It used to be that in order to be seen as an influencer or to be really taken seriously in your niche or genre, you had to be on someone’s blogroll.  Being added to a blogroll gave you some credibility and it also helped you get read by others in your group.  You got to be one of the cool kids if you were recognized on a blogroll.  The goal was to get listed on a blog roll by someone with lots of readers as well.  It also helped you get read by others, or it helped your voice get heard. Being on a blogroll was the gold standard.

Now with the likes of Twitter we get more of a situation of more noise less signal.  It is difficult to be heard. 25 Million people all hoping their 140 characters get in front of someone to read.  You may have the best ever 140 characters in the history of the world, but to broadcast it to Twitter is to cast it into the sea of information hoping to find a home. I liken it to casting an SOS note in a bottle into the ocean and hoping someone finds it.  Chances are it may never get read by the person that matters.  Twitter can be the same way.  It seems that many online marketing types believe this a great way now to broadcast their message.  They think a message in a bottle is a good way to broadcast.  Cast a net big enough and sooner or later someone may hear what you have to say.  This is not the best case scenario unless you get on someone’s list or in a group.  Instead of blogrolls, we now can put our Twitter friends or followers into groups.  I use the popular application Tweetdeck, and I have many groups of my followers distilled into readable tweets.  I have my social media colleagues and I have technology people and parenting bloggers and no, even though I joke about it quite a bit I do not have a "Hottie" Twitter group. This is how I track what is being sent via Twitter by those I want to listen to and want to hear. I want to hear all 250 Million people out there but I have yet to figure that out sans some special paid for application.

This is how I read most of the important stuff on Twitter.  I go through a specific group and see what they are talking about and what they have to say.  It may be an hour after the fact when I re-tweet something or I comment or take notice, and the reason is, I don’t have time to scan the river of noise going by at 10,000 people a minute. In the instance I am talking about you get added to my group if you provide me good thoughts or value. I don’t want to miss your tweet.  The only thing is, my groups are not public.  I need to find something that allows me to show you my groups.  I need a public app that shows my Twitter groups, my blogroll of twitter friends. I need to develop this as a widget for blogs or web sites.  You can get on my group in in my Twoops (URL taken I checked)?  Anyone? 

Photo via Mykl Roventine

Tags: Twitter, Blogrolls, Web Apps, River of News, Noise vs. Signal

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Just reading over at Profy and Svetlana Gladkova asking the question, "Twitter is a Popular Marketing Tool?".  The analysis is interesting on Svetlana’s piece and I think you should read it.  The thing that caught my eye was less about the written words and more about the graphic she had in the post.

The thing that made me note this graph was the far right three forms of online tools being used, blogs, podcasts and Twitter.  I preach of course that these are the "new media" and that companies should be embracing them, but it is nowhere near the use of direct mail.  I was amazed at the lopsided view of this. Twitter is the new media darling and blogs are making somewhat of a comeback since breaking on the scene at the beginning of the century.  I am curious how the study was conducted and as I understand it it was conducted by WebTrends.  The study appears to address only the European companies but I think that the results can be indicative of what is happening here as well.  As the economy keeps dipping and we go back to the "what works" idea of marketing, I see the testing of social media to be take a backseat to the more measurable results of the past.

Tags: New Media, Twitter, Twitter Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

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The other night I had a special and impromptu radio show talking about social media and what has become known as the  the Motrin video debacle.

During the discussion and roundtable of experts,  we talked about the idea that Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of Motrin, and more specifically, McNeil Consumer Healthcare the company that is heading up any campaigns, was not listening and did not respond to the situation in a quick manner.  That perhaps they had an opportunity to jump on this before it got to the heights it did and they could have done something more.  The response, and apology and the aftermath is a different post altogether.

In that discussion one of my guests, Jessica Gottlieb, mentioned that the company is big enough to have a team dedicated to listening to what is being said about them online.  I debated that this was not the reality of the situation. Even the largest of companies have no idea what is being said on a regular basis and they in fact have nothing in place to help them with this idea.  This also made me think of a scene from one of my favorite movies:

President: We didn’t see this thing coming?

