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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Look out 
| | Sez here that a rocket will be going up from Vandenberg tomorrow morning. These things are often visible from much of the Southwest, once the rocket gets high enough. (We're only about 30 miles away, so we can see most of the show, if it's clear.) |
| | I'll try to find if there's a more specific timeframe than 7 to 11am, and a site that gives us current news on the matter. |
Sploggers beware
| | Meet two upstanding enemies of all that is splogging. |
| | First Ian Kallen, who knows more about splogging than anybody else I've met; and who has provided much useful guidance for me, as both as a writer and a reader in the blogosphere. Lately Ian and I have been talking more about what constitutes a splogger, and what can be done about it. Here's his latest: |
| | In this corner: Doc is going to attack kleptotorial splogs by employing cleaner living through better licensing (a creative commons flavor). And in this corner: Elliott Back says he is a victim. He has been slammed by Scoble (and Scoble was gracious enough to apologize). I have no sympathy for Elliott Back. Sure, he's just the gun maker, not the shooter. But weapon makers producing wares without safeties get sued for negligence. Basically, any tool that programmatically harvests and posts other people's feeds should at least have the common decency to not ping. If you re-inject something into the update stream that you've appropriated from someone else, you're scamming the update stream. This isn't about quoting or citing, this is about fraudulent pings, "I've updated my blog (nevermind the fact it's with OPP)" -- keep your feed harvesting to yourself, please. |
| | My blog is primarily for my amusement and that of my 24 loyal readers. My postings are for the amusement of myself and my loyal readers. Nothing here is available for commercial usage without explicit clearence from me. |
| | He then quotes the license and adds, |
| | John Bransford has not contacted me either as an individual, owner of ChronicNews.com, Phoenixsnews.com or any other entity to obtain permission to republish my material on his network of splogs. In every case that permission is denied now and until the heat death of the universe. |
| | That statement also went to GoDaddy, by the grace of which John Bransford and ChronicNews.com does its business (I assume... THL is less troubled by not being a lawyer than I am, and wields his legalese like a gunner in a pillbox defending his beachead with a machine gun). THL wants GoDaddy take Bransford's offending items down. [Later, in Episode Seven, he succeeds.] |
| | Now, I am not somebody who goes to the law, or to lawyers, or to the courts, or even to legalese, when I feel a wrong has been done, even to myself. In fact, I very much prefer to pour everything I write into the public domain, which is why I've had a public domain dedication on this blog for nearly as long as Creative Commons has provided me one. |
| | But I have little sympathy for Elliot Bäch (who operates a set of blogs that look so sploggy that he feels the need to publish a link to Legal Information on his index page) or John Bransford (about whom I'll trust The Head Lemur). And I have no sympathy at all for the countless sploggers who successfully hide from the sources of the posts they harvest, even as they soak millions out of Adsense and its advertisers. |
| | Again, my hope is that 1) we can come up with a form of license that allows others to use our writing in a creative way, while not allowing it to be used only for advertising purposes (which would probably allow Elliott Bäck to do what he does — which, to his credit, includes dialog with his critics); and 2) widespread use of that license (perhaps as a checkbox choice on popular blog authoring and hosting systems) will give Google, Yahoo and other big advertising systems better ammo for going after sploggers (and not to have to wait for a class action suit from the victims of splogging). |
Space those bets
Now he only smokes other runners
Long 'train running
| | Way back in 1999, Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger put together cluetrain.com (the contents of which were published as The Cluetrain Manifesto in 2001). [Actually, January 2000 - ds.] Their list of 95 theses begins "1. Markets are conversations". The authors built a convincing argument that the Internet has the potential to fundamentally change the way people select and purchase the products and services created by industrial corporations by facilitating real communications between individual consumers, and supplanting the artificial communication created by marketing departments and agencies. |
| | While the book was written before the birth of Myspace, or any of the major sites now classified as "social networking", its central arguments only grow more relevant in a world where an increasing number of individuals spend an increasing amount of time interacting with one another online in ever more socially substantial ways. |
| | Unfortunately, the vast majority of online advertising and marketing activity (including advertising on sites specifically dedicated to facilitating human interaction) is born of an old, one-sided media mindset. While we may be screaming through a bullhorn into the fastest growing online neighborhoods, we¹re still largely ignoring the millions of potential customers waiting patiently to talk back. |
| | There are plenty of cynical answers to this question: marketing executives still living in a product > focus group > advertising world; institutional separations between qualitative consumer research (focus groups), quantitative research (metrics), and marketing departments, etc. |
| | While these are all real concerns, there are some issues specific to social networks that must be addressed. |
| | Your customers are using social networks to make themselves visible to the world, just like you are. When customers communicate with you, they¹re not just telling you their opinion of your productŠ they¹re telling you about themselves. By utilizing this data (demographics, popularity, etc.) you can make decisions that respond to the specific concerns of your target marketŠ or refocus to meet the market that¹s interested in you. |
| | But he also recommends something much more important: one-to-one direct contact between the people who make stuff and the people who use it: |
| | Example 2: Company B is a large technology company with a somewhat stodgy image. Long know for business products, Company B is interested in developing products aimed at college students, and wants to begin working on its image, even as product development is just beginning. The company has purchased ad space on social networking sites popular with the target market, but is currently only supporting a marketing heavy branding site. |
| | a. So far, Company B has made the decision that many companies do when approaching social networkingŠ they¹ve viewed it as a demographically attractive pile of eyeballs on which to pour a rich sauce of steamy marketing. If they want to have a substantial effect on the brain behind those eyeballs, however, they need to offer real engagement with the customers, centered around the development of their upcoming product. This doesn¹t mean they need to publish piles of proprietary development information. They could create a conversation around a series of "what-ifs"Š "What if the device did this? Would that be helpful?" |
| | Again, respondents can be evaluated based on their self-published profile. While this doesn¹t mean the company shouldn¹t have any more traditional marketing on social networking site, it does itself a disservice if it doesn¹t attempt to establish a conversation with its new target market as soon as possible. |
| | As long as we think of social networks as individual sites, and plan advertising accordingly, we will continue to realize a tiny fraction of the benefit to be reaped from those ad dollars. As long as we see social networks as just another venue for our awesome advertising idea, we¹ll continue to be the loudmouths at the party that don¹t understand why no one invites us back. |
| | When we¹re able to step out of our noise-machine shoes, however, and use social networks like the rest of the world, and join the giant asynchronous conversation, we can begin to connect to our customers in previously unimaginable waysŠ like a collection of regular, real, people. |
| | From the company's perspective, the social network that should matter most is the one that grows between the people who create the product and the people who buy and use it. Nothing could be more important here than either expanding CRM (customer relationship management) to include these conversations and relationships, or junking CRM entirely, because — as Ian Kallen (one of the engineers on the supply side of Technorati's offerings) put it to me in a conversation yesterday — "CRM is for stalking customers". (Disclosure.) |
| | The primary job of marketing is to facilitate those conversations, and to reduce interference in the most highly leveraged relationships a creative company can possibly have. |
| | Oh, and thanks to RageBoy for the lead on John M's piece. |
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