Engaged In a Conversation

UPDATE: Stuart was kind enough to send me an email and I have since removed his last name from this post. Seems he outsourced a link-building project on a freelance board and was surprised to find the guy who took the job was not playing by the rules.

I hate the guys that comment on blogs like this:

"Cold air is certainly a relative term, but a name brand cold air intake is engineered to retrieve the air from the coolest part of your engine compartment. Cooler air has more oxygen by volume and therefore ignites better which turns into to increased power." - Stuart [last name redacted]

So I sent them a note on their "Contact Us" form.

Hey, Intake Systems:

Not sure if you have a guy named Stuart working for you in the area of "online presence management," but he's spamming my blog in your name.

Please see here: http://wheresmyjetpack.blogspot.com/2010/08/well-stop-when-someone-sues-meantime-we.html

I will let slide his grammatical error at the end of the comment, but you'll note that his comment has absolutely NOTHING to do with my blog post and is of the haphazard copy/paste variety that annoys people to no end. This is not a good marketing technique and anyone who told you it was is feeding you a line. If they are an outside agency, you should fire them now.

We have come to expect these tactics from Third World operators of foreign currency exchange sites, Costa Rican real estate developers and (in the old days) Russian pornographers, but I'm sure that an upstanding auto supply specialist such as Intake Systems does not want to be associated with such practices. You're doing well in other areas: you've got the requisite articles stuffed full of keywords and opportunities for people to "like" those articles on Facebook or share them on Twitter, but you have to tell Stuart to knock off the blog spam.

I see your headquarters is in Ocala, not too far from where I live north of Orlando. Go Gators!

I have a good rule of thumb for you when questioning whether or not an online marketing practice is a good one or a questionable one: Ask yourselves, "What would Tebow do?"

Don't make Tebow sad.

Thanks,

Dave

PS: Since you chose to "engage in a conversation" (as your marketing genius likely told you to) I will continue that conversation now over at my blog. See here: http://wheresmyjetpack.blogspot.com/2010/08/engaged-in-conversation.html

Ken Fox - Social Media Strategist!

I get Linked-In updates about former colleagues who now include "social media" in their list of "core competencies." Most of these people were highly incompetent to begin with, now they're going to charge you to set up a Twitter account and show you how to "follow" people. "Look! Now you're following him! Once he follows you back, you can start to engage him in a conversation!"

Chris Houchens also has a nice take on how everyone is now a social media expert.


SEE MORE "KEN FOX - STRATEGIST!"

Ken Fox - Strategist! (No. 5)

What are you getting for that "social media optimization" service you pay your new media guru for? Seen any money from it? Can you trace a revenue stream to your Facebook? Have you considered that maybe your teenage daughter knows more about social media than your well-paid "consultant"?

I agree, it's good to be out there, in as many places as you can find, but you really don't need to pay someone to tell you how to set up a Twitter account and what to say in your tweets. Pretty soon, you'll have a review committee and three rounds of edits before you authorize a tweet. Just get out there and do it. Kick the Ken Foxes to the curb.


Previously in Ken Fox - Strategist!

If You Buy This Book, You Are, How Shall We Say, "Not So Smart"

What a waste of effort on the "authors" parts. What a waste of money if you buy it.

Everything you need to know about blogging I already wrote here.

Nailin' It

Nail Communications of Providence, Rhode Island (state motto: "The Tiniest State") has a rare handle on Social Media and the Web 2.0 craze. Clicking that link will take you to an irreverent PDF/white paper of sorts, outlining Nail's approach to Web 2.0. It's long and involved, but what it amounts to is a little common sense in this wild frontier. Maybe you're already doing what Nail recommends, but I know for a fact that many of you aren't. Nail is offering this PDF for free, giving away all of their secrets to all the other shops and new media start-ups doing it wrong. (And hopefully putting a few of the scheming, scamming charlatans out of business in the process.)

