It’s alright to be in a funk

ze’s page :: zefrank.com: on feeling uninspired

LOTD 11/29/07

• Online news publishers are exploring ways to re-write the Robots.txt files on their sites to, in their words, more closely mirror the terms and conditions they have for sharing their content. I still don’t buy the argument that Google News and other services are stealing their traffic, but that’s just me. (CT)
• Along with that comes news that some site administrators may be altering their Robots.txt file to give preferential access to Google’s crawler since they send the most – and best – traffic. (CT)
• Brightcove.tv, just days after saying it would no longer accept user-generated uploads, is looking toward the future and smartly focusing on building brand loyalty to the site as opposed to making a quick buck and hoping for the best. (CT)
• OMG, Google is building functionality that would let you tag particular results as more or less important and relevant to what you’re looking for. This will, of course, change the course of the Internet as we know it and immediately result in the downfall of several civilizations as well. Or at least that’s the impression I get from scanning various headlines. (CT)
• While these tips for enhancing brand marketing are specifically targeted at B2B companies, many of the general concepts enshrined in them are applicable to just about all levels of business. (CT)
• I never quite got what eBay was going to do with Skype to begin with. Always seemed to me like they were buying it to have one more asset to make the eBay itself more attractive to a potential buyer. Anyway, BusinessWeek says the confluence of recent events may turn 2008 into Skype’s make or break year. (CT)

Narcissim? On the Internet? I just don’t believe it.

From The Onion:

In what is being called a seminal moment in Internet history, a rare weekend post by 25-year-old blogger Ben Tiedemann on his website bentiedemanntellsall.blogspot.com rocked the 50 million-member blogosphere this Saturday.

Within two hours of going live, Tiedemann’s 15-word post received 34,634,897 comments.

Holy crap.

The power of Rogen

Rogen meets Huey?

Very cool news as I’m a big HL&N fan as well as a fan of Rogen’s movies.

LOTD: 11/27/08

• Okay, we know that Facebook took out the “is” from its status field, and with the ability for Twitter and other services to the platform, that was a no brainer. That said, I would love to know why Mashable didn’t get more responses to this survey from last week. Of course, the audience of Mashable doesn’t encompass the overall usership of a Facebook or another service, but still. I’d love to have that survey done through “regular” (read: non Web 2.0 workers) users. (TB)
• Guitar Hero does indeed blend, as Gizmodo points out. (TB)
• Marijean Jaggers is advising everyone that they better get on the RSS delivery bandwagon because she just unsubscribed from all her email newsletters. (CT)
• Steve Outing at Poynter suggests news operations should setup Twitter feeds for breaking news, something journalists in the field can use to share short little updates on developing stories. (CT)
• Kevin Dugan says if your press release is more than 22 words long Google’s going to ignore it, so keep it brief or be prepared for zero search love. (CT)
• Cory at Lost Remote takes up the issue I was discussing the other day of why newspapers and other online pubs don’t link out. (CT)
• Ben McConnell makes my day with this list of ways to tell you have too much money in the marketing budget. (CT)

Oh to be a fly on the wall at an Onion editorial meeting

I mean seriously. How funny can one publication consistently be?

Online Couple Never Chats Anymore

Perfectly Marketed TV Show Somehow Fails

Neurotic Asshole Finds Success In New York City

Book Review: Now is Gone

When I got back into the office from a trip to The Garden State a couple weeks ago there on my desk was a package. Hmmm, I thought. I’d already gotten this month’s Bloggers Gone Wild: Spring Break WOOOO!!! Edition VHS and everyone I know had already tried to assassinate me. So I was curious to see what was inside.

To my pleasant surprise I found it to be a copy of Now is Gone by Geoff Livingston with Brian Solis. The book purports to be a “primer” for executives to acclimate themselves to the new media world and figure out, if they already haven’t, how to create effective marketing relationships in that world. Livingston places heavy emphasis on the idea of relationships, saying time and time again that they are what needs to be focused on and not traditional marketing. Not only because doing so allows you as a marketer to know what people are saying, but it gives the people formerly known as the audience the sense that they are participating in the success of a company or product that they feel an affinity for.

The strongest point Livingston makes in the book is that it’s not enough to just take your existing marketing and put it on the web. It needs to be high-quality, appropriate for the people you’re trying to reach and delivered on a platform that they are already using. The combination of those three things may not insure your marketing efforts will be successful, but it gives those efforts a better chance of not blowing up in your face.

If there’s one thing that I took issue with in Now is Gone, it’s Livingston’s tendency to paint things as definitively right or wrong or to characterize the social media world as if it operated with a single collective conscious. At one point Livingston warns public relations practitioners that if they send out a heads-up to bloggers and that pitch does not result in the story being written up then it’s a failure and they need to scrap the entire program since it’s obviously not adding value to the larger community.

While I agree that PR people should approach bloggers carefully (that’s why it helps to have someone who knows the community and that language) and that pitches need to be individually crafted to make the story as valuable to the blogger as possible I don’t think failure to achieve pick-up is a sign of a bad program. I get pitches all the time that aren’t that attractive to me, but sometimes that’s just because I’m in a bad or just funky mood. Since blogging is so highly personal – even if I’m not blogging about personal matters – sometimes I just can’t get excited about a story that would normally be right up my alley. Bloggers are moody, something that occasionally renders any hard and fast rules about engagement moot.

Considering that Livingston is aiming at the higher levels of the org chart with who he’s trying to speak to the book does succeed more often than it doesn’t at making its points. Marketing in the social media-powered world of 2007 is not like marketing as few as 10 years ago. The rules are different because the balance of power is shifting, the risks are higher and the demands even more demanding.

