Global Neighbourhoods

Hugh Hewitt's "Blog" book getting props

Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit just gave Hugh Hewitt's new book, titled "Blog" props. Anyone here read it yet? I just ordered a copy. Haven't heard of Hugh Hewitt? He's one of blogging's biggest names.

Here's a point we're going to make in the book. If you want a good blog, you need to be authoritative and passionate. So, why are we linking to our competitors (and, gasp, gonna say nice things about Hugh?) Because the one who links to the best things in the industry is more authoritative than someone who'll only link to their own products and services.

By the way, did you know that if you have a blog you can join Amazon's Associate program and get paid money everytime one of your readers buys something after visiting a link?

We haven't done that yet here, but we're planning on it. Think about it. We could make money off of our competitor's book sales! Now is that innovative blog thinking? Hmmm. :-)

Will Blogging Kill PR?

A lot of things happened during the period from 1981 to 2001 when I was a tech PR practitioner. At the beginning, technology was this tiny niche. The IBM PC had just been introduced and it remained unclear if the new PC would beat Apple Computer in the marketplace. Microsoft was the No. 2 OS software company and most people felt that having killer apps was much more lucrative and strategically important.

I worked for legendary Regis McKenna, Inc. (RMI). Employees sometimes called the University of Regis, because so many of us learned a great deal from the marketing guru, then moved on, hopefully to do great things of our own. Regis taught us that the newsclip was not the key to PR success. The secret sauce was to build relationships with people who would make a difference to your client and to become a credible source of insight and information to them. Key influencers included investors, analysts, editors and individuals vaguely labeled “influencers.”

We didn't call editors just to pitch our client's virtues, but simply to keep up with what was going on with them and to chat about what were doing.  When editors were stuck on a story, they turned to the Regis mid-level operatives for fresh leads and new angles. At the time, no one called it conversational marketing, but in fact that is what it was.

I was very good at it, mostly because I had been a reporter and editor and I now treated reporters and editors as my customers.  Clients? They would come and go, but the relationships with some of these editors would last longer than my PR career did.

With a very few painful exceptions, I never overstated what my client’s news worth. When I started my own PR agency, I told operatives they could be fired for intentionally misleading the press. I taught clients to speak in respectful terms about their competitors, but to be able to point out your own competitive advantage.

But something happened during the dot com boom and everything changed. Tech PR shunted relationship marketing and adopted a more aggressive style called "buzz marketing. " Suddenly PR became pushy.  Operatives were hired for their physical endowments and for their abilitis in tele-sales. An all-too-clever new breed of marketing hot shots necame our clients and the disdainfully saw customers--not as someone to understand and serve--but merely as “sticky eyeballs.”

The purpose of press coverage was no longer to build interest, enthusiasm and awareness of client products and services, but to be able to drop a stack on the table during board meetings. 

The dot com era was very good to me financially.  SIPR had always specialized in start ups, start ups were breeding like rabbits on sex drugs. For a while, it seemed like entrepreneurs were lining up at my door, waving money in my face. But all the while, there was this queasy feeling in my stomach. Something was wrong with what was going on, and like most viewers of the emperor parading without clothes, I saw something was missing, but did not say so, because the money was coming in and I was fearful people would think that I just didn't get it.

Even before the bubble burst, the word-of-mouth food chains broke.  They just couldn't scale. The techniques I had used for more than two decades as a PR professional just couldn't influence the new, huge global markets. The same with news publications, whose models would themselves soon break. In the late 90s, there were too many editors and too many  publications growing obese from too much advertising being placed on money that came from too few earned dollars. Too many PR people were pitching, pushing, emailing, calling, press releasing and gimmicking to reach editors who were born yesterday and did not know they were supposed to ask tough questions. 

By the time, I stepped out of SIPR, the agency I founded and ran for 20 years, I no longer knew who to influence. I've wondered if PR was dead, and I've concluded that the way I practiced it probably is.  But what was at the core of it is being revived through blogging and other social media. The worst of the practitioners are gone, as are some if it's best.

But blogging now makes word-of-mouth scalable in new ways.  It also filters out bullshit with great efficiency.  It is also an efficient way to rank high with the most efficient way of scoring high on the most efficient placement of all--the Google Search results.

It seems to me that PR will not die, but will continue to experience a fundamental change.  The language, the tactics and the delivery mechanisms will all change.

The Red Couch will deal with these issues.  We also will invite case studies of how PR operatives will successfully adapt and point out cases of operatives who try to game the blogging system and fail to do so.

What's the vision for the book?