 
Dan: Well, our object collision budget’s a million dollars. That allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg’n your pardon sir, but it’s a big-ass sky. ~ Armageddon (1998/I)

The line in the movie refers to the fact that a big asteroid the size of Texas was about to hit the earth.  The President of the United States wanted to know why we were surprised by this fact.

I thought about the Motrin incident with the Mommy Bloggers and the Internet in the same fashion.  Turns out the YouTube Video referred to was released to the website in September and didn’t really get known until a month later.  They were completely caught unaware.  The video went viral over a weekend, and I am sure that the folks that are in charge of the campaign were all home for their weekend off and had no idea what was coming.  The Internet doesn’t take weekends off. Monday morning, I can picture the CEO standing in a boardroom with the same conversation as above.  The department head responding the same way, “we are sorry but we don’t spend much time or money on this kind of thing.”

I recently attended,  as a representative of the IBNMA,  the Blogwell event put on by the Blog Council in San Jose a few weeks ago and I was introduced to this very idea by Debbie Curtis-Magley, at United Parcel Service.  Debbie is the whole department for their social media campaign as it relates to their online management or brand reputation management and quipped about having difficulty tracking the entire Internet, and knowing that their are quite a few people writing online about “sit-ups” and “chin-ups.”  She has her work cut out for her because like above, “it’s a big ass Internet”.

There are quite a few companies out their that do help companies with their online brand and reputation management and they have proprietary applications that they use to accomplish their task.  They specialize in making sure you are alerted to what is being said about you, your company, or about that crazy YouTube video you put up on your website that set off a wildfire response in the blogosphere.  They can also be there when something good happens.  Normally however, and most unfortunately, the good stuff does not get quite the play as the bad stuff.  What is being said about you and your company?  Are you listening?  It is after all a very big ass Internet.

I would challenge the people I mentioned above to leave a comment if you are monitoring the Internet.  Did you read this post or see it come across your screen?  Debbie, did you pick it up?  Jessica, can you leave a comment here in more than a day or two? How about my own folks at the IBNMA?

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I can remember the first time I had my name appear in the phone book after I purchased my first home.  Like Steve Martin in the movie “The Jerk”, I danced around and shouted, “I’m somebody now”.  Back then of course, I think computers were something in sci-fi movies, and the Internet had not yet been thought about.  But I can still see that brand new version of the white pages all clean and crisp with my name right there alongside the other 30 people that shared my name.

I was recently watching television when the new Dex advertisement came on and I had a trip down memory lane.  I am still amazed that anyone would be spending much time looking at a Yellow page book in the modern era of finding everything through search.  I think the last time I used a yellow pages directory it was for a booster seat for the kids to reach the table better. 

Then I saw a related article recently put out by eMarketer.com.  The article states that online local advertising will reach 2.9 billion in 2007, which is only 13.4% of the total online advertising market.  The study and article are an interesting look at local advertising.  It made me wonder about the dollars being spent on traditional offline products such as the yellow pages.  I also wondered whether what they were being told about the results they would get as business owners and placing the ads.

I can remember the game back in the day of Yellow page advertising, companies wanted to somehow be listed first in their niche.  If they had a plumbing business, they would call it AAA Plumbing, because then they would be listed as the first alphabetical result listing in the book.  We are not that far off now with the way companies are clamoring for that all important number 1 placement in search results.  Now we are doing it with SEO and other tactics.  The ideal is still the same and that is to be that first listed business under plumbing.  Even though advertising is drastically changing since the old days, in some respects it stays the same.

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For some time, I have been wondering about all of the data that is exchanged on the Internet between individuals and companies and what is being done with that data, and where it is being stored and what it is being used for and who has access to it.  At the risk of sounding somewhat like a conspiracy theorist, I have a nagging feeling that somehow we are in for a rude awakening in this country as it relates to our privacy and our anonymity in our life.

This thought surfaced again as a result of a video by Loren Feldman and his friend Michelle’s take on the use of Facebook.  I’ll let you judge her reaction, but it seems that she represents a normal adopter of a social network.  I say normal because of the issues of the technical elite and the early adopters that are all but normal with new applications.  She innocently typed in her email address and password and suddenly realized that the application had just accessed all of public, private, known and unknown contacts that she has ever sent an email to with that email address.  Yes, she was a little taken aback by that, and she should be.

