Innovate - Word of Mouth via Blogs
See Small Business Not Hot On Social Media
I've been pitching the benefits of blogs, social software, and social networks to small businesses and big ones. Most of the people I contact don't know about any of these technologies or concepts. Believe or not, many business people do not know what a blog is, nor do they care. I persist but I am not alone!
Thanks to Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and many other books on marketing, my job of educating is getting easier. Seth is giving away, free, Who's There? the new ebook (free for now) This is an excellent primer for any person that wants to know about about blogs, blogging, and the biz implications.
Seth... I try to sell you hard on how building a blog asset can have a spectacular impact on you, your career, your organization and your ideas.
FIRST TRUTH: Clutter
- 80,000 new blogs every day.
- 19,000,000 different beverages at Starbucks.
- 19 flavors of Oreos.
- 172 professional sports teams in the United States
- On September 28, 2004, a search on "podcast" in Google turned up 24 matches. AS I write this, the number is 17,000,000.
The amount of noise we're living with is exploding. There's an exponential increase, but we're not noticing it because it's happening a little bit at a time. If it were suddenly turned off and we were transported to a three network universe, a world with three car companies, six radio stations, two kinds oflaundry detergent and two newspapers, you'd go crazy looking for something to distract you. Just because you're used to the noise, though, doesn't mean t's not there.
- And it is changing everything.
- When you apply for a job, so do a thousand other people.
- When you see a house listing, so do a thousand other people.
- When you bid on a grilled cheese sandwich on eBay, so do a thousand other people.
And when you want people to come to your blog or your website, so do a million (ten million, a billion!) other people.
You've just read that, but you didn't really believe it. You are almost certainly living in a different world, a world where you expect that some people actually care about you. Your boss nods her head when she hears about clutter, but turns right around and builds stuff and markets stuff as if it were 1969.
No one cares about you. Almost no one even knows you exist.
In addition to Seth's e-book, I've clipped, "Word of Mouth Improves Product Development" from Strategic Public Relations to expand on Seth's ideas of putting blogs to work.
Some companies cringe at the idea of giving a "free-wheeling blogger access to their secret sauce." But I know of several gadget bloggers that relish signing an NDA to access what's next. They follow the NDAs to the letter, give their feedback and wait until word leaks out about PRODUCT X to give an early, effusive insider's review. By having a hand in its development, these influencers become part of the team and give educated insight into the product's finer points.
Sam Decker from Decker Markting blog illustrates WOM.
As usual today, main stream media lags behind the blogosphere but I thought it worth a mention that: New Search Engines - Help Users Find Blogs , WSJ
...the tech-savvy are flocking to them. Julie Meloni, a 31-year-old Web designer in San Jose, Calif., often uses Google to find how-to guides for design tricks. But to learn what other Web designers are saying about a new development in the industry, she turns to Technorati to search blogs. "You can hear what the unofficial word is," she says. "You can watch the buzz happen."
WSJ does not really get it. Blogs, technorati, and other supporting third party services of the blogosphere and web 2.0 are gaining real traction outside of the tech world.