So you can find out that the title of your blog doubles as the title of a bad made for TV drama from 1994.
Also .. why is the pic of this video so faded?
« September 2007 | Main | November 2007 »
Posts from October 2007
Are you going to the CMA's Digital Marketing Conference this week?
Are you going to the CMA's Digital Marketing Conference this Thursday and Friday? If so, I'll be there. I'm leading the roundtable discussion on Blogs as well as soaking up wisdom from some of the great folks they have speaking. I'm really interested in what Dr. Anita Sands, VP Innovation from RBC has to say. And I'm hoping Mark Hurst can give me some tips on whipping my inbox into shape.
Folks from Edelman, Heavy.com and Nettwerk are going to be there as well. Lots of good stuff it looks like.
If you're going and you read MNIK or One Degree, please find me and introduce yourself. We'll also have a roving reporter from One Degree, Alexa Clark, on site as well. Would love your feedback on how we're doing as well as on what you'd like to see in the future.
And since this is my personal blog, I can complain about this .. I am super excited to see Dr. Sands, Tara O'Doherty, Deborah Hall and Christy Scott on the speaking roster. But out of 29 speakers, there are only 5 women - these four and myself. I've voiced my opinion on the CMA's lineups before. It's deplorable (though they are not alone). I know conferences are tough to plan; I know that speakers are hard to get. That doesn't mean the effort doesn't need to be made. And again, I am not advocating "equal representation" over quality. I don't want to hear a poor speaker just because she's a woman. But again, I refuse to believe that there are not more interesting, strategic, engaging and insightful women out there than are typically represented at conferences like these.
So, here's my challenge to you: if this is something you're concerned about, let the CMA know. BUT, don't just complain, VOLUNTEER. Contact the CMA and tell them you'll help out. I've publicly stated that I would volunteer to help plan this conference. I haven't yet been taken up on the offer. But I hope one day that I will. And if you volunteer, I hope you will too.
Image Credit : Andrew Love
Last-minute halloween costumes, good SEM writing and not pissing off social networks.
A project we completed recently at Reinvent! got me thinking about the importance of good content as well as the nature of social media and it's short term vs long term effectiveness.
The project was the creation of a number of Squidoo lenses for a Halloween costume e-tailer. They wanted to complement their traditional SEO and SEM initiatives with content that was a little more engaging and broader in its appeal. We created eight Squidoo lenses - a master lens with seven lenses that were focused on themes. The themes and the subsequent modules in each lens were based on keyword research as well as Costumes Inc's expertise in the area. The lenses are:
- Master Lens: Amazing Costumes for Halloween
- Halloween Costumes for Girls
- Halloween Costumes for Boys
- Sexy Costumes
- Traditional Costumes
- Humorous Costumes
- Movie-related Costumes
- Costume Accessories
The lenses were all written to tell a story - to fire the imagination of people looking for Halloween costumes. It was really interesting to listen and learn from our client - they've been in the business a long time and really have a handle on the different types of people who shop for costumes.
We also got to take a little bit of liberty with the content. It's not the same writing for Halloween costumes as, say, for an oil and gas company. These lenses were really fun to write and stretched our imaginations. We had three different copy writers on them (we turned these around in 5 days) but managed to get the same type of tone for the audience (the lenses about kids costumes were a little more tame than those for adult or movie costumes). Some examples:
Mean Streets Costumes
The Tagliarelli Family are out to get you but Roberta's dragging you to the speakeasy for the third night in a row. It's like the broad doesn't understand your work. Or maybe she just can't wait to show off the cool threads of your Gangster costume to the other molls. Better tuck a tommy gun under your jacket, just in case you need to mix it up.
Tony's acting all shifty again. Why doesn't he ever want to go to the speakeasy? Maybe it's time to ditch that gangster and hook up with one of those cute Tagliarellis. Better put the finishing touches on my sexy Gangster's Moll costume before hitting the town. Where's my cigarette holder?