While there are points of view in Now is Gone I don’t exactly agree with, it is worth picking up and reading. It’s just like reading anything else. There are things I completely agree with and others I don’t, but when it’s all been tallied up it does add something to the conversation. I’d rather read something and disagree with the author than read something and have no opinion. I think that can be said of just about everything in my RSS list as well as my book shelf.

Becoming part of the community

For the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking – in my copious free time, which mainly consists of the walk between the train station and work – about the people I know online. Specifically I’ve been thinking about how I link to stories and how I identify the people I’m linking to. When I link to something from, say Josh Hallett or Alex Billington or someone like that I generally say “Josh says…” or “Alex pointed out…” in a manner that makes my identification of them a very casual thing. I know them and the brands they’ve built up around themselves and so refer to them in the same way I would were I talking about them to a mutual acquaintance. After all, as Tom and I said on Jaffe Juice a while ago, “We are the brand.”

But when I link to MediaPost of Variety I use, for the most part, the publication name. That’s because although I read those sites and assume that many of my readers do I don’t necessarily know the people who have actually written the story. There’s not the same personal connection and so the communication I use reverts back to being very formal.

There is – and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here – a dramatic shift going on in the media world. But it’s not just on the audience’s side of the equation. The members of the media itself are changing how they’re doing business. But much of that change, it seems, is being held in check or at least slowed by the willingness of the publications they work for to adapt along with them.

The other day I linked to this MediaPost Research Brief that reported on a survey showing 54 percent of journalists said they got story ideas from reading blogs. When Tom saw that he kind of couldn’t believe that. And I said back to him that while that in some respects is great, the problem is that the number – not the percent but the flat number – of publications that would give credit to those blogs much less link out to them could probably be counted on two hands.

That thought came back to me as I was writing up a couple stories for Movie Marketing Madness. In one story recounting the problems Paramount/Dreamworks is facing marketing Sweeney Todd, the Hollywood Reporter writer cites a blog entry from a Steven Sondheim devotee who is worried his favorite songs are going to be cut from the movie. But there’s no link back to that blog. So the blogger doesn’t know he’s just been quoted unless he subscribes to THR and reads the full text of the story and recognizes his line.

In another example, a MediaPost story about some TV spots for Saw IV mention that the spots were still (?) available for viewing on YouTube. But there’s no link to the video, something that would have made the story about 40 percent more useful to the reader since they could have seen first hand just what the spot looked like. Instead they can either accept the description as written or engage on their own YouTube search for the video.

Journalists are increasingly blogging, either on their newspaper or magazine’s sites or striking out on their own. Some are doing it better than others (Chicagoist threw a mock celebration when the Tribune’s Steve Johnson – the paper’s technology writer – finally started linking out) but it seems like they’re trying and learning just like the rest of us. And they’re going after ad revenue on their stand-alone blogs.

Unfortunately even those publications that purport to be embracing blogs like AdAge, which now houses the Power 150 list created by Todd Anderlik, still aren’t getting it. As Mack pointed out the other day, they’ve done little since taking over management of that list to integrate the blogs there into their coverage, neither citing them in stories or turning to the people behind them for their perspective on stories that impact the online marketing world.

Bloggers have succeeded in large part by becoming part of a community and those relationships encourage linking, commenting and other forms of interaction.

Publications like The New York Times and others have been shifting from a paid wall to free access that’s supported by ad revenue, with the idea being that more visitors leads to higher revenue. But what they’re not getting is that if the journalists at those publications were to go out into the online community that’s covering the same beat they are, even more traffic would come their way. You link to me, you drop me an email, you interact with me and turn yourself into a person as opposed to a drone at a faceless corporate entity and I’m going to send more traffic your way because I now have a relationship with you. It’s just like any other sort of referral. If a friend is looking for a mechanic you don’t send them to a big store you just happened to notice in the phone book. You send them to someone you know and who has done good work for you in the past.

Ideally, journalists should become part of the communities they exist in for many of the same reasons companies should. Doing so makes everyone’s life a little better and provides a more useful product for readers. In the OJR, Robert Niles points to some ordinary bloggers that went beyond a mainstream newspaper story to provide more information. And Nikke Finke just recently took the New York Times to task for some questionable reporting.

Malcolm Gladwell was right to some extent when he said blogs wouldn’t exist without the New York Times. But the relationship is much more symbiotic than he might think. Mainstream media feeds social media, and social media is increasingly beginning to feed mainstream media. But while social media has been open about how much it depends on mainstream outlets, the mainstream outlets still have a ways to go before they are acknowledging bloggers and others in the same way. It’s a deeper change that needs to happen than ABC putting together a clip show of user-generated videos that have been submitted. It needs to be systemic and deep-routed, with mainstream writers as much part of the community as bloggers are now.

Smith taps Rogen, Banks for Porno

Seth Rogen set to ‘Make a Porno’ – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety

Not that I wasn’t already going to see this already since I’m a big Kevin Smith fan, but the casting of Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks clinches it.

Story revolves around two lifelong platonic friends who are deep in debt and enlist the help of their friends to make a porn pic for some quick cash. But Zack and Miri realize that they may have more feelings for each other than they previously thought.

Allllllrighty then.

Cathartic cooking

Torture That Red Guy: Throwzini’s Knife Block Stores Cutlery on Wheel of Death

This is the must-have holiday gift for that person you know who loves to cook and just found his/her girlfriend/boyfriend of three years was cheating the whole time/is married/decided they were gay.