Check out their 8 Internet Marketing Experts to Avoid. I've worked with a few of these clowns. If you see yourself in any of those profiles, I'm sorry. I didn't write it. It's never too late to get your girlfriend to cut your faux hawk.

Nail also has a nice site, utilizing the whimsical Flash animation so prevalent with agency sites, but keeping navigation simple, a rare thing with hipster shops. You don't have to guess where anything is, which is refreshing. I'm not sure why agencies (usually the big ones) think it's creative to create a site so unnavigable that it requires guesswork and insider cool to figure out.

Go Nail.

I'll Be Your Jackass of New Media

Rick at Blog World & New Media Expo says I’m a “jackass” because I shat all over his just-finished blog conference back in July on this site. For those who don't know, Blog World Expo is "the world's largest blogging trade show and conference dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of blogging and new media." Rick also tells me, “Glad you didn't come. If you change your mind and decide to come next year, please think again and don't.” I assured him I will not be there.

I’m on the record, Rick, as thinking this whole blogging consultancy industry is a sack of crap. My opinion hasn’t changed.

click for big

I'm not saying blogging has no place in business. That would be stupid. But social media should be common sense and we needn't have silly new titles like Social Media Guru and New Media Maverick. We don't really need a conference to tell us how to blog. What's more, huge investments are being sunk into something that can show very little in return. All the tools you need are free.

Here are a bunch more opinions of mine on the subject. So maybe I am writing the book. Or hosting the conference. And maybe I'm just a shitty capitalist.

The Corporate Blog Challenge
Enrage The Consumer
Save The Money and Get a Kid to Do It
Cold Call Carl: Selling Twitter Consultation
The Podcast is Dead
Cold Call Carl: He Keeps on Dialing
Buy the Book - Attend the Seminar
There's a Comment Pending Approval
Your Company Blog Bites
Drinking the Kool-Aid - Not Catching a Buzz
Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out
Your Title Was Boring and I'm Busy
If You Can't Trust a Paid Blogger
Relevance - It's a Beautiful Thing

Save The Money and Get a Kid to Do it

What Happens in Vegas Will Be Pointless

The promoters of this and the believers in it will say, "Mark Cuban is the keynote speaker! Mark Cuban will be there so you know it's legit! Mark Cuban is a zillionaire and he owns the Dallas Mavericks and he's a maverick and he's the keynote speaker."

I don't give a rat's ass who's there. Let me save you the trip to Vegas for this Festival of Nonsense.

Blog. Do it daily. Link to other blogs. Make comments on other blogs that link back to your blog. Ask other bloggers for link exchanges. Write interesting posts that have a unique voice. Don't just be a link farm to a bunch of bullshit that you didn't have anything to do with. Be original. Use technorati or any of the other tag services you prefer. Create interesting titles for your posts. Use pictures - they're fun. Use relevant labels. Don't be a corporate voice. Allow comments. Moderate them when they start to get offensive. (This is the "conversation" part you will hear so much about at your conference.) Try a podcast. Give up on it. Try a webcast. Give up on it. Give up on creating a viral video before you even try it. Viral happens naturally - you don't unleash it with a marketing plan. MySpace is NoPlace for your business and you will gain nothing from it other than people hating you. Same goes for Second Life and Livejournal. We'll see about Facebook. Tweet if you want, but the Twitter backlash is coming. For now, it's a good monitoring tool. Oh, one other thing: Customer Service is not a phrase to be tossed about in your Mission Statement. It's a practice. When you suck at it, expect your business to suck.

You can call yourself a Social Media Guru, New Media Maverick or Thought Leader. You can even print it on your business cards. But I don't need to pay a bunch of money to hear you say in two days what I just said in one minute. It's common sense. It doesn't really need to be an industry.

Buy The Book - Attend The Seminar

Nevermind that the book was self-published and the seminar is on YouTube. He will be called "Ken Fox - Strategist" in case he becomes a recurring comic.
Click it for maximization

Your Time is Gonna Come

I got an invitation to join YET ANOTHER network thingy today. This one was for “Spock.”

