TellTail Signs

Why didn't I think of that?

My cousin sent me this today.  Seems Bud Light will be paying money to promote the USA Rock Paper Scissors League.

With better pacing than tic-tac-toe, but with less chance for serious injury than thumb-wrestling, Bud Light obviously saw the enormous potential of the USARPS, helping to fund a tournament beginning this month in bars across the country. In April, 250 finalists will be flown to Las Vegas to compete for the $50,000 grand prize at The House of Blues in the Mandalay Bay Hotel.

This is a great example of compelling content. Sure, it's completely worthless content, and only marginally related to the consumption of beer (except for the fact that drunk people are perhaps more likely to take this event seriously). But it's going to get people thinking about Bud Light.  Now, will this sell more beer? Probably.  Will it sell more Bud Light?  Who knows?  But hey, it's only going to cost Anheuser-Busch a pittance for a ton of buzz.

Incidentally, rock-paper-scissors is an important part of the annual bottle-rocket-catching contest between me and my cousin. One year, we had something like 8 ties before we settled "home-field advantage." Perhaps, someday, the story of that epic struggle will be told in more detail, in the USARPSL Hall of Fame.  One can only hope.

NonProfit Blogging from a NonProfit Blogger

Whitney Smith of Girls for a Change has a nice summary of how blogging is helpful and important for nonprofit organizations.  Go read the whole thing, but here are a couple of blog uses that stand out for me:

• A live tool that we can use as a way to distribute information about
  our organization and issues affecting our constituents widely.
• An innovative way to engage our primary focus, young women, in using
  technology and creating systems of communication for them to widen
  their network globally.
• Enhancing our current volunteer recruitment and donor cultivation tools
  by using the blog as an ongoing source of information about issues
  affecting girls and about social change.
• A way to get our organization in front of more people for fewer dollars
  than we could ever do with our more traditional marketing efforts, our
  website or enewsletter.

I responded to Whitney's summary here, so rather than create another post, I'll just paste in part my gut response to what she wrote:

There are so many reasons for nonprofits to blog that it's hard to boil them down to a few, but you've done a great job.  The key to all of them -- the nugget of information I think all nonprofits should take away from your post -- is that a blog is about connecting very intimately with the unique audience you're trying to reach.  It's so much more than a traditional website, which functions largely as a "billboard" for information.  A blog is a place where you can create a community that centers on exactly the issues you want to discuss, with the people you want to have a discussion with. It's like throwing a big dinner party where all the people are interested in exactly the same conversation as you!

Hat tip to Beth's Blog for pointing me to this.  Great stuff, Beth!

Conversation vs. Content Quality

Yeah, I know.  We're all hung up lately on the value of conversation. 

"The blogosphere engages consumers in conversation!" we like to exclaim. (My colleagues have patiently asked that I stop exclaiming this very thing when we're at restaurants, because it draws unwanted attention.)

But is the value of the blogosphere really in its conversation? Well, yes and no.  Yes, the blogosphere empowers a global conversation between consumers and producers and onlookers, all of whom can stumble on information they never would have seen 2 years ago -- and who can then add their own voice, at their own blog, in their own style, reaching their own set of friends. So I'll go along with that.  The "conversation" of blogs is invaluable.  It's stupendous.  I'm excited about it, to the point that I randomly drop the word "conversation" into my conversations, rather like Dan Rather's short-lived use of the word "courage."

On the other hand, this is really about more than that. Because not all conversation is created equal. Dare we forget sitting at the dinner table at our grandparents' house while the grown-ups talked about who-knows-what? It was slow.  It was long.  It was dreadful.  It was a bore.  The conversation was not compelling to us.

At WOMBAT, there's talk of providing "value" to customers, and earning trust.  All well and good, but what's value?  Value, in my opinion, is about providing compelling content for consumers.  It's got to be something interesting, because conversation for conversation's sake won't go anywhere.  Instead, again, it all goes back to content. 

