everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: events

  • Online Media Meet Market

    Most writers view advertising as a necessary evil. Working for a weblog software company which makes the tools that many writers are using, I’m always on the lookout for an interactive agency that "gets it" and can provide a bridge for the considerable financial resources of its clients to make its way to my customers’ pockets so they can succeed. In my ideal world, good advertising should compliment good writing and create an experience which can co-exist in a way that adds value to a site.

    I regret to say that I didn’t see it on the Ad-Tech trade show floor. As with my previous brush at another online advertising show, it was the usual mosh pit of smartly-dressed Search Engine Optimizers and Ad Network hucksters. There was a group of busty women in tank tops that had "Wanna be on top?" written across their chest running around promising to get your site to the top of the search engine results heap and a firm called Blow Search that promised Search as, "swift as the wind" from their "Super-Meta PPC search engine." It seemed like every other booth featured shot glasses as the giveaway-de-jour. Less a conference on how to create carefully-crafted editorial products and more a carnival on how to hoodwink the blinking masses into buying your product.

    Not all was lost though. I did meet up with some folks from Nielsen/Netratings that slipped me their latest white paper, The Rules of Engagement, Online Media’s Missing Link, that introduced the subject of audience measurement in this new world of interactive media. Contributors include Rick Bruner, noted blogger, who has semi-retired from his blog in order to focus on his new role at the soon to be acquired DoubleClick.

    The point of the paper is that the old metrics of unique visitors and pageviews may no longer apply to the world of blogs where they are seeing a flattening of growth in online visitors but a sharp increase in the number of pages viewed and time spent on a site.

    There is little evidence demonstrating that changes in technology translate into changes in human nature. Technologies come and technologies go, but for as long as media has been consumed, engagement has truly been the sine qua non of success. It is precisely because engagement in the online environment is on the rise that the era of "proving" the efficacy of the online medium is over.

    We have seen only the tip of the iceberg in audience fragmentation, and we are all in for a long, bumpy ride. Marketers choosing to cling exclusively to traditional media will miss the mark in two critical areas. First, and most obvious, they will miss opportunities to meet today’s customers where they are spending more and more time. But most important, participating in the online environment today will give marketers a deeper appreciation of how changing media preferences will impact their sales tomorrow.

    I’m going to see Esther Dyson’s keynote tomorrow. In the meantime, you can read more on Ad:Tech San Francisco on this blog.

  • Mary Meeker on Online Advertising

    Yesterday I visited the Ad-Tech show here in San Francisco to catch the last 20 minutes of Mary Meeker’s keynote and visit the exhibition hall. Let me first say that Mary’s presentation was fascinating but left me winded. We blew past 50 slides dense with stats and tidbits that raised an eyebrow when I first ran across them in my readings over the past several months but now, when gathered up and presented together, are nothing short of inspirational.

    My key takeaway was that with broadband penetration now hitting 25 – 30% in North America, we’re going to start to see even greater adoption of the internet as the alternative delivery format for rich media. As more families experience life with an always on connection (I have an iMac in my living room and the little white window has become a hub of activity throughout the day), they begin to view the internet as a viable alternative to existing delivery methods.

    Weblogs replace the letter from friends. Topix replaces your local paper. Weather.com replaces your local TV forecast. RSS feeds replace your local sports wrap-up. The list goes on. Mary’s point was that we’re only just beginning a new adoption phase as it is only when penetration of a new medium hits 25% that the volumes start to make sense for others to follow. Once all these families start hanging out on their always on broadband connections, you’ll see the advertisers follow which will enable more interesting projects which will draw more people online which will draw more advertisers, you get the idea.

    More tomorrow on the exhibit hall.

  • Bite PR on Doc’s “snowballs”

    Bite’s Trevor Jonas posts about the marketer’s perspective of Doc Searl’s snowball metaphor – "frightening."

    I think it’s all about giving into the loss of control. It’s no longer about having a message to control and more about participating in a conversation as a participant and not a leader. This gets to what is still a new concept in marketing circles. Brands are owned by their customers, not the company. This leads to a whole new style of marketing that empowers the external champions of a brand. in this new world it’s all about working through the customers to drive a point, not leading them.

    Blogging is a platform that amplifies a message. If your story is told in a way that resonates with your customers, it will be picked up. If it’s well written, it will be picked up with all the contextual detail that will tell the story with less distortion and greater impact.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Mark Jen

    Mark Jen was fired from Google. He broke a few cardinal rules such as not being sensitive to Google’s culture which didn’t support blurting things out. He also broke a cardinal rule of blogging by deleting posts. This is a huge red flag that will only draw attention to the post which can be retrieved from RSS feeds and browser caches. He also mentioned sensitive information right before 4th Quarter earnings were released.