Cute.

Don’t need it. Won’t use it. (I know it's been around a few months, but this was the first time I was invited to "join.")

Spock is “a search application that allows you to see what people are saying about your friends and colleagues.”

Whatever.

At some point, this has to stop. How many different ways do we need to be “linked-in?” And which one is the best? How many different ways can I twitter your myspace or digg your facebook? What does it matter if I “know” someone you “know?” Are we going to transact business? I sincerely doubt it. Maybe we’ll talk about what an idiot you are behind your back.

A former colleague has apparently been viewing questionable content on myspace and now I get two comments a day from him about ringtones. Thanks, dude. I’m deleting you as my “friend.”

I say everyone just get a website. I’ll link to you if I like you and I will check on you once in a while. I may even comment on your blog if I have a moment. If you are in business, title and tag your pages with something semi-related to what you do, and I might find you in my search engine of choice

This giant overloaded blimp called Web 2.0 is about to go down in flames. There are a bunch of "thought leaders" in the "interactive space" on board, and they're wearing gasoline-soaked suits, walking around lighting matches. Show me one client who turned a blog post into actual revenue and I will show you 50 who tried it and found it to be a colossal waste of time. Show me how Facebook helped your clients. Give me a case study on how being Linked-In was beneficial in DOLLARS (not Linden dollars). Show me how having 10,000 “friends” is worth two shits. And if you say, “It’s about branding. It’s about name recognition,” then we’re done talking because you are selling snake oil.

Be Sure Your Sins Will Find You Out

A lesson is being taught over at FEMA for all of you Web 2.0 "pioneers."

Seems FEMA held a fake news conference where FEMA employees pretending to be reporters asked softball questions about the agency's handling of the current wildfires in San Diego. The ruse was quickly uncovered and the agency looks pretty stupid right now.

But the same thing is happening all over the blogosphere all the time. Let's say some self-appointed new media guru lands a client and sells them on a blog. As the blog sputters and tries to die, the guru will inject fake life into it by commenting anonymously or setting up fake profiles that make it seem as though people are reading and actually care. Or she'll go around commenting on other blogs as she tries to drive traffic to the client's blog. You get them all the time on your own blogs: "Hey, great post. Love your blog. Come check out mine at Awesome Medical Insurance Alternatives."

Or it happens with models like Pay Per Post, where people who don't give two shits about your product are paid to blog about your product. Some investors threw 7 million dollars into this idea, apparently unable to see the potential for disaster and failure. (Currently, Orlando based Pay Per Post is looking to hire a "Director of Customer Love." I will pause while you stop gagging....OK?....Now get this: If you are picking up what we are throwing down check out the listings in each department listed on the side of this page. I am not worthy of the hipness being thrown down at Pay Per Post.) Everyone's a loser in this: the whore blogger who no one trusts - and the client who was so desperate that they paid for random and obscure blog mentions. Oh, and the investors in this model.

This is such a no-brainer and yet people keep trying to do it. It's called ethics. You can't hold fake press conferences. You can't post unrelated, irrelevant comments on blogs and expect to drive traffic to yours. You can't pay bloggers to write about obscure crap while maintaining any credibility.

Man, I am really looking forward to the next dotcom bust.

Drinking The Kool-Aid - But Not Catching a Buzz

On Friday, Copyranter did me the kindness of linking to a story here at Where’s My Jetpack? (Good for a huge spike in traffic, with that link being the leading source of traffic over the weekend – and likely through this week.) In the comments section of that post, I thanked him, as did Mr. William Green of Make the Logo Bigger. Bill pointed out that Copyranter “ranks higher than me on every blog ranking list he doesn’t want to be on.”

Copyranter has no labels, no Technorati tags, no digg icons and he doesn’t Twitter. He’s not asking you to Stumble Upon him or mark him as del.icio.us. There’s no way for you to email his stories to your friends from his site. He steadfastly refuses to keep a blog roll, even though he’s known to make the rounds as a commenter here and there. The most he offers his visitors is a Feedburner link.