At a party, if you walk into a big crowd of people, you can't get a word in edgewise -- unless you have something interesting to say.  It's the ability to say something interesting that earns a place in the conversation, and that's where the quality of content comes in.  Far too many people are assuming that all content is going to be treated equally in this new environment, when that's not the case.

WOMBAT: Provide Value, Earn Trust

The Word of Mouth Basic Training Conference is going on in Orlando. It's all about using consumers to tell the story of your product to other consumers. 

Consumers care more about what other consumers think that they do about advertising. That is not new. What is new is that via the internet, one customer can reach similar numbers of other consumers with a message that carries enormously more weight than the advertising message. . .

Whats's the moral of the story for businesses and marketers: Be honest about your products and services; provide value and earn trust so that what you promise to consumers in your message matches the product or service. Don Peppers posed the question, if earning trust was the next big thing for marketers. If it's not, it should be. The consumer is in control. (Emphasis mine.)

Of course the next big question is, how do you provide value?  And is any old blogger able to do that?  Hmmmm..... more thoughts on that later.

Be Approachable. Just Don't Ask for a Link.

Not to pile on or anything, but does anyone find delicious (not del.icio.us) irony in the fact that Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion today has a post called "Why Being Approachable Is Good for Business," just a few days after telling people not to bother emailing him asking for a link?

I'm sure Mr. Rubel gets a lot of emails, so I don't really blame him.  But a lot of folks in the blogosphere took his comments as something less than "approachable."

Return on Investment

It's the age-old question: what's the return on investment (for blogging)? Steve Newson posts some thoughts on ROI in the blogosphere, along with a real-world example. Go read his post. It's worth your time.

Will "Mainstream PR" Be Replaced?

Tom Foremski, at Silicon Valley Watcher, poses some really interesting questions about the way traditional PR agencies are tackling the interactive Web. In a nutshell, Foremski says they're not.

With all the disruption that is going on in the mainstream media industry, where is the disruption in the mainstream public relations industry? PR companies and corporate communications teams are still going about their business in the same way, and seem to be thriving.

Foremski's writes that the role of traditional PR firms will shrink as the importance of reaching mainstream media outlets shrinks. In other words, if it's no longer necessary to get exposure on all the TV networks--because blogs are touching customers directly--there's less need to hire a traditional PR agency. So far, Foremski says companies are still trying to reach mainstream media, and thus, are still using PR firms to get those mentions. Eventually, he theorizes that companies will move away from that, leaving PR firms high and dry.

I'm with Foremski in this sense: a lot of PR folks just don't seem to "get it" yet. I attended a panel discussion with about 250 PR people in St. Louis recently, all about blogs, podcasts, wikis and other interactive Web tools. After sitting through some pretty good stuff about how the audience now controls the message, some people were asking questions like, "But how do we keep control of our message?" There's just a complete disconnect.

Have PR firms been trained for so long in "message control" that they're unable to see a different way of doing things? If so, they're in trouble. The PR people who understand that this is not about "message control" anymore are a step ahead, and they'll be the leaders in "new" PR.

Thanks, Amy Gahran.

iTunes = Ratings

Where's the money in blogging and podcasting? Don't look now, but NBC and ABC have found a mess of it.  Or they will, once their higher ratings are converted into new ad revenue on their TV networks.  Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion reports that the two networks got a ratings boost for the shows they sell on iTunes. TV Week has more details:

NBC's "The Office" delivered a 5.1-its highest ratings ever-last
Thursday among adults 18 to 49, a bump the network credits in large
part to the show's popularity as an iPod download.

In fact, the series is NBC's top-performing video podcast available on Apple's iTunes, where it has been available since Dec. 6.

This is not to say that video podcasts are the savior of traditional network TV. If the networks approach iTunes as merely another way to boost their broadcast ratings, I think they're probably just delaying their demise. But the news does indicate that what happens on the Web can influence the bottom line in all the ways I'm so fond of writing about: by building consumer loyalty, by strengthening relationships, by meeting consumers on their own terms.

