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Ann Hadley has been blogging for three months now and she thinks she's found blogging biggest lie--that building up traffic is easy. I could write a book on what it takes to make a new blog popular. I hope some of you visit Ann and give her some encouragement. It's not all just plug and play as she has learned, but it can be done if you hang in there.
I have not met Ted Murphy, but he is co-hosting a blog dinner for Jeremiah and me in Boston on July 12. This morning he sent me an email pointing with pride to this BusinessWeek article accusing him of Polluting the Blogosphere, which I think is pretty accurate of Ted's new service PayperPost. Jeremiah, my co-guest at this event posts that Ted is actually a very nice guy, which he apparently also told to Marshall Kirkpatrick of at TechCrunch.
I don't care if Ted comes across as a bloody saint. I hope this nasty, cynical, ugly idea crashes and burns swiftly. Jeremiah may recall that last night over dinner we talked about the meanest people, the ones who have committed the nastiest, least honorable actions. They always come across as being really nice. They are accomplished at getting other people to like them,despite their slight tendency to be sociopathic in business.
I'm not saying that Ted is one of these. But I'm feeling a mite suspicious that he is. His email to me said he just was curious to know what I thought of the idea. He had to know I wasn't going to like it. He just figures that among my many wonderful readers are a few slimeballs who might take him up on his call to prostitution. So maybe he's enjoying any fuel I'm putting on the fire because it could be helping him.
That is not my intention.
When I was a kid, back when the wheel was being developed, there was a school play that nearly every school produced, called "The Devil and Daniel Webster." In it, Webster has a solo in which he says something to the effect of, "The devil won't show you horns and pitchfork when he comes down. He will be a well-dressed and well-mannered man. He will smile and shake your hand and call you friend."
I didn't much care for the play and I am sure I am badly misquoting it. But the pith of it has resonance for me today.
I was going to post a mild rant about Google Checkout, a service that I think moves Google closer to the sellers and further from the buyers in the online marketplace. However, Marshall Kirkpatrick beat to the punch over at TechCrunch. He covers all the points I would have made and then some.
But at least I got to write what I considered to be a pretty clever headline.
Dear Six Apart Friends:
I'm really a loyal customer as many of you know. And there are some glitches--like better authoring tools and a dictionary that recognizes the word "blogger" to not me a typo rendition of "logger," and I know in time you will fix all that.
But there is one really small thing that is starting to make me batty, or in my case, battier. I have turned on the feature that makes Commenters a string of alphanumeric characters before they can post. The feature has done a good job of reducing spam and I appreciate that.
However, Six Apart buddies, could you make it so that I don't have to pass the eye test every time I post a Comment to my own blog? After the first 30 times it does get a little annoying. A minute ago, I found myself hesitating before I left a comment because I didn't want to deal with it You may know that I spend a good deal of time encouraging companies to have conversations through blogs and here I am slowing down my own interactivity because of the little script.
I promise, I will never spam my own blog, so I feel safe if you could bring this teeny, weenie tweak to the top of your fix list.
Other than that guys, keep up the good work.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Ballenger, the Think Mojo man was quick to point out that my request for help finding the right washer and dryer was not a true test of Doc Searls Intention Economy. Doc's vision of for an online marketplace where buyers can express their intentions and sellers can compete for the dollars with their best offers. This today is of course more visionary than reality, although it would be really, really neat if it existed.
Through email, Jeremy also pointed me to Otavo where I posted my intentions and started my own blog, using the primitive blogging tools. I think Octavo is another one of those baby steps in the right direction, but I got no results that were useful in this exercise. Octavo needs a much larger number of participants, particularly on the sell side, which will be a challenge.
Jeremy was also right that my own post, published a fortnight ago was more an exploitation of my social network than a true test of the intention economy. And in that light, it became effective fast. I learned that front load is better than top for washers and that moisture sensors are important for dryers. I also learned that Whirlpool makes both Maytags and Kenmores, but for some reason, Kenmore is a more trusted brand than the others.
Then there's the issue of the store. Whenever I walk into a Sears I feel like I am revisiting my childhood The retail array has not changed all that much since I bought my Schwinn at the New Bedford, MA Sears & Roebucks with money I earned watering lawns in summer. We headed to Hillsdale where last summer, we chased KitchenAid as a refrigerator brand. We like our sales guy, had prompt, easy delivery and installation and forgot that we ever had one that stopped refrigerating previously.
This time Joe Letsinger waited on us and it was again, a simple non-pressure interchange. I like Joe. If you live in the area and need an appliance guy, I recommend you seek him out. Our washer and dryer were delivered within the two-hour window two days later. However, there was a problem. I thought our old dryer was electrical but it was gas and we do not have the right heavy duty connection for the electric dryer. My mistake. The hook is that Kenmore has discontinued the gas model of this dryer and the closest match in appearance was more than twice the price.
So the blog was a fast, easy way for me to learn more than I wanted to know about these appliances. People sent me to a store I already trusted at least on appliances. The blog made this whole process, simpler, faster and easier.
Now, please help me: Does anyone know a good electrician in the San Carlos, California area?