What are these companies doing with every keystroke and each of the addresses that pop up in a window of every adopter of their application.  Am I to think that their promise of “we won’t tell, cross our heart and hope to die” is supposed to make me not question what exactly is being done with that data?  Michelle is just but one user, now think of the access to all of the users in Facebook and the data becomes a staggering look into the lives of all of us.

Facebook tells me who is talking out there, and what they are saying, who is a friend I have in common with another friend, and it knows the opinions of those friends, and whether I agree with them.  It can access my credit cards when I buy a $1 gif image of a ice cream cone I send to a friend.  I am afraid to say that Facebook knows more about me than my own mother.  Think of the data acquired now in the wrong hands…”Conspiracy Theory”, not really, but I’m sure we’ll see a Crichton book and movie deal about the idea and what can happen.

UPDATE:  I couldn’t find this video in my original post but was able to find it later.  Big Brother can be very scary.

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At least in our company, we get most of our client’s through Google searches done by companies looking for a blogging consultant or looking to hire a blogger for their company.  I ran through our client list to see the number of companies that have contacted us to provide a professional blogger or to consult them on a social media campaign.  One of the things that struck me was that a large number of them that had reached us or found us as a result of a Google search.

The conversation that prompted me to look at this in this light was a phone call from a prospective client.  We had discussed our services and he was happy with our business model and thought that we would probably do business in the future.  He then told that he had a difficult time finding a service such as ours, but eventually had found it through search.  He explained the roundabout way he happened upon our site, and I recognized a common theme to his search.  Everyone of the other clients had a similar story.

As a small business without a corps of sale people and without a huge marketing budget and a advertising team providing our message, we rely solely upon word of mouth, and being findable.  I preach the same to each of our clients.  In order for your business to be successful, it has to be findable.  It’s nice to see the sermon actually works for me as well.

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One of our clients have a great communication tool in their hands with a contact page on their blog.  Many people that have purchased their product can come and get information about the products they sell and the industry news and information about the company.  In this particular case, a consumer had a problem with their product after purchase.  They found the blog on the company website or through a search engine, and used the contact page on the blog.  They could have also used the comment section of the blog as well, but chose to use the contact form.  They explained their problem in the contact page and the blogger was able to immediately help them connect with the proper person to correct their problem or to allow an exchange of the product if necessary.  This all seems very common in many cases, but it also provides a great opportunity to show other consumers that you are on top of customer concerns and work hard to resolve their problems if needed. This scenario offered a chance to post an article about the product problem, the reporting of the problem, and any resolution that has occurred as a result.  This allows other customers to find perhaps the same problem and use the same process for resolution.  A blog can also serve as a great customer service tool, and the resulting service can be used for some very important blog fodder.

[photo by Customers Rock]

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Transparency always comes at a price.  Normally the price is honesty and integrity, but sometimes it can come in the form of justice and wrath.  While following along with Twitter today, Anil Dash of Six Apart provided a link to a post by Adam Kuban at the Serious Eats blog that comments on an article in the Wall Street Journal by David Kesmodel and John R. Wilke about comments in forums by “Rahobed”. Now that all the attribution is out of the way let’s discuss the story.

It seems that John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, has been out in the web acting as the pseudonymous Rahobed, a backward spelling of his wife’s name Deborah, and posting in forums and other places about Whole Foods and its competitor Wild Oats.  I am always amazed at what can be found by using some backend tools to uncover the identity of commenters on blogs and those in forums.  This seems to be the gist of his comments:

“Would Whole Foods buy OATS?” Rahodeb asked, using Wild Oats’ stock symbol. “Almost surely not at current prices. What would they gain? OATS locations are too small.” Rahodeb speculated that Wild Oats eventually would be sold after sliding into bankruptcy or when its stock fell below $5. A month later, Rahodeb wrote that Wild Oats management “clearly doesn’t know what it is doing …. OATS has no value and no future.”

Should he have used his own name? Perhaps commenting and conversing in forums was not the best way to achieve the conversation about his industry.  I might suggest that instead of acting as a sock puppet and making comments and disparaging statements about rivals in forums, it may have been better for Mr. Mackey to have started a blog to discuss his thoughts on the industry, about his competitors or what he thought about his own haircut.

