Isabel Walcott Draves

Holy F--ing S--t!

This is what Brad Listi said when he got an email from a student telling him his debut novel was on the LA Times best-seller list just a few weeks after its release.

It's what publishers, PR folks, and marketers everywhere should be saying when they examine how he got there.  With no real marketing campaign from Simon & Schuster and only one mediocre review, Listi took it upon himself to market his own novel on MySpace: networking with friends of friends, blogging, and linking to others.  Sponsoring a photo contest on his site and handing out 100 free copies of the book helped kick-start his personal campaign.  A picture on his cute, folksy, and utterly "unprofessional" (on purpose) blog states, "This is me, standing on a street corner in Manhattan, shortly before sundown, preparing to engage in some lighthearted guerilla marketing".

A word-of-mouth marketing triumph.  As Listi said in the Metro article, "This democratizes the marketing process for writers."

Technorati's New Tools

David Sifry (Technorati's founder) describes some new tools that just might be able to help us to better take the temperature of the blogosphere.

As we know, we can't read every blog.  Mainstream media voices (newspapers, magazines, etc.) really add value because they tell us what and who is worth paying attention to, and cut back on the information overload.  (No need to comment on how they have lost market share over the past five years by doing that very important job wrong - the rise of the blogosphere proves that). 

So how can blogs compete with the editorial value a newspaper offers (or at least, has the potential to offer)?

For starters, Technorati introduces the "explore" feature which brings up blogs that have tagged themselves as being about a certain topic.  It's not much, but it's a start... if you want to have a read about fast food, you can go to Explore and read through blogs that discuss the fast food industry, which might be termed "trade blogs".  No longer are you doomed to whatever blogs a regular Technorati search offers, which would include Joe Consumer's latest fast food run after a drinking binge. 

One obvious problem: bloggers can tag their blogs however they want, and there's not yet a way on Technorati for readers to rate the accuracy of the self-tagging.  So if a drunken blogger casually gave their blog a "fast food" tag after a Broiler binge, or a blogger assigns hundreds of inaccurate tags in an effort to get more exposure for their blog, the reader loses out.  In time though, I'm sure a reputation system will develop to help us better sort blogging content, much like Google developed a useful algorithm for webpage sorting.

Along those lines, Technorati has also developed an "authority meter" for their standard keyword search, which allows you to say whether you want to see all the blogs that contain that search term, or only the blogs that other bloggers are linking to.  Now, Phil Gomes has correctly argued that just because lots of people don't link to a blog, doesn't mean it's less read or less accurate, and David confirms this.  But if Google's success is any guide (and of course it is), once a search tool starts sorting by number of links to a source, that metric does become definitive.  And people will start to pad their results by linking to their friends and setting up link to schemes for SEO (search engine optimization).  So -- watch how you sort results, you might just end up setting the standard for the entire industry.

For example, if you do a search for "Isabel Walcott" in Technorati with the authority meter on high, you see that Doc Searls, David Weinberger, and someone I don't know named Natalie Bennett who must be cool have all mentioned me in their blogs.  If you move the authority meter down to "any authority", Sean Bohan and Ed Vielmetti's posts that mention me come up as well.

Would be cool to see Google offering different "authority sorts".  Show me content by websites that have been around the longest, or by companies that make the most money, or by universities or scientists first, etc.

Bok is Back!

Larry Summers has finally resigned.  Perhaps his run-in with the women on faculty was a factor in the decision.  Derek Bok is taking his place during the interim search. 

I think it's a good thing that Summers is out.  His comments about women's performance in the sciences were unwise, given his position and his location.  I'm not saying that he doesn't have a right to his opinion, or that his opinion is incorrect.  I'm saying that if you are the leader of a university that is struggling to attract and retain top women professors in math and science, and you're at an economic conference attended by those very women, it is unwise to suggest that innate brain differences, not prejudice, account for women's under-representation in universities.  It's just not the place or time to make that suggestion.  You really have to have a tin ear to not suspect that that wouldn't go over well in that setting.