[Note--I fixed the spelling of Otavo.]
Our cat Kinko keeps getting into fights and losing them. Either he needs to become a better fighter or easier to get along with in the feline world. In any case, I'm used to finding myself in the middle of a busy day like today on the waiting bench in the animal hospital's urgent care section. Since I've been here and done this, I am smart enough to bring my Thinkpad. Taking advantage of the built in EVDO card, I get connection and start clipping off the emails that require the most urgent care of their own.
I'm sharing the bench with a rather corpulent, business-suited woman, sitting with her caged corpulent cat. She glares at me over her mystery book to the point where she's making me nervous. Finally, she snaps, "You computer people. You go everywhere with those things. Personally, I think you should be made to stand outside with the smokers." She the goes back to reading her book.
It's funny. She and I share several things in common. We both had to take time from what we do because we both care about sick or injured animals. We both sit on the same bench hoping our cats will be okay. But when she leaves her office, the work gets left behind and she fills the space with a beach book. I take my office with me.
I stop answering email and post this blog. This is my revenge and it lets me get past my impulse to be rude back to her, which would have been easy.
She has a very ugly cat.
[Note--I fixed a typo in the headline]
Josh Hallet has announced BlogOrlando Sept. 22-24 an unconference, an I believe the first ever in the southeast corner of the US. The last time I was in Orlando, the folks down the street from the Software Publishers Association Conference were blast a few astronauts off into outer space. It was one of the times they all came back safely.
I have two observations about this event. If Josh is involved in producing it, it has high likelihood of being a quality event. Josh is a quality guy. Second, it is heartening to see blogging go out to the edges of the tech community. An unconference in Silicon Valley is not news. An unconference in Orlando still is.
As the say down in Josh's town. It's a small, small world.
I stumbled across Farecast while Blog surfing this morning. The site, still in early beta, is attempting to predict whether airfare between any two cities is likely to rise or fall over short period of time. It is still in early beta and only serves flights in and out of Seattle and Boston.
This is a good idea. Many of us have lost any sense of loyalty to single airlines through the variations on mileage plus programs and viewing our travel as a marketplace where price is the driving factor, is in fact what people are doing.
Farecast has some interesting features including a chart showing you the trendline of whether fares between two points are rising or falling, and who the market share leaders are along these routes. But it has no predictive functionality as far as I could determine. It does not yet take into account factors like rising or falling fuel costs, rising or falling competition along air routes. It also does not let us have one look--as Orvitz does--at multiple airports, such as we have in the Bay Area, or Los Angeles, New York City or Washington DC.
It also dawns on me that most traveler have very little flexibility in the dates they are traveling, particularly for business. Even leisure is becoming more of a challenge. A family trip to Hawaii that I booked in March could not be assembled within 30 days of the time we original wanted to go. I for one am too nervous about getting a seat at all to wait for prices to possibly go down a few dollars if I wait a few days to book.
All in all, the more information we, as travelers have, the better we can make our decisions and Farecast goes a nice little step forward in giving us intelligence on a most dynamic market that so many of us need to use.
My friend and former client Gibu Thomas has an excellent piece about the bureaucratic headaches all Indian citizens undergo whenever they try to cross a border--any border. He reminds us that there are quite a few speed bumps in the flat world and proclamations that his native country is on an unstoppable track to emerging as a global tech powerhouse may be premature and a bit optimistic.
One of my faults is that I often stray from the subject at hand. I was talking to Deb Eastman, Biz 360's CMO who has recently contracted me to run a blogging presentation workshop. She was supposed to be giving me input for my talk. But she couldn't get a word in edgewise because I was off on yet another tirade about poor corporate support.
Yesterday and today I was dealing with the labyrinthine separations between United Airlines and United Vacations, which you will find on UA's website but is in fact not part of UA. This leads to customers being treated like a Ping Pong ball when they need information or have a problem. I might add that the UA side of this pincer of torture is a good deal more callous than the UV side.
Deb pointed out that she recently blogged about her problems with Mercedes and it was a good 10 minutes later that she managed to coral us back to the subject at hand.
I think the heart of this matter is that Deb and I are both marketing people who have come to understand the incredible flexpoint of how companies deal with customers and prospects when they have problems or just need information. Deb and I are both passionate on the subject. We both believe it is a marketing issue, as does David Churbuck over at Lenovo as I recently reported.
I go so far as to believe support should be a part of an enterprise marketing organization. It should not be treated as an ROI-depleting expense, but an opportunity to generate word-of-mouth marketing champions. For me this is an issue of emerging passion. In a world where companies and customers are having fewer and fewer face-to-face or voice-to-voice encounters, the imprint of the support line conversation is eclipsing the 30-second spot, the full-page ad and the ten city media tour in terms of perceptions and brand.
The good news is that more and more companies seem to be getting it. Th bad news is that most companies still don't or they do see it, and feel paralyzed for reasons that are sounding lamer every day.
Why am I dwelling on support n a blog about business blogging? Because blogging gives us a voice. There is much greater power in blogging about company support winners and sinners than there is in shouting at your TV sets.