Yes, it is a fine line when dealing as a public company where any misstated item could come back to haunt a company.  Statements made to manipulate stock prices is obviously illegal, and of course any slanderous comments or libelous articles still come with criminal penalties as well as civil.  This can all be a difficult path, but a CEO of a corporation should not be out there on the Web doing this type of activity.  For the obvious reason of the possibility of getting caught.  The results now are for worse than if he had just started the John Mackey blog.

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Thought the very familiar three-column layout that typifies was only for blogs or bloggy things?  Think again, the “blog style layout” is excellent for any information-rich website, just ask AOL News:

The new design lays out news in an blog-like fashion, with excerpts of all the day’s main stories laid out chronologically from top to bottom. Source: AOL launches new blog-like news site – Download Squad

I talked about one facet of the Download Squad’s point, which is, does the blog-style layout work, on my own blog, here I’m going to look at another facet; using blog templates for “general” websites.

As blog engines, Wordpress especially, have matured, they are becoming very real options for companies to run their whole web presence on top of.  Of course a blog engine tends to use a blog template, not just the technology of templates, but the whole blog-style.  Columns, excerpts, sidebars.  All of these features are what we recognize blogs as having, but think about how you can use these things on your own site.  Highlight a new promotion on a sidebar.  Have a quote displayed from an asides category.  Powerful and easier to implement than even a couple of years ago.

Think you are limited in design options?  Think again.  There are thousands of free templates available for Wordpress alone.  Take one of those templates, modify it to suit your tastes, needs, even colour scheme, and viola! You have an amazing, easy to read, powerful website.

Again, if you don’t believe me, ask AOL.

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A couple of days ago, Tris wrote a blog post for the b5Media blog he writes for at Pimp Your Work, and the post made it to page 1 of Digg.  In that post he did a link to this site as an example of how to  do an email signature.  As a result, the all the people at Digg also came to this site following the link.  The mention caused us to get approximately 100 people an hour visiting the blog.

I followed along with the spike in traffic and looked a little at where the people that were coming to the site were coming from and looking at patterns.  I checked the analytics, and was wondering if this increased our subscribers or perhaps whether it made for more readers that would return. 

Finally, I looked over at the My Blog Log widget in our sidebar and it dawned on me that the visitors it showed had not changed for most of the day.  Those of you that know how that widget works, when you visit a site with the widget installed, and you are also a member of the My Blog Log community, your avatar shows in the widget.  I explain this because with hundreds of new visitors that day, none of them were members of My Blog Log.  This meant that the people at Digg (what we call the Digg Nation) are not also members of the My Blog Log Community.

This makes me wonder if people go with one social network and stay with that network, not also belonging to other groups.  Do people go with Facebook and not also go with MySpace?  If you use one tool do you not always use a competitor tool?  One thing for sure, with all of those visitors, if they had been My Blog Log members, that widget would have been smoking.

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Tris and I had a great time talking about how a business or individuals can get into blogging. We talk about the very basics and things to think about and tips on how to get your company up and blogging.

You can go and listen to the show!

Tags: Blog Marketing, Bloggers For Hire, Blogging 101, Blogs, Hiring Bloggers, Jim Turner, Mediasphere Radio, One By One Media, Professional Bloggers, Social Media, Social Media Marketing, Tris Hussey

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After watching the story unfold about the blog post that appeared on Digg that was dugg over 15,000 times and appeared on page one of Digg.  The Digg Effect as it has become known is a phrase given when this phenomena occurs.  Many times if a story becomes popular enough it will appear on page 1 of Digg and the result is traffic soaring to the point of bringing most servers to their knees and crashing many sites.  This Digg Effect has taken on new meaning for me since seeing the resulting revolution that unfolded.