So if he lacked judgment in similar settings and made political mistakes like that more than once (which he seems to have), it's really not appropriate to give him such a big and wonderful job.  I'm sure others will say he was witch-hunted out, or that Harvard is too "politically correct".  But in fact Summers was literally politically in-adept, in a way that no good CEO can afford to be -- he didn't know how to gauge the impact of his words on his audience.  As usual, that's just my two cents.

Barefoot Contessa Cupcakes

I made the Barefoot Contessa coconut cupcakes this weekend with the Stone-Buhr flour Josh sent.  They flew off the plate at my birthday party.  I noticed something interesting while looking for the recipe online, that reminded me of the Creative Commons license.

Someone posted the recipe on their blog, changed the amount of one ingredient, and didn't credit the Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten.  Someone anonymous consequently wrote in the comments section, "This looks just like the recipe from the Barefoot Contessa, except she uses 3/4 cup buttermilk and cooks them differently" -- the commenter then proceeds to explain the cooking method given in the cookbook.

I also noticed some places where individuals had posted the recipe, and it had been taken down.  I wondered whether they had been asked to remove it by the Barefoot Contessa's company.  Probably not, but it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility for a company to ask customers to stop spreading the word about how much they love their product (free advertising!).  The Barefoot Contessa's website wisely does not feature all their recipes, just a selection.  The idea is you will discover one you like, and buy the book to get the rest.

The thing that really interested me is that people don't see posting Garten's recipe as dishonest.  Making the recipe "open source" is more of a compliment, and bakers  are likely to perceive accessing the recipe for free as a right (even though the proprietor may prefer to "own" the "intellectual property").

What's publicly recognized as dishonest, though, is listing the recipe as if it was your own, and not giving credit where credit is due.  If you try it, eventually, a fellow netizen is going to call you on it.  "That's not yours, it's the Barefoot Contessa's."  That's why all the Creative Commons licenses start with "Attribution" as the essential copyright.

To learn more about Creative Commons licensing for your intellectual property, check out their site.  (The frosting recipe is included here).

Open-Source Content, Open-Source Marketing

Lately, publishers have been struggling with fledgling efforts at open-source content. For instance, while the Washington Post had to turn off the comments feature on the ombudsman's blog in January, other editorial blogs there remain open for comments. 

(A digression: From what I have seen, many of these comments tend to pick on the writer's poor typing, spelling, and grammar skills. Hmm, maybe writers need editors after all?  That's a new thought for the blogosphere.  Someone could start a company to help edit bloggers, for a per-post fee of course.  Combine that with a reputation system so readers can comment on what blog posts are best, and before you know it, you have a newspaper!)

First-time glitches aside, it is an appropriate, credible, even expert marketing (or editorial) technique to give stakeholders a say in the product (or help make the content).  As we know, there are several ways to interpret the words "Open-Source", with one being that the code or "recipe" is able to be seen (or "open"), and another being that the provenance or origin of the work is communal or collaborative (or "open").

Here's a nice example of both open-source marketing and open-source content: Sony's website http://thedavincichallenge.com , which quite brilliantly creates a forum for those who disagree with the message of the book The Da Vinci Code.  Conveniently, all the experts asked seem to have a similar message: hate the book and the movie, but read it and see it so you can discuss them with those who love them.  A boycott, one of the anti-experts states, tends to draw more attention to the movie, and draw negative publicity to your cause.  The site is clearly "managed", but it's a decent way to open up the floor for comment that may not be favorable.  Anyway, it's fair to manage collaboration, which can get really messy.

I continue to believe that it is worthwhile to engage your detractors in public discussion as a marketing technique!  I heard the other day that yet another company stopped advertising in a newspaper that published a negative story about them.  This happens all the time in the magazine world.  When you stop participating in the conversation, you have lost the battle.