Spartan and Persian Costumes from the movie 300
When you're battling an invading army of a million Persians, you don't want restrictive clothing. Same goes for Halloween ... when you're fighting your way through the throng, you don't want a lot of belts and buckles getting in the way. This Deluxe Spartan Costume from the movie 300 is loose, doesn't chafe and puts fear in the heart of your enemies - Batman wouldn't dare to take the last candied apple!
Also worth a read: Old-Time Vampire Chastises the Younger Generation and Darth Vader Costumes, for you and your pet!
So, you can see we had a lot of fun ... and were able to bring some additional fun to the story and to the experience of shopping. When we were finalizing project details, Costumes Inc. showed us some examples of some "keyword rich" writing that they had been done for them in the past. The examples were stuffed full of keywords, but were generally uninteresting and practically unreadable by humans.
This is one the pressures that e-retailers face and why I think every e-retailer needs either a blog or some sort of other mechanism for telling a story - search engine algorithms are quite sophisticated - and stuffing your copy full of keywords isn't the answer. Burgeoning SEM writers need to understand this too. While understanding how humans search is important (keyword research), understanding how humans read and subsequently shop is important as well.
Don't Piss off Your Community
An additional component to this project was promotion. And this is where a marketer has to tread lightly, particularly vis a vis marketing to social networks. This was the first short-term step in a longer-term online strategy. And the question I struggled with is how to harness the power of social networks for short-term awareness (and frankly conversion) gains without damaging any long-term credibility of the client.
We started with social networks that were link-based (like del.icio.us and stumbleupon) and where people participated in them to learn about new content. And we carefully placed a few posts in relevant social networks that we were already part of (for example, a discussion thread in a parenting forum on fun group costumes for kids). This is a controversial practice, I think, but the benefit was that either myself or other members of Team Reinvent! were already part of these networks. So we were trusted and not perceived as spammers. This is important for any marketer who hopes to create WOM - participate in social networks, even before you have something to sell.
So, if you're looking for a last-minute Halloween costume, check out Costume Inc's lenses. Or, if you want to share thoughts on using social networks for short-term marketing gains, I'm quite interested in discussing it/sharing ideas. I struggle with balancing the needs of my client with the ecosystems of communities they would like to talk to. And I'm always looking for good ideas on how to bring the two together.
This is what is wrong with agencies.
This is screenshot of a job ad in Marketing Magazine's daily newsletter.
Nothing about creating experiences that your clients' customers value.
Nothing about exceptional customer service.
Nothing about contributing to building a profitable business.
Nothing about anything that matters to a client.
At best, this sets up an untenable expectation for staff who are ultimately responsible for servicing your clients and your clients' customers.
At worst, this further widens the gap between client and agency relations. If I were a client and saw this ad, I would be outraged at the priorities and values espoused here. Yes, awards have their place and we all want to produce exceptional creative. But I would rather have my staff and my business focused on the priorities and values of my clients.
Not chasing rainbows.
Instantiation, immersion and the ephemeral. Or, what's next for blogging?
[Warning .. this one's a bit personal and a little curmudgeonly. And I quote a verse from the New Testament. Maybe read it with a nice Scotch.]
For a variety of reasons ... wedding planning, death in the family, overwork, general irritation about the echo chamber of marketing blogs and podcasts, dearth of women acknowledged by my industry as speakers/authors/legends/pioneers .... I've become incredibly disillusioned and generally unexcited about blogging. I feel like we're all just saying the same thing over and over and over and over and over.
Mainly to hear ourselves talk.
And to see if the next coolest kid up the chain will think what we said is cool and link to us.
But what if there was no linking?
Nick Wilson (known as 57Miles in Second Life and one of the most interesting thinkers and contributors to virtual worlds that I've read - he's the founder of metaversed and one of the co-founders of metanomics - so smart!!) just started a "personal musings" blog (for lack of a better term). And this is what his about page says ...
