avoiding change.  Knowledge of a company’s culture and institutions is actually vital to the change process.  Any CEO who’s been brought in from the outside to shake up a troubled company can tell you that his most valuable allies are the people who help navigate the rocky channels of organizational change.

My suggestion to this manager was to learn from social networks.  In business communities like LinkedIn, people gain prestige and influence by demonstrating their knowledge. The more questions they answer and the more contacts they facilitate the greater their prestige.  In social networks, this process is organic and motivated by personal ambition.  Inside the four walls of a company, it needs some help.

As companies put internal knowledge networks into place, they need to take some cues from successful social media ventures.

  • Voting mechanisms should be applied to let people rate the value of advice they receive from their colleagues.
  • Those who actively share should be rewarded with financial incentives or just publicity in the company’s internal communications.
  • Top executives should regularly celebrate the generosity of employees who share expertise.
  • Top management should commit to insulating these people from layoffs and cutbacks.

Sharing expertise should enhance a person’s reputation and job security. Management needs to make the process a reward and not a risk.