The Experience Is The Marketing
File this under great wonders of the internet, a 13 gigapixel photograph of Harlem. In the top left of this photo is the entire panorama, and the tiny red square is the area i’m zoomed in on.
and a bit about the project:
BTW 13 Gigapixels means 13 Billion pixels, whereas regular cameras are measured in Megapixels which are a Million pixels each.
Bobby Hendersons post explaining his Fine Art Taco experiment should be required reading for all marketing, advertising, business people, and bloggers.
Essentially Bobby put up a site with some badly lit pictures of taco’s and claimed the site was targeted at a specific demographic, people that liked both fine art and tacos. He demonstrated this demographic with a very nice example of a Venn diagram, showing the critical intersection.
Today BoingBoing linked to him proving his point of course, clearly there are enough people to buy his weakly framed and badly lit taco photos to keep him in beers for a while.
But of course no one is really interested in his photographs or the tacos, they are really interested wonderfully predictive nature of his experiment. His venn diagram and blog post are almost the queen of hearts a magician will remove from a sealed envelope after guessing the card.
But his point about niches is important, tight niches are what enable something to go viral, they provide the kindling to get something going. They are not the fuel, that’s the sites like boing boing, tech crunch, digg, the mainstream media. Think about it, it really doesn’t require much more that 40 people to digg something until the rest of the site gets on it, so intially you just have to get 40 or 50 people excited enough about it to get on the front page of digg.
One case study in not being too niche, if you will forgive the self reference, is my t-shirt blog, tcritic.com which I started about a year ago. A lot of people thought it was too niche, a lot of people wondered if I would be able to find enough to write about. Well a year later that site has been on BoingBoing (indirectly) and on the front page of digg. After 1 day on boingboing I had picked up over 1500 rss subscribers in a day, had over 10,000 unique visitors. My one day on the front page of digg of course crashed my server and then let to about 25,000 unique visitors. In fact my most viewed content on the site is two very niche blog posts my top ten list of star wars t-shirts, and my top ten list of video game t-shirts (and as they are months old and still get about 50% of my traffic they also demonstrate how the long tail works on niches as well).
If it really is only about 50 to 100 people that are passionate about something it’s no wonder that a post titled the 50 most influential bloggers is some of the best linkbate this year… that and the leave brittney alone guy (dugg over 5000 times geez).
Blogs are almost old hat as a “how did you hear about us” question. I wonder when twitter or facebook becomes a source worth tracking.
Anyway, the Thrillist is an email newsletter that recomends the best cool stuff that’s going on in a particular area. Beyond nightlife it also covers gear, gadgets, shopping etc. You kind of get the demographic from their email confirmation page, I love the fact that it says “we’ve got your email”, and the illustration of the guy getting tattood, brilliant.
Tip of the hat to Fimoculous, and Rex if you ever come to SF lets get a drink 
Jeremiah Owyang is too smart for his own good sometimes but he hit on and incredibly interesting point on his post “The Difficult Balance in Writing a Career Blog“, where he states “blog you’re reading “Web Strategy by Jeremiah” is a career blog”. For me that is a very useful distinction and a label I think is quite appropriate for ExperienceCurve, which is by all intents and purpose is my career blog. Blogs are in fact better than resumes because they are dynamic (always up to date) and they are connected, connected to people you respect, and hopefully linked to by people you respect as well.
On a side note I wouldn’t be surprised if blogs and social networks end up becoming a replacement or at least and extension of often stagnating intranets and knowledge management systems that many companies have. I just found out recently that there are over 2,100 people in the Facebook Nokia network, I wonder how many will be in there in a years time?
See also:
How Social Networks are Disrupting Everything you Know About Business
Who’s Harnessing Social Networks?
And some great examples of career blogs:
David Armano
Mack Collier
Mario Sunder
Greg Verdino
Stowe Boyd
Scott Weisbrod
Dino Demopoulos
Technorati has just added a new feature called topics, I was very excited to hear this because as you know i’ve written a couple of articles begging Technorati to get back to it’s roots of building tools for bloggers (see Can Bloggers Save Technorati). Unfortunately my excitement was short lived, and I’m beginning to feel like a long suffering technorati user.