This blog is an experiment. It has no navigation, and you'll only ever see one post at a time. When a new post is published, the old one disappears, and unless it's been linked to from somewhere else, for all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist any more.
I'd like to think that this blog acknowledges the throw away media that many blogs really are. Today's thoughts, tomorrows fish wrapper. Or that it's a super clever way of getting noticed, and having people link to posts. After all, if you don't link to them, or bookmark them in someway, they're lost. Forever. It's not though. Not really. It's just an attempt at doing something very, very simple, and reflecting that simplicity in the design.
The mainpage of 57miles.com is so refreshing. One post. No navigation, no clutter, no reciprocal linking, no widgets. Just a few thoughts.
Now Nick is poking a little fun at himself ... and may be encouraging the linking by taking this tact (there's more insight in the first post and in the comments on that post) ... but I still found this idea to be so startling that it bumped me out of my anti-blogging funk, even if just for a moment.
What if we weren't the cumulation of our thoughts? What if my archive list wasn't proudly displayed on every page? What if posts didn't have ridiculous number of technoratic tags? What if we didn't try to game search engines and ego feeds and social bookmarking sites?
What if each of us was only represented by the thought that is NOW uppermost in our minds. And our digital presences were ephemeral. And our cumulated ideas didn't hinder our future thinking. And blogging wasn't destiny.
I know we say we link so that we can have conversations - so we can build this interconnected web of ideas. But are we really doing it to increase our technorati ranking?
I'd like to think that we're on the verge of something, and I think this explains my interest in virtual worlds. We're not wired for this 2D space. We're hardwired for 3D (John Lester, aka Pathfinder Linden, says so. And he has a background in neuro-psychology!!). And these attempts to have rich conversations within 2D constraints are what Paul described in I Corinthians 13 ... "Now I see through a glass darkly, but then I will see face to face. Now I know only in part, then I will know fully."
Virtual worlds give us so much more possibility for knowing than any blog. Because as 3D representations ... we can instantiate ourselves. We have gesture and language and nuance. We have genuine embodied interaction. The perceptual immersion evoked by a 3D space invites an emotional immersion - more complete and complex than any blog or podcast.
I don't know exactly what all this means ... but we are changing. And the next generation even more so. They will think it quaint that I use a keyboard to type my thoughts into a linear online journal that is as flat as a billboard in meat-space.
I'd like us to dream bigger. Really give our imaginations a good workout. The nature of connection is changing. The nature of conversation is changing. We need to be ready.
Photo Credits: PhotoCatcher and Coxee
Amazon moves to left hand navigation ...
I just went to Amazon.com and was STUNNED!
Amazon.com has shifted to the left. This is my homepage now:
And this is the image from an "About our Redesign" page they have (which I always recommend for sites undergoing such a radical change).
Wow .. Amazon.com has been like the LAST hold-out on tabbed browsing. I wonder how long the internal debate was about the switch. Also, I tried the amazon.ca site - still tabbed browsing, but their "about" page indicates that they are still in testing phase - so maybe it's an occasional thing? Or perhaps not rolled out to international sites yet.
In any case, pretty wild.
Popular Posts
- How To Engage Employees in Your Social Media Activities
- The Anatomy of a Great PR Email Pitch
- To Live Tweet or Not to Live Tweet
- Speaking the True FAQs Through Social Media
- Social (Media) Mores - How Should We Behave?
- Placing YOUR stake in the muddy waters of blogger relations
- 9 easy social media steps to get beyond fear & laziness in marketing!
- Job hunting sites for marketing and tech in Canada
- Is it time to send your website to summer school?
- Reminder to my fellow marketers: you leave digital footprints!
- Instantiation, immersion and the ephemeral. Or, what's next for blogging?
Smaller Bites
- These are some of the images, videos & quotes that resonate with me, but I don't feel like writing a full post about. So I publish them on my tumblr. And there is a feed for these if you're keen ...