All this applies to blogging and audio podcasting.  Note that NBC and ABC are not necessarily making a ton of money on the video podcasts themselves. But their ability to adapt, and to meet consumers on the new-media Second Front, has allowed them to improve their position in relation to their customers. In other words, even though the payoff isn't direct, it's still a payoff.

5 Tools to Make Online Life Easier

I just got high-speed wireless access at my house. (Yes, you may now express your amazement at my productivity on a mere dial-up connection!)  The arrival of a high-speed connection has prompted a downloading frenzy. I had no idea there were so many cool things to make it even easier to get around on the Internet.  Well, I knew about a lot of them, because I've spent many a day at the local coffeehouse on my laptop, using their high-speed connection. But still, there's a lot of cool stuff that I'm now using on my desktop, and I figure this is a good time to share some of it:

• Performancing Firefox Extension: You may very well have seen this one already, but it's great. If you're using Firefox and blogging, you've gotta have it.  And if you're not using Firefox (and you know who you are), you need to get it and download this extension.  It allows you to split the browser screen at the touch of a button and immediately blog a website without logging in at your host site. You know all those times when you see something interesting and think to yourself, "I'll blog this later?"  You know you never get around to blogging that stuff; now you don't have to wait.
• Sage: This Firefox extension is my new RSS reader of choice.  It just pops up in a sidebar when you want it, and it's completely integrated with the browser.  I like the layout of RSS entries, making them easy to scan quickly and read.  You can search for RSS feeds at new sites with one click. 
  
• Del.icio.us Firefox Extension: If you're using Del.icio.us, this makes it simple. Right click on a page you want to save, and a box pops up allowing you to add your own notes and tags. It even gives you a list of the popular tags for that site at Del.icio.us.
• Writely: Easton at BusinessBlogWire notes that this online word processor has been upgraded. And that reminds me to add it to this list. What's so cool about Writely? It's not just an online word processor.  It's interactive.  So if you have a group of folks spread across the country, working on the same project, they can get into a document and edit it, and their changes automatically appear to the other members.
• TechnoBar: Man, I love this one. Yet another Firefox extension, tied to Technorati's search engine. Every time you visit a site, you can immediately see all the blogs linking to that site in a sidebar.  So you don't have to scurry around looking for related information with a bunch of searches; it's all right there on the screen as you scan/search/blog.
  

Conversational Agoraphobia

Amy Gahran just keeps churning out great stuff.  Here are her thoughts on what's holding business blogs back; she calls it Conversational Agoraphobia.

In my experience -- and I'd be curious to hear yours -- business people generally get scared by the fact that blogs are so public.

...That is, they're less worried about hearing criticism per se, and very worried that anyone might hear them being criticized. That is, the public nature of blogs fills them with a heightened -- and often irrational -- sense of vulnerability.

Her solution has some promise, I think:

One of the most successful treatments for ordinary agoraphobia is graduated exposure therapy: slowly and incrementally increasing a someone's exposure to a feared situation.

That gets me thinking... Maybe for companies or individuals who fear public conversation so much that they must control any part of it in which they participate, it might be helpful to find ways to gradually introduce them to conversational media -- BEFORE they actually launch their own blog. Teach them how to follow and join, in small ways at first, ongoing conversations in blogs, forums, e-mail lists, and other conversational media channels.

Steve Mays has told people that if they're not ready to climb to the top of the diving platform and do a cannonball into the pool, they're probably not ready to blog.  He says it's not a good idea to dip a toe into the water down in the shallow end.  Does that conflict with what Amy says?  Not necessarily.  I think Amy's suggesting, like Steve, that someone shouldn't start blogging until they're ready.  Dipping a toe in the water is okay -- as long as you don't do it for the world on your live blog.