So what makes Copyranter’s blog have a Technorati ranking of 14,117 and an Authority of 297? (Those numbers, for those of us who watch them, are mockingly higher than many blogs with every social media icon known to man cluttering up the end of every post.)

Say it with me, class…CONTENT.

That’s not to diminish the value of all those social media tags and widgets, and if Copyranter were to employ them, he could probably write a book, sell it online, and retire in wealth and peace, free to toss the Plastic Flatball™ with his girlfriend in the park. But any book he wrote would only be a bestseller because of its content.

Content is still king. For all the attempts by some to make their blogs rack up huge traffic numbers and links from other blogs, it’s surprising how many of them have so few comments under the posts. Why? Likely nobody cares about what was written.

I’ve had the opportunity to help clients set up blogs, and I know many of you are engaging in the same practice. But I honestly fear for the livelihood of those blogs. Few are participating in them at best. And no one’s reading them at worst. Maybe it’s a lack of transparency. Maybe it’s already a backlash on the part of the audience, small though it is. It is easy to distrust a corporate blog, unless that corporate blog is in some way compelling by its content.

You hired a new employee? Woo-hoo! You’re speaking at a conference? Yay you! You landed a new piece of business? Awesome. You'd be better off to save that news for your Sunday afternoon call to your mom, so you can hear her say, "We're so proud of you." Or issue a press release no one is going to read.

I want you to tell me something new, something refreshing, something newsworthy or something funny. I want you to be an authority. I want you to have an opinion. I want to see you push the bounds of corporate communications and tell me how you, as the high-powered and well-known CEO of Acme, Inc., think the San Diego Chargers made a HUGE mistake in firing Marty Schottenheimer. (You do have a personal life. Your customers and prospects can benefit from seeing your humanity.) I want you to throw open the curtain and say, “People are complaining about our new rollout, Product X. Some have outright called it 'a piece of shit.' We’re working to resolve some of the obvious problems, but I invite those people who are dissatisfied to please comment here on my blog and see if together we can resolve your issues.”

Another problem with corporate blogs is frequency. If you’re posting once a week or less, just quit now. You need to keep it up. And get out there and comment on other blogs if you ever hope to see a visitor who didn’t just find you by accident. And by all means, do not engage in fake conversations with yourself, commenting anonymously on your own blog just so you can have some comments.

The Age of Conversation is very real, and I’ve made virtual friends (even met one) out here within this Series of Tubes. I’ve found voices and opinions I love to listen to and converse with in the year this blog has been active. The blog is a powerful and fun tool. (I’m not talking about MySpace, Facebook or Second Life yet. That’s a whole different post.)

Blogging isn’t going anywhere, but it has yet to be tapped effectively by those who seek to make it a means of “engaging the consumer.”

Tell Her You Love Her With a Plea for Sex

It's that time of year again, when date-rapists everywhere are expecting a little "thanks" for their "thoughtfulness." Nothing says, "I bought this for me," like lingerie. Forget the endless parade of jewelry store ads, you don't need to spend that much money for what you're after. Guys, if you want some hot action, listen to the lusty lady voiceover here, (with the campy stripper music as background bed) and order your girl some undergarments. She will reward you with her affections and your "I love you" won't have been wasted.

This advertiser knows its target well. The production and copy are so bad only a guy with a beer buzz could appreciate it. Aired during the Colbert Report last night.



And if you read the comments to this video on YouTube, it's terribly transparent the way the company is trying to do the "viral thing" with fake commenting from inside shills. If you're going to do "social media optimization," at least try to sound authentic. Something beyond "Wow! This is the best idea for a Valentine's Day gift EVER! I bought one for my girlfriend and it really worked, if you know what I mean! Great product! Fast shipping! Action not guaranteed, but pretty much a sure thing! Do it, guys!"

Why bother? A bottle of Old Spice is so much more affordable, and it does the same thing, from what I hear.