For me, the "New Digg Effect" is the power of social networks and communities.  This can be used for good or for bad actually.  In my opinion, posting something on a site that breaks the law or goes against a terms of service rules can be a very bad thing.  Mob rule takes over in this new action.  This is not necessarily unique in the instance of Digg, but its popularity was shown and the number of people that can influence an outcome was apparent here.  As I read a comment by Paul Montgomery at Tech Crunch it came clear to me that this could be a New Digg Effect:

I agree with the users on this one. They win. I just wish they could turn their power on some issue that actually mattered. (emphasis added)

That made me think of the power that social networks and communities could wield in other areas. The viral effect of this new medium.  It made me think of things like the Amber Alert System, and then I began to think of the power a mob could have on a Presidential election in online communities.  I’m not sure if the New Digg Effect has me running scared at this point or in awe how quickly something can travel from shore to shore and continent to continent when a group wants something accomplished.   Social Media and the online communities carry a new torch at this point.  Like Paul Montgomery said, let’s use this New Digg Effect for something that really matters.

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As I was watching live streaming via the Ustream.tv site of Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo and Jeremiah Owyang, I saw a pattern of responses to the question, "Do you have a business card?"  Many of the responses were the same, "just Google my name and you will find me."  I heard this not only from the above named, but also in the background from people that were being interviewed or people introducing themselves. 

A quick look at the names Googled indeed showed that "Chris" was the number one search result for Chris Pirillo, "Robert" showed that he too was the number one search result, and finally "Jeremiah" was not number one but was ranked on the first page of results.

How is this possible?  It is a matter of the power of SEO and the power of how search works.  The power of blogging has made them Google celebrities.  These are not uncommon names, and in fact are pretty benign as I’m sure each of you know a Chris or a Robert.  I myself checked my own name "Jim" and of course my campaign to be first on Google came up very short.  Then I Googled my full name "Jim Turner", and lo and behold, I’m on page one here at One By One Media.  I have not been blogging nearly as long as the bloggers I name above, but I’m well on my way to capturing the new way of passing out business cards.  How about you?  Do you rank high in your search engine of choice?

Tags: Ustream.tv, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Jeremiah Owyang, Business Cards, Google, Search Engines, Findability,  One By One Media

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As Tris and I were chatting about business, he suddenly went silent and now I know why.  He was busy typing up something he heard on stage at the Web 2.0 Expo.  He writes up on the Blog World Expo Blog:

John Battelle talking to Eric Schmidt of Google (Eric Schmidt in Conversation with John Battelle) has just announced that Google is adding a presentation tool to Docs and Spreadsheets.  At this point the timeframe is next month, I believe.

It is this reason that some people love the idea of "Live Blogging" from conferences.  This will probably makes it way to the MSM in a week or two, but we get to hear it first.  Great job Tris and keep up the live reporting.

Tags: Web2.0Expo, W2E, Blog World Expo, BWE, John Battelle, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Live Blogging, MSM, Tris Hussey

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I was on a conference call with Eric Rice last night and reading feeds, and listening to Chris Pirillo’s live streaming and refreshing my Twitter page.  As you can tell, my media consumption is evolving into something that would make Orwell happy about “Big Brother”.  I have given “multitasking” a new definition, and my ADD has been fed like that flower in Little Shop Of Horrors.

Earlier in the day, I was meeting with my bookkeeper to go over the books for the last month and preparing for the next month, and I was listening to Jeremiah Owyang’s live feed through Ustream.tv, chatting with Robert Scoble, Jeremiah and others on the IRC chatroom under the stream, while talking on the phone with my mother, reading RSS feeds, chatting via Skype with my partner Tris about client issues, and emailing with my accountant as to how I would have to drive an hour North to sign my business tax return to get it on the mail.  The television I just had to have when we bought our new home, was sitting silent and cold in the other room.  I had a new mistress now and had traded her in for a new model.  Again, to some in my industry, this is another day at the office, yet for others, this is the equivalent of information overload that would cause a stroke in most normal humans.

My consumption of the media is changing as fast as the technology that drives it.  I am watching, reading, hearing, and providing news in ways that 10 years ago that would have never crossed my mind.  I had watched a white Bronco on 3 different channels in an airport, had watched Bernie Shaw describe the events that unfolded in the Gulf War, and other media hyped news events, but nothing like this.  I wonder as I sit and gather information about the shootings at Virginia Tech, how I will see the news in another 10 years.  The evolution of my media consumption might even have a new look in 6 months.

Tags: Eric Rice, RSS, Chris Pirillo, Twitter, George Orwell, ADD, Jeremiah Owyang, Ustream.tv, Robert Scoble, IRC, Skype, television, Voip, Chat, MSM, Media

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