Blogging

WhyMommy & give Peas a chance

December 21, 2007 by Susan Getgood

cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles

Over the past week or so, a movement took shape on Twitter to support a fellow blogger Susan Reynolds recently diagnosed with a difficult-to-treat form of breast cancer. As a result of a comment she made about using frozen peas to relieve pain in the affected breast, folks started adding images of peas to their Twitter avatars in a show of support. I don’t know Susan, but many friends and acquaintances do, and I truly admire bloggers facing life-threatening diseases who write about their battle in an effort to help others.

So, I decided I would put up a new Twitter avatar. A decision made easier when the Queen of Spain’s talented husband offered to make pea avatars for people, meaning you wouldn’t be subjected to my sketchy graphics skills.

However, I decided I didn’t just want peas. I’ve written here before about a courageous woman fighting inflammatory breast cancer, Susan Niebur, also known as WhyMommy, who used her blog and the community of mommy bloggers to spread the word about this rare form of cancer.

I wanted my avatar to honor both Susans.

So today, in their honor and also in memory of friends and family lost to cancer, my Twitter avatar is a pink Y, for WhyMommy, wearing a pea necklace, for Susan Reynolds.

Tags: Susan Reynolds, WhyMommy

Lame web celebrity lists and gender equality

December 19, 2007 by Susan Getgood

Yesterday, Forbes published its annual web celebrity list and last night, we had a bit of chatter on Twitter about it. I promised a post to further explain my thoughts on the list. Here goes.

There’s more than one problem here, so let’s start with the most obvious. Do we really need yet another web celebrity list?

If we truly believe what we say, that social media is about more than celebrity or rank, that it is about the democratization of media, that the long tail is just as important as the mass market, then we need to put our money where our mouths are.

We need to look deeper than the A-list. And not be fooled by lists like this one that merely scratch the surface of the richness of the blogosphere.

Now, I am not at all surprised that Forbes takes the easy way out by pandering to our culture of celebrity by creating a list that seems more appropriate to PEOPLE or the STAR. It’s a chance to show that they are more than just a stodgy mainstream business publication. Oooh Perez Hilton in Forbes… who would have thought….

Unfortunately, this perpetuates a misconception about what social media is, and what it can become. What we can become as a result.

Not only is that a real shame, but also it goes a long way to explaining why so many companies get it wrong when they engage. If we treat social media just like everything else, why should we expect that they’d "get it?" That they’d understand the fundamental differences between mass markets and the long tail, between bloggers and journalists. And so on.

The other problem is the gender imbalance. The Forbes list, like so many others, suffers from an over-representation of white middle class men. Only four women out of the 25. That’s 16%, for the math jocks out there. That doesn’t match the demographics of either the US population or Internet users.

The Forbes list is merely one among many that suffers from this problem. In the tweet-around last night, Chris Baskind forwarded me yet another recent list that purported to summarize the definitive blog posts of 2007. Just as bad. I counted 38 different authors (many of the same ones as in the Forbes list by the way) and 5 women. That’s about 13%.

Quite often, these lists mention the same women. Not to take away from their work and significant contributions, but there truly are more than a handful of women engaged in social media. And don’t get me started on the fact that the "definitive posts" post attributes CommonCraft’s great "RSS explained" video to Lee Lefever alone. No mention of business and life partner Sachi LeFever.

Now, we could say that these are stupid, lame lists, and why would women and minorities want to be on them anyway?

Unfortunately, that would miss the point of true equality.

True equality means that women and minorities should be adequately represented everywhere.

Certainly anything that claims to be a definitive summary of web influence.

And even lame web celebrity lists.

Tags: Forbes, gender, web celebrity list, a-list

Media Bullseye Link Bait

December 13, 2007 by Susan Getgood

Chip Griffin published some lovely link bait on Media Bullseye today, and since I think contrarians who have the guts to publish under their real names should be rewarded, I’m biting 🙂

Chip’s thesis is that there are a number of social media "rules" that just don’t make sense. For the most part, I agree.

As I’ve written here many times, to argue that there is only one right way to do something is silly. So while I personally prefer blogs that allow comments and publish RSS feeds, I understand why companies and individuals might choose another path (#1 & 2). Likewise, I’m not terribly fond of anonymous blogs, but realize that there are some situations where anonymity is necessary.

Press releases… Amen, Chip, amen. As I’ve said before, and will again, it isn’t the press release form on its own that engenders the negativity (die press release die.) It is bad, irrelevant pitching. That said, there is a lot of goodness in making the news release more social media friendly and the folks at SHIFT among others deserve kudos for pushing the envelope ( #3 & 4).