It turns out that topics are just a live feed of blog posts that are under 6 unfeasibly large categories of Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life. Needless to say these topics are updated every second or so, leading to a pretty useless stream of unrelated blog posts, from popular blogs. Read/Write Web where I picked up this story agrees:
Now Read/Write Web suggested in their headline that Technorati might be taking on Techmeme and I really wish that was the case, but it’s not, Techmeme actually pulls together blog posts that are talking about the same thing, which is really valuable if you want to understand the context of a story. IMHO if Technorati did try and take on Techmeme that would be a very good move, Techmeme is extremely limited in the topics that it covers and the blogs that it indexes. It seems to me that Technorati with it’s link tracking, tags, and authority could blog Techmeme out of the water on more niche topics. Imagine a techmeme for marketing, or social media, or secondlife, or twitter.
I’m afraid the Technorati topics reminds me of that phrase “for every complex problem there is a simple solution which is wrong”.
They have a feedback area in their forums, if you are a technorati user I suggest you check out the topics, and then go and give your feedback in the forums, I did.
UPDATE: lots of coverage on Techmeme, and a great quote from Stowe Boyd:
What a brilliantly asinine quote from Mark Simon, a VP-industry relations for SEM firm Didit in his article for Ad Age “Ditch the Lunatic Web Content Crazes - Beyond the Hype: The 10 Most Asinine Trends Online and Why You Should Ignore Them”
Even more ironic this is under “CMO Strategy”, yep this is exactly the kind of advice you need if you’re a CMO, ignore new things, don’t experiment, don’t participate and your world will be simpler, safer and easier to understand.
Follow me on twitter at twitter.com/karllong where I talk constantly about my need for big macs.
Thanks David, who also has a twitter page where he broke a story about an old woman being rescued from her car that was stuck on the train tracks, yep, another boring day in twitterland
The New York Times just reported:
This is why NBC is totally boneheaded for trying to charge $4.99 an episode for their stuff on iTunes. The entertainment business, music, movies and TV actually need to figure out how to make there stuff more “shareable” not less. The television channel as a concept is outdated, I wrote back in January that Reinventing Television Might Be Easier Than We think, and guess what, Vint Serf agrees with me
No kidding. With Cory Doctrow saying DRM is an impossible dream and the music industry proving that suing your customers is bad for business, the TV industry has to try another route. With shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report proving the power of social media and demonstrating that engaging with audiences is better than alienating them we can move away from companies trying to cripple our media and set it lose and extend it.
In the last couple of years the idea of reaching out to bloggers as a PR/Marketing tactic has started to become a mainstay for companies looking to engage early adopters and technology leaders. I’ve personally been amazed at the sophistication and scale of programs that I have been privy to. Way beyond schwag, bloggers have become an important, trusted, and generally independent voice in the media sphere. As more and more companies approach and interact with the O’Sphere questions of ethics, independence and transparency have come to the fore. Somewhat related I think the the Nikon Ambassador program was extremely well executed, Pop PR has an in depth case study of some Nokia blogger outreach and Greg Verdino has got a bit of a blogger outreach roundup here.
Anyway, the reason I started writing this post was I recently read about Ogilvy PR’s Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics from Rohit Bhargava’s Blog and I think it’s a great start and an important reference for any companies engaged in blogger outreach programs.
Here’s the list including some some emphasis to things I think are important.
It must be Fake Steve who wrote the open letter to iphone customers because i’ve never heard of the Real Steve Jobs listening to anyone Or as the New York Times writes “Meet the New Mr. Jobs: He Listens to Customers“. As Om and others have suggested, if it wasn’t for blogs, twittering and other social media Apple would have never done the right thing so quickly. Lets hope Ask A Ninja is happy now, I would hate to have him on the wrong side of me
I was just reading a post on Scoblizer where Robert is talking about the iPhone price drop and in the middle of the post I came across this statement:
Seagate, today, just brought out new hard drives. More capacity. More features. Lower price.
Now I know Seagate sponsors the Scoble Show, so it was not really a surprise to me, but it seemed like a square peg getting jammed in a round hole to see that in a totally unrelated blog post. If there was a big badge on his blog saying “this blog is sponsored by Seagate” I think it would be much better, but there is no such disclosure, whereas you go to the Scoble Show and Seagate is all over it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think anyone is totally unbiased, and i’ve written about schwag before but I like to see it up front, rather than woven into unrelated blog posts.
The reason I bring this up is not to attack Robert, the Vallywag is there for that, I do it because i think he is a pretty important figure in the blogosphere and I think his conduct in the blogosphere often sets the bar. I mean he just co-authored the Social Media Bill of rights.
Thoughts?
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