Social Media Strategy & Engagement Marketing by Karl Long

One of the often overlooked parts of the Customer Lifecycle is the point at which a customer opens the box. This is referred to by industrial and product designers as the OOBE or the Out Of Box Experience. There are a couple of notable companies that give good OOBE, Apple being one, and the Dyson company being another, but many companies fall flat on their face at the point the customer opens the box. A classic OOBE for many of us was the cursed “batteries not included” small print on the toy we got on christmas day. I wonder what the modern day equivalent is?

Well anyway, there is now a whole blog dedicated to the art of “unboxing” and you can find it at unboxing.com, and a hearty Tip of the Hat to Adam Richardson of Frog Design.

And for all you Dutch speakers, here’s a version of unboxing from the netherlands, but they call it and Uitpakparty and they just threw one for the Nokia N91 (don’t you wish you had a babel fish sometimes).

BTW if you’re interested in participating in the uboxing meme, go post some photo’s to the unboxing flickr group. I for one will be posting pics when I unpack my Nintendo DS Lite this weekend
Cheers,

Karl

I just noticed the interface to sign up for the Teees newsletter was wonderfully simple. It combines joining, and leaving the newsletter in exactly the same space with no mixed messages or confusion. Also, because it is so obvious how to “leave” the newsletter it made me much more willing to sign up. Two thumbs way up, oh and they also blog about the best t-shirts, and if your in the mood for t-shirts check out my blog-vacation at Tcritic.com, why a blog vacation, because I don’t think too hard about it and it’s easy to update every day. It’s hell trying to think of something to say on a regular basis that won’t be totally redundent.

Cheers,

Karl

Another wonderful podcast called For Immediate Release, anyway, FIR 141 on May 29th, a few days before GodinGate the guys discuss the relevance an importance of enabling comments on blogs. The upshot of the conversation is “if you create a blog to engage, why wouldn’t you enable comments?”

This is going on my list of regular podcasts.

Tip of the hat

Karl

I’ve had a couple occasions where i’ve received trackbacks from blogs in other countries, and i’m almost always a little selfishly disappointed when I click through and find it in another language. It means that the conversation ends there for me, and i’m genuinely interested in participating, and finding out what other perspectives are out there. Anyway, i’ve got a couple of trackbacks from a Turkish blogger over the last year or so and he used to write exclusively in Turkish, until now. I was thrilled this morning to see that Marketallica is in English, and he’s got some great stuff there (as i had suspected).

Here’s a couple I enjoyed:
Flickrprenuership - mashing up flickr, amazon etc
IKEA Everyday Fabulous Campaign in NYC
Orgasmic Chocolates - A New Luxury Chocolate Company

Anyway, thanks Ozgur!

I’m not sure but i think i’ve been selected to be part of the 9rules network, holy shit.

Update: Yes it looks like it’s official, here’s the round 4 list on 9rules, I’m not actually in there yet as they’ve got to get the agreement in place and write a description and put ExpereinceCurve in the right category.

Boy I am extremely excited about this. If you are not familiar with 9rules it is a network of hand picked blogs that are aggregated on the 9rules site, it’s kind of like a very small very exclusive yahoo for blogs. They have about 200 blogs under a bunch of different categories. Currently they’ve got 23 business blogs, 40 design blogs, 10 technology blogs and so on, so you can see they’ve been very selective.

Their criteria are here:

• Great content, updated regularly. A nicely-designed site might draw readers in, but it’s the content that keeps them coming back.
• The desire to improve your site and your skills.
• A commitment to the 9rules community, whether that means helping fellow members or just giving advice to a new writer.

In some ways I feel like Steve Martins character in The Jerk when he finds his name in the phone book…

Managing the Grey hosted by C.C. Chapman who is the Digital Marketing Manager at Babson College and has been doing music podcasts for a while. Managing The Grey is about “new media, social marketing, no control PR”. Hmm. those are some more terms to add to the ever growing list of adjectives used to describe ‘new’ marketing.

and

Accross The Sound Hosted by Joseph Jaffe, of Life After The 30 Second Spot fame. Joe brings a wonderful perspective to this conversation because he has worked on the agency side of things and on the ‘new’ marketing side of things. Across The Sound is usually about an hour, but he does a good job of filling it with interesting content and gives a nice show summery on the Across The Sound blog (i think they call them show notes).

and

MarketingMonger.com - Marketing Strategy, Social Media, 1,000 Podcasts Hosted by Eric Mattson who is currently in the middle of conducting 1,000 podcasted interviews of marketers, innovators, entrepreneurs and other interesting people

Anyway, for me it’s kind of weird to just be discovering these guys as i’ve been an avid participant in the blogosphere for a few years, and finding these podcasts is like finding a parallel universe. Maybe bloggers and podcasters run in different circles.

After turning on comments for one post and getting a response that most bloggers would cream over, Seth is now clarifying that he’s not turning on comments as a rule.

It really begs a couple of questions, is a blog without comments a blog? To his credit he leaves trackback turned on, which certainly enables a degree of interaction and interconnection. Most militants of the social-media revolution that is afoot believe that it should all be open, conversational, dare I say naked etc. But hey, Seths a well known author and doesn’t need to answer to anyone, he sells enough books without needing to “participate” in the conversation.

I think the reason Seth is getting flak is because he has been a poster child for new thinking in marketing since he wrote permission marketing, and many people who are jumping on the ‘new’ marketing/social-marketing co-creation bandwagon somehow believe that Seth should be leading that charge as well. Maybe Seth is more a follower of the ‘auteur’ theory of blogging, and not the co-creation theory.

Seth has been “called out” in the past for not having comments on his blog and therefor being a bit “one way” in his approach, which is in direct violation of bloggers code of conduct. Anyway, he just turned on comments and I wanted to be one of the first to welcome Seth to the conversation
David also likes this move, and clearly Mack will be pleased to see this as well

Update: Seth has now turned comments off and gives his explanation here

Seth Godin posts a list of advice on driving traffic to your blog. In this list of 50+ items there is some sound advice, but much of it is at best contradictory, at worst bad for your blog. Traffic is one measure of success, but a more fundamental measure of success for a sustainable blog is organic incoming links. Not only do they drive traffic, they also form the foundation for your visibility on google and technorati. Seth suggests some topics to write about, but if you want to write a sustainable blog you have to write about something you know about, are passionate about, and are intensely curious about. Be authentic.

(Seriously, i love Seth’s stuff and i’m not trying to be snarky here)

Topical and Timeless.

I say stay on topic until you’ve built a readership, I say pick a topic you know something about and then find the other people who are talking about that.

Yep, that’s what we need, more bloggers talking about blogging, gadgets and web 2.0 That way you won’t have to compete against scoble, techcrunch, and gizmodo

I say write about whatever you want, but make it interesting

Good one and tag them and link them back to your blog

Why don’t you have comments Seth?
note: Seth just turned comments on note: Seth just turned them off again

No, don’t or you could end up with a sidebar like this

It’s not a joke, it’s a real product, and that was the real ad

Hey how about getting one for your kids at amazon

• Air-powered blaster lets you drench your opponents with powerful blasts of water or globs of gooey bio-ooze
• Hit targets up to 35’ away with a 27-oz. water-supply capacity or up to 20’ away with a 10-oz. bio-ooze capacity
• Blaster comes with 10-oz. cartridge of bio-ooze
• Recommended for ages 6 yrs. and up