Wednesday, March 9, 2005

First depressions can be deceiving

This morning somebody asked, "Do you compost?"

"No," I replied. "I'm just aging normally."

A wave theory of death

Terry Heaton: ...nobody dares to ask the question of what happens when customers reject all mass market advertising? Ouch, eh?

Every time I watch TV I notice a strangely — even precipitously — high percentage of ads for automobiles. So I wonder, What would happen if all those advertisers suddenly decide (perhaps because they notice they're advertising mostly to maintain spendng parity) to stop advertising on TV?

At some point the woeful inefficiency of spending large amounts of money to "reach" people who aren't watching (or don't care, or hate suffering annoying and irrelevant "messages") will make its own case against TV Advertising As We Know It.

At some point, mass market advertisers will start conversing with, and relating to, customers. Inevitably, they'll discover how much more leveraged that is than spraying "messages" at "consumers" through "channels" between "content" that viewers would rather watch without messages.

Bonus link: The Real Battle.

InPodding

I'll be on The Linux Link Tech show tonight.

What it wasn't

Saw the Nightline on blogging last night (can't find a link to the show itself). It was good, as that kind of stuff goes. Having been at the Berkman meeting where much of the footage was shot (I saw my belly in the corner of a couple shots), I was glad to see that stuff that might have made controversial but misleading fodder went to the cutting room floor.

I second that commotion

Robert Scoble, our greatest example of a successful corporate blogger, modestly points to lessons he learned from Technorati's David Sifry and Naill Kennedy whose own takes on matters best known only to the two of them are here and here.

Good and helpful stuff.

I've written about corporate blogging already, and have little to add, other than these three points:

Nobody ever knows more about What's Going On than the people directly involved. In other words, if you're guessing about what happened, or making interpretations based on facts unknown, there's a good chance you're wrong.For solving personal misunderstandings, there is no substitute for face-to-face (or, second-best, phone-to-phone) conversation. In other words, talk about your problems among yourselves before you go blogging about them. Sharing personal conflicts with the world usually makes them more personal. And harder to solve.We're all still learning here. This is new territory. When a fracas like this one comes up, look to learn lessons from it, not just to assign blame.

Disclosure: I'm on Technorati's advisory board.

More aboard

Discovered Affiliate Cluetrain through my reader this morning. Here's the about page.

Found out, among other things, that EcomXpo was a hit. I spoke at the online show, which did a remarkable job, I thought. Especially for a first-time effort. The next one is coming in October.