On Google, Eudora, and FON

I'm excited about GoogleTalk, but can't figure out how to tell who is already a gmail user and invite them to show me their status.  I've been invited by several  other gmail users to show my status to them, and accepted.  But I only see links to invite people to "chat" -- I don't want to chat with them right now, I'd just like to see when they are online.  And differentiating between people who already use gmail and people who don't, although it may not mean much to Google, is important to me.  It's less intrusive to invite someone who is already signed up than to ask someone to register.

I've been using gmail for probably a year or so now, in conjunction with Eudora which downloads my mail to my hard drive.  I prefer to work primarily off my hard drive, since I don't yet live in the "IP Everywhere" world of David Reed.  Yet I LOVE the backup Google offers me, and although I'm a little skeeved out about the privacy implications, I'm rolling with it for now.  There's a weird bug somewhere in the Eudora-Google interface that causes it to crash once in awhile when sending mail using Google's server. This is annoying but I can use an alternate SMTP server as a workaround until they figure it out.

Another asset: If I send mail from my gmail account, it cc's a copy of what I've sent to my inbox, with myself as the "from" contact -- but of course I would prefer to see who they were sent to, not who they are from.  If I transfer these mails from my inbox to my outbox in Eudora, the "to" contact automatically shows up.  The mails don't show up as "sent" (how could Eudora know?), but at least they are there as a record, which is what I need them for.

Google and Skype both recently invested in a company called FON; the dynamic Rebecca MacKinnon and the inimitable Jerry Michalski are on their board of advisors.  The name is oddly old-fashioned considering what they are attempting, which is to build a network of users who make their connectivity available to other members so that all can ride free (connecting through any device) while traveling. 

There are a bunch of issues with getting a large enough network to make it functional: namely, that the service providers aren't interested in letting their subscribers share wireless, and that providing free connectivity has limited allure for retail establishments (coffee shops, airports) who want a cut of profits.  But obviously if enough people and partners get on board FON will overthrow the powers that be, a communist revolution of a sort.  Swimming upstream, but the goal is so worth it!  Kind of reminds me of Sxip.  Call me crazy, but I'd love to join a company like FON that really leverages the possibility of the Internet for great, future-thinking goals.

Friendly Update

Thought I'd take a minute to tell you what my friends are up to.

Bruce Kushnick is at it again; his ebook, briefly summarized in a concise post over at John Paczkowski's blog, explains how AT&T took $2B in government incentives to provide broadband to the home but never delivered. 

Marm Kilpatrick, Auston Marmaduke Kilpatrick for long, has been speaking and writing all over the place.  Dr. Marm is an expert on West Nile virus and in hot demand lately thanks to the bird flu.  Go Mamadou!

Josh Dorf, a friend from Nicolet, cashed in his Internet chips and bought a flour company.  I am curious to see whether his dot-com-savvy word-of-mouth marketing techniques will transfer.  So far, sending flour to Tim O'Reilly has netted him a blog post over there.  I got some too and can't wait to make cookies for Valentine's day.  Who will get the cookies?  Maybe they will blog about Josh too.

Ace Bhattacharjya has a really cool job at the US Tennis Association.  He's creating a do-it-yourself, user-created-content website for them.  He's building a social networking app to help tennis fans find other players, courts, and leagues in their area.

Maybe he can hook up with my buddy Derek Lomas, who has built a great application called Scape that companies and associations can private-label and tweak to make their own Friendster/MySpace type communities.

People who are interested in online communities should check out Diane Hessan's wonderful company Communispace, where big brands like Kraft and Pfizer can have conversations with their customers about products and marketing messages. 

I can't end this post without at least a little WOMM tirade.  EVERY company should have these conversations with customers, and let their customers do the talking for them, but honestly, so few do.  Really.  You would be absolutely shocked how few companies actually listen to their customers talk about what improvements need to be made to their wares.  They think it's "too expensive". What a waste when so many people are willing to share their opinions in the hopes of getting better products and services. 

Software tools like Scape Networks, online communities like Communispace, and just the everyday reality of the many-to-many nature of the web help so much with the cost, that there is really no excuse anymore.  So get conversing, people!  Get on the Cluetrain already, it's been five years since publication!