Messages. Conversation. Audience. And so on. Chip makes some very good points, and I urge you to read his post with an open mind.

The one point upon which I really disagree is ghostwriting. I do not believe in ghostwriting for blogs. Sure we know that CEOs and celebrities don’t write their speeches. Talk show hosts don’t write all their own bits. And if you didn’t know this before the WGA strike, I hope you know it now.

If your CEO doesn’t want to blog, fine. There are other ways to bring his or her thoughts to the customers. And other ways for the company to engage. All of which are reasonable approaches.

Hiring someone to ghostwrite a CEO blog is not.

Other than that? Rules are made to be broken. Isn’t that what this social media stuff is all about anyway?

Tags: Chip Griffin, social media, Media Bullseye

Are rankings rank?

December 10, 2007 by Susan Getgood

Regular readers of this blog on Typepad (versus in a feed reader) will notice something different this morning. I deleted the badges for the AdAge Power 150 and Mack Collier’s Top Marketing Blogs.

I’ve never cared too much for blog ranking systems. Ranking systems are popularity contests, of one form or another, and just not my thing. I enjoy writing Marketing Roadmaps, am thrilled and honored that so many people get something out of it, and love reading your comments. This blog has never been and never will be about having a top ranking.

But I do follow the different systems so I understand what’s going on, and in all honesty, did get a kick out of being on the AdAge 150, albeit toward the back. I also think Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing Blogs was a good effort.

The problem is that the source data these, and other, ranking systems use is, well, rank. As in "strong or offensive in odor or taste." And it just doesn’t seem to get any better.

Consider the following:

Bloglines has no idea of the total number of readers who’ve subscribed to my feeds. Or at least it can’t count them, and delivers a different set of choices each time you subscribe. Yup, I tried it this morning, and first time I was offered my old atom and rdf feeds, which are still active with subscribers, and the second time I was offered my feedburner feed and the rdf feed. Feedburner on the other hand has no problem counting them up and getting to a total number. But the AdAge ranking just uses one of the numbers. Does that mean it under-reports my Bloglines subscribers? Or is Feedburner double counting somehow? Who knows, and really who cares? Bloglines is so cluttered with inactive or duplicate accounts, it doesn’t matter which of these numbers is the right one. There are just so many opportunities for error, Bloglines subscribers is totally suspect as a measure of readership.

Alexa. Man, I just don’t get Alexa. Or rather, I just don’t get how it has managed to become an important measure. It counts page views by people who’ve installed the Alexa toolbar. Hmm. It seems that if you use the Alexa toolbar yourself, your ranking goes up. Mine went up 29% since I installed it last week. Hmm.

Google Page Rank. What Google bestoweth, Google taketh away. Just ask all the Posties who had their page rank reset to zero. I’m not fond of Pay Per Post (or whatever it is called now), but something that can be artificially reset to penalize is not a terribly good basis for a ranking system. Too bad Google already apparently owns the world.

And Technorati. Ah Technorati. You have had your problems over the years, but until last weekend, you were fairly consistent. Marketing Roadmaps had been hovering somewhere between 450-550 in authority, and in the top 10,000 blogs, for quite some time, even before the W list pulled some women, including me, up a bit. Because it represented people linking into a blog, it was more dynamic than counting feed subscribers. And you could *see* what the ranking was based on. That’s why I thought Mack Collier’s list was more representative of influence than measures that use subscribers or hits. But this weekend, Technorati imploded. God only knows what they did to the algorithm, but suddenly Marketing Roadmaps’ authority is in the 200s and we are nowhere near the top 10,000. Why? The same blogs are still linking in. I can’t imagine that EVERYONE who had the blog in their blogroll suddenly decided to drop me. We don’t know why things changed. And that’s the problem with using Technorati as a ranking measure. Not a big deal if it is just your ego taking the hit. But what if you are using a ranking system to set ad rates for your blog? Yeah, not so good.

Don’t even get me started on subjective ratings. Certainly, they are important for understanding the influence of a blog or a blogger, but they are also situational and inherently biased. They do not belong in ranking systems.

I’ll continue to measure the health of this blog by your comments, visits and the general trending I see in Google Analytics and Feedburner. I applaud the folks who are trying to come up with systems to measure the influence of a blog or a blogger, but am not sure it is possible given the highly suspect data sources available to us.

So I’ve taken down the badges. Not sure I’ll ever put them back up.

Tags: Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines, Google Page Rank, Feedburner, ranking, measurement, Ad Age Power150