    Mark now works for Plaxo.

    Plaxo has a blog but they’ve made a decision to segment the comments over onto the forums.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Tom Foremski

    Tom previously was the Silicon Valley correspondent for the Financial Times and later founded the Silicon Valley Watcher.

    Tom joined to FT to take advantage of the brand and the infrastructure to get his word out. When blogging came along, this new publishing and distribution system came to the masses.

    Are bloggers journalists? Not a relevant question – it’s all about reach. It’s about a trusted relationship, a brand that gets built up reader-by-reader over time.

    Richard Koman on blogging ethics – most of the people that were paid to blog for Marqui ended up just blogging about being paid to blog about Marqui and didn’t write much about the actual CMS product.

    On SEO – don’t waste money on search engine optimization, companies should put their money back into “their knitting”. Why waste money on boosting your ranking if you can’t deliver on what you promise via your links.

    On sources – people can’t help telling you stuff. It’s important to let people know that “off the record” is default.

    No one has ever been fired for blogging, only for “inappropriate conversations.”

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – How to Pitch Bloggers

    Presented by Jill Ratkevic of Bite.

    Tivo – select play, select 30, select. Not something that Tivo could officially endorse or promote but blogging has gotten the word out there for them.

    On blogging and journalism – blogging is open source journalism. Whatever you write will be corrected by your readers. If you readers have a bad experience that you don’t cover, they will contribute this information as comments. It’s based on dialog, not monologue.

    On harnessing the conversation – relationships take time, talk about the issues first, not your product.

    Pitching bloggers – need to build cred with the influencers by tipping them off with fresh information in real-time for feedback which can then be incorporated into your pitch to the mainstream media.

    Traditional PR is about the number of clips. It’s a different world now. It’s no longer about mentions, it’s about results. Jill talks about their client become.com which generated much better ROI from their 10,000 beta testers that seeded the conversation around their product than from traditional press releases and media tours.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Q&A

    Rod Boothby (E&Y) asks – what about the blogging in companies? Are conversations of benefit to companies?

    Absolutely. Companies have souls, they have a “nature.” The value system comes from its founders. Some companies are born to blog. There’s an inverse relationship between branding and blogging. Companies that have a strong brand have difficulty with blogging. Companies can’t talk, people do.

    Question – How are PR departments handling blogging?

    It’s important for companies to have as many people blogging as possible. Need to trust your people to have good judgment. There’s something about blogging that acknowledges the incompleteness of what we know. This is anti-thetical to messaging which is about driving home a point.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Doc Searls

    I’m attending the Bite blogging seminar at the W in San Francisco. Swish venue with not only lemons and lime in the drinking water but strawberries.

    Great line up of speakers, about 50 – 60 people seated. They’ve got wireless so I’ll pass on some of the highlights.

    Doc Searls – talks about his writing of Cluetrain Manefesto

    On Blogging – email that I would write with “cc:world”

    On time it takes to blog – if you look at your email, the volume you put out in email probably exceeds what’s up on my blog.

    On marketing – it’s about conversations and not messages. Branding was a concept that P&G brought from the cattle industry. Branding is about putting out 8 boxes of soap and “singing about the difference.”

    On writing as content – John Perry Barlow once said that he never heard about content until the container business felt threatened. Once you start talking about “content” you’re already off base.

    On the Net – it’s a place, not a medium. The nodes of the net are not separated by time or space, a blog post is immediate. Once you You don’t send a message using “content.” You’re having a conversation in a place. You are “on the net,” you use real estate metaphors to describe the net.

    Update: I left off the best line of the conference. As a parting thought, Doc described (and I’m paraphrasing” his life before blogging as one of, “pushing many big rocks a short way uphill” and his life now as a blogger as, “rolling many snowballs down a hill with the compelling ideas gaining mass as they roll downhill.”

  • Blogging and Meetup

    I’m going local on you, I know but I just wanted readers in the San Francisco/East Bay area know that Ginevra and I have taken on organizational duties at two local blogging meetups and will be hosting events next month. If you’re in the area, stop by, we look forward to meeting you!

    The San Francisco Movable Type Meetup – April 11th @ 7 pm
    The Alameda County Weblogger Meetup – April 20th @ 7 pm