a bee in my bonnet

Blog Blazers whets the appetite for more

At the last Social Media Breakfast, I picked up a copy of Blog Blazers: 40 Top Bloggers Share Their Secrets, by successful blogger Stephane Grenier.  The publisher (or the author?) made a box of copies available to the social media enthusiasts who showed up.

The book is a Q&A format series of interviews (conducted by email, it appears) with famous and successful bloggers, everyone from Aaron Wall to Yaro Starak.

Yes, it is organized alphabetically.

In fact, if I have a beef with the book, that's probably as good an example as anything of the author's unwillingness summarize or add value, to deviate from the formulaic way he set it up. 

All the bloggers, with the exception of Seth Godin, get asked the same questions, in the same order.

There are cases where this just seems silly, like when "Steph" the author runs through the list of questions with "Stephane" the blogger. (Yes, it's the same person.)  It also seems silly when a respondent replies with something along the lines of "I think I answered that question in my answer above." That's often enough, and somehow jarring every time.

This lack of critical editing and afterthought also leads Grenier to make a major error in the book, when he identifies "Manolo The Shoeblogger" as Manolo Blahnik, the famous shoe designer, in the chapter heading, even though the Shoeblogger has published a post trying to make it clear they are not one and the same. In the text of the chapter, in fact, the Shoeblogger says:

For the humble shoeblogger, the most exciting moment was when Maestro Manolo Blahnik the shoe designer, told the Times of London newspaper that he thought the Manolo's Shoe Blog was 'hilarous' [sic]. Ayyy! this was the Manolo the Shoeblogger proudest moment."

It seems to me that, if the author had carefully read the answers of the bloggers he was quizzing, he would not have mistakenly attributed the blog to the shoe designer. Or perhaps this is a problem introduced at the editing stage... but someone should have caught it, no?

Still, as a newer blogger, I have lots to learn, and there were takeaways for me from bloggers featured.

So, if you can put up with a formula that is, as my friend Francis Moran describes, "a mile wide and a pixel deep," then the book has some value to offer. It's a quick and (mostly) painless read.

Twitter is the new Google.

Let me preface this post by saying I am no SEO expert. I've been lucky enough to hire some of the smart people who specialize in this fast evolving science, and I try to pay attention, but I have never made it a core skill.

That said, I've been mulling something over the weekend, since my friend Eliot Burdett brought my attention to a tweet by Guy Kawasaki.  Kawasaki noted that Twitter provides Alltop (an information aggregator and one of Kawasaki's business ventures) 1/4 the traffic that Google does, but 10 times the traffic the site gets from Facebook links.

Those are astonishing results really for Twitter, a messaging and micro-blogging platform most of us only started experimenting with in the past year. Disruptive.

But these results are even more interesting then they appear at first glance.

• Alltop's Google ranking is certainly being boosted by the inbound links created in his tweets and many re-tweets of his posts. Twitter is very definitely improving Kawasaki's Google performance. That can be true for the rest of us too.

• In fact, to the distaste of some tweeps, who believe the knowledge will diminish the value of the conversations taking place on Twitter, SEO folks are starting to see the value of Twitter links for improving search engine rankings, and some are starting to propose ways to game the system (which I am NOT advocating, BTW). The key to understanding this is to understand that the Google algorithm has not yet been tweaked to discount inbound Twitter links, or to intelligently process the value of these links (by taking into account follower count, say, or re-tweets, or by discounting non-arms-length Tweets).

• As an information and link aggregator, with endless numbers of pages on endless numbers of topics, and a huge number of inbound and outbound links, Alltop should have a much better Google ranking on most topics than most businesses could expect to have, and more clicks from Google, where information discovery is the whole purpose. That means, for most of us, direct inbound links to our content are hugely more important than they are for Kawasaki.

True, Kawasaki's Twitter traffic will also be all out of proportion to the average twitterer, given that he has a huge following (> 80 K at the time of writing this, compared to my measly < 400) and his is one of the most re-tweeted Twitter streams.

Still, Twitter cannot be dismissed by marketers.

I have been saying to my marketing pals that consumer brands must be on Twitter, at a minimum to monitor what is being said about them in real time. More and more, I see the value for us B2B marketing types as well.

