Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Kiss your children tonight

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Dear Elena. I’ve run across this blog a few times in my reading over the past week, and have been almost afraid to read too much, for fear of falling apart. My son is nearly six, about the same age as the girl who died suddenly last week, and whose father has written this most eloquent blog about her, her sister and their family.

My heart goes out to all of them, and I know I am but one of many many people who have been touched by this blog and this family.

Kiss your children tonight.

Peace.

Whew.

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I started my marketing consulting business in 2004. For the previous 10 years, I had been employed, in various capacities, and under various corporate owners, at a web and email filtering company. My last position was head of marketing.
 
I really love what I am doing now, and after my blog reading today, I am doubly, triply glad I no longer manage the public relations function at a filtering company.
 
Today, BoingBoing effectively declared war on filtering company Secure Computing, the maker of SmartFilter (and by the way, that is not where I worked. If it were, I would not be writing this post.)
 
It seems Secure is including BoingBoing in its “nudity” category, resulting in the wildly popular blog being blocked lots of places, including entire countries that use the Secure product. You can get the details at BoingBoing.
 
For the record, I think Secure made the wrong decision here, both in the initial decision and the way they handled the issue with the BoingBoing team. And it is really going to hurt them. There are legitimate reasons for using filtering software, but I won’t go into them now. This post is not about filtering software. If you’re that interested, google me and some of the older results will be my public statements and testimony on the subject.
 
What I am interested in are the PR and business implications. Because this will end up being more than just a PR firestorm that will blow over in a few weeks. This will become a business nightmare. Blogs are going to spread the word further faster and more furiously than we ever faced in the old days of the Communications Decency Act. And the folks at BoingBoing have much more clout  — through the blog and their other business and personal interests — than any of the opponents the filtering companies faced before.
 
Figure it out fast, Secure — blogs are more than just “personal diaries” and now, you’ve got the most popular one in the world gunning for you.
 
Like I said, glad I’m outta this space!!!!!
 
 
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Technorati Favorites: Most Favorited

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Just what we didn’t need — another blog popularity contest. Technorati now publishes a list of the top 100 “most favorited” blogs.
 
Oh well, at least this time, they’ve ‘fessed up that it IS just a popularity contest.
 
What will be really interesting will be to watch how closely the two popularity lists (unique site links and most favorited) track to each other over time. Already look pretty close in some areas 🙂
 
Because remember – the unique site links is what they use to calculate “Technorati authority.”
 
Hhhmmm….
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Yes, Virginia, there is good news!

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Forget about all the A-list rigamarole and Technorati’s problems with authority.

Start your week off right with this news report about an autistic high school student’s well-deserved moment in the spotlight. From YouTube via TailRank.

UPDATE 2/27 at 11:30 AM:  And then wander over to check out What if Microsoft designed the iPod box? (YouTube video, seen on Scobleizer)

UPDATE March 1: From BoingBoing, CBS "pulled an NBC" on the YouTube video of the autistic basketball player, but you can still download the movie at this mirror. That’s how to raise the ratings, boys, pull the feel-good story of the year off the net, where it is probably getting more exposure for your anchor than he got ALL LAST YEAR.

Roadmaps This and That

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So I am finally getting around to trying out Qumana. One too many posts in progress eaten by the "mystical keystroke combo" that closes all my open windows 🙂  And malformed HTML code because I forgot to save my Word doc as a text file before I copied the content.

Just a few things to highlight from this week’s blog reading.

Some more comments on the New York A-list article and resulting discussion of the Technorati 100:
InfoThought: Higher Jumpers Is Not The Same As Lower Barriers, or A-list Change != Rebuttal. While I don’t always agree with everything Seth Finkelstein says, I do think he has a point here. He concludes:
"Having more competitors who can jump over higher barriers is not the same as barriers being low for everyone."
A great post from Jory Des Jardins about Dropping the A-list Mentality

Speaking of Technorati — Technorati Favorites. Not sure what I think yet, except that 50 seems like a small number of favorites when most folks track far more blogs. Who makes the favorites list?Is it therefore an honor to be on someone’s Technorati favorites?

How is this that terribly different in its result than a blogroll. Yeah, I get it that a blogroll just lists the blog, while this highlights the recent posts from someone’s favorite blogs, but in the end, not that different in its result –it is a way of finding new blogs based on a reference from a blog you already like or trust. In light of all the conversations about blogrolls, and utility thereof, with some bloggers getting rid of them altogether, I’m wondering what need this actually fills? If blogrolls are too hard to maintain, or even perhaps too political, why do we need ANOTHER favorites? Some other comments on this (by no means all, just the ones I bookmarked):
Neville Hobson, Sharing your favourites

Frappr. I’m not sure how useful this is, but I can see how it can become addicting. I joined the group started by Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz in support of their excellent podcast For Immediate Release, and really haven’t done much with it. Well, this weekend, I got an email that Chris Locke wanted to be my friend on Frappr. I said to myself, "That Chris Locke???" so I felt I had to check it out. Sure enough, it was indeed that Chris Locke of Cluetrain and Gonzo Marketing fame (infamy??) Turns out, he was playing with it, and apparently inviting everyone in his address books. Well, I had exchanged a few emails with him about a year ago, and there you have it. I figured, what the hell, let’s see what happens, so said yes. And over the past few days, friend invites are dribbling in here and there. And I find myself checking people out way more than I did in boring old Linked In 🙂  I even "spammed" a few of my friends with invites!  Still haven’t figured out if how useful this is beyond the entertainment value, but it’s been fun, so thanks Rage Boy.

H&R Block. Miscalculated its own state income taxes, understating its liabilities by $32 million as of April 30, 2005. What can we say. What a PR nightmare. No matter how competent their tax preparers are, or how good their software is, they are going to have to deal with a perception that they screwed up their OWN taxes. Ouch. Seen on Threadwatch.

And to end the weekend, and start your week off with a chuckle, a great ad by HP (seen on Adrants) and a funny cartoon (thanks Neville)

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