As an (admittedly very small, and very new) example, this blog gets 90 percent of its traffic from social links, split pretty evenly between LinkedIn and Twitter. I have also generated a couple of inbound links in other blogs that generate a bit of traffic. I have, to date, seen only a minuscule amount of traffic through Google, mostly for posts on a specific thing something might be searching for, like a book review.

I think the same is likely to be true of most companies who don't have a huge Google footprint, those in growing and building mode.

That is, most of the rest of us.

Related links of interest

Google is not about to buy Twitter. New York Times.

The Conversation is Shifting. John Batelle's Searchblog.

Welcome to the Hive-Mind. How to Search Twitter. TwiTip.

Ottawa. Hot or not?

Yeah, Ottawa is in the thick of winter, and so when I ask "is Ottawa hot," I am not referring to a sudden Spring thaw. 

Andrew Wahl of Canadian Business tweeted this report out of McKinsey this morning.  It includes the great visual captured below. 

Looking at the chart (click to see full size), Ottawa looks like a veritable hotbed of innovation, based on increase and number of patents filed. We score low on the diversity axis (meaning that the patents are being filed from a smaller pool of companies) but maybe that's not bad for a smaller centre.

All in all, this is a report I am sure my friends at the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation(OCRI) will be happy about. (Disclosure: I am on the organizing committee of Zone5ive, OCRI's marketing forum.)

Along with his tweet, Andrew asked the questions "where is Kitchener," home of RIM and, what happens to Ottawa-Gatineau "after Nortel?"  These are excellent questions that deserve further study. I'd like to know what percentage of the patents filed in 2006 (which dictates the the size of the Ottawa circle) are Nortel patents, for instance.

Also, I think this chart is only part of the picture. Sure, Ottawa may have seen a steady increase in patent filings during the period covered, but how many products did it bring to market?  What would this heat map look like if it were technology product revenues?

How many of those products were designed to meet actual, pent-up customer demand, and not some engineer's notion of what would be cool?

I've met a lot of technology entrepreneurs in my decade as a marketing consultant. My concern is that this town maintains its engineering culture and build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. For many engineering/entrepreneurs, the end game seems to be acquisition by a company with marketing muscle, or selling the IP to a bigger player.

Am I wrong? Are things heating up? I'd love to think that Spring is around the corner.

He said, she said. Your brand is social.

People are talking, alright. Talking about you.

About how you suck, or how you went the extra mile. About what it is they see in you, or why they are about to give up on the relationship.

They are your customers, your prospects, your market. 

On February 20, Stuart MacDonald came to Ottawa to speak at Social Media Breakfast, and his talk was stirring. The founder of TripHarbor.com (also the founder of Expedia Canada, and later Chief Marketing Officer for Expedia.com) discussed travel as a perfect example of a market that is inherently social, and discussed how brands (in travel, and other industries) can and should tap into that power.

For travelers, the actual trip is only the beginning. Many travelers invest as much energy on sharing the details, from war stories about airlines, to comparing deals and prices. Travelers want to share insider information, tips, and even their photos with like-minded travelers. 

[Aside: What are the other markets where this is true? Books, for sure. Others? I know I don't buy an appliance without searching online for feedback about the make or model. Is any brand or retailer facilitating that discussion?]

Some nuggets from Stuart's talk:

• Lonely Planetguides (which I note has added forums and user content on its site) originated in 1975 as a traveler-to-traveler advisory guide with insider tips. It was printed and stapled together and circulated among like-minded friends. Travelers today are doing the same thing. All that has changed is where and how the information is circulated.

• Sites, like Tripadvisor, when they first added user reviews, had no idea how huge that feature would be, with both consumers and contributors of the information. 

• Dealing with user feedback can be a challenge. With enough traction, the unfair negative stuff gets neutralized by other contributors.  The best recommendation engines have started adding in profile information, so that people can filter reviews by traveler profile (eg. traveling with kids v. a romantic get-away.)

It was a great and energizing session.  I look forward to the next one!

Thanks to @sylc and everyone else that helps to put these together.

[Photo borrowed from Stuart MacDonald's Twitter profile!]