One of the things we do at Microsoft is start a project by listing the "exit strategies." In other words, what conditions, if met, will signal that a project is ready to ship?

For me, what will make this book great?

I've been spending a bit of time in the book store lately. The authors I look up to (for instance: Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Tom Peters, Guy Kawasaki) all teach you things by telling great stories. Just read the excerpts from their books. Their writing pulls you in. Suprises you. And teaches you all at the same time.

But it has something else. Their books have soul. The kind of soul that only people with lots of real-life experience can write. Could Guy Kawasaki have written anything about starting up a company if he had never started up something himself? I don't think so. If he did, it certainly wouldn't have had the authority that his current book has oozing across its pages.

And that gets to what makes a good blog. Authority and passion. Oh, and good stories and good writing.

But today's corporate conversations are deeper. There are two types of companies. Those that build great brands and products in secrecy and those that bring you inside the corporation and show you how the sausage is made. Hint: it isn't always pretty.

It doesn't matter which kind of company you work for, we'll analyze the trends of what's happening in today's markets. Word-of-mouth is hundreds of times faster than it was just 20 years ago back when I was helping run a Silicon Valley camera store.

News cycles now run in hours where they used to take days or even weeks.

Marketing is changing. 20 years ago you could advertise on a few TV shows and everyone would have heard of you. Today the audience is disperse and, worse yet, they have Tivos and Media Centers and can fast forward over your commercials and avoid you completely.

And then there's Google.

Let's say you're looking for a plumber in San Francisco. Quick, think! Your basement is filling up with water. Where are you gonna go for a plumber? Today you really are left with three choices:

1) Already have a great plumber. Let's imagine you don't have one. Next.
2) Play yellow-pages-roulette. You know, flip through the yellow pages. A ... F ... M ... N ... O ... P. When you get to the plumber's page, how do you decide? Biggest ad? Nicest customer quote? First name you find (ever wonder why so many towing companies start with the letter "A")? Nah, that's no way to pick someone where your home and your hard-earned cash is at stake. So, that leaves us with #3.
3) Google for "plumber San Francisco fix a leak." Now, how do you decide? Everyone on the Internet is out to rip you off, right? We heard that on the TV news. So, how do you decide? Do you take the first listing? Many people do. Or, do you add something like "great, love, hire, blog" to the end of that search to find out what people are saying about the plumbers in attempt to find one that other people like? Better yet, do you look at the authority of the plumber? Does he/she write articles on the Web telling you how to fix the leak yourself? Does the site link to other plumbers, including his/her competition? Does the site utilize conversational techniques? (Translation: do they have a blog, do they have an RSS feed? Can they be found on Technorati? Do they ping weblogs.com?)

See, there are hundreds of thousands of small businesses that haven't yet joined the Cluetrain. They don't know there are some easy ways to get better rankings on Google. That there are ways to drum up new business very efficiently and easily.

They also don't know that there's ways to get PR for their efforts that'll really help their businesses. It all starts with a blog. "Blog or die," we say.

If our book is any good we'll help businesses of all sizes understand the effects that IM, email, blogging, SMS texting, and camera phones are having on marketing efforts. Oh, and these businesses will learn how to get great Google traffic through doing a few simple things.

Oh, plus we'll tell you a bunch of great stories about how people are using blogs to build interesting new businesses (or talk with customers of already-existing businesses).

Sound interesting?

Conversation with an Agent

I could not help but notice that, while most of the comments about agents were negative, the comments arguing their value came mostly from people who used them, particularly in non-fiction areas. I also asked a few friends of mine what they thought, and while there was a split, most of our book-writing colleagues have recommended that we use one.  In may ways, they see it just like dealing with a lawyer--everyone hates lawyers, but most of us find we need one from time-to-time to protect us from maing really big mistakes.

Today, I spoke with, Neil J. Salkind, an agent from Studio B.  Neil was sent our way by Jeremy Wright, who has been very helpful to Robert and me, even though he is also writing a book on blogging from a different angle.  Jeremy strongly recommended Neil. I found Neil, to be knowledgeable and honest.  He made clear what he could and could not do for Robert and me. It was a good first conversation.

To summarize, Neil is something of a combination of a lawyer and our outbound marketing guy.  He's like a lawyer because what he seems to know best is the fine print portions of publisher's contracts, and just by the little he pointed out, there is some trickery that Robert and I might easily miss.  Neil has a passion for the negotiation and told me the difference between contracts that O'Reilly, one publisher we've spoken with, might offer and Wiley, the other publisher who has voiced interest in. He also seems like a born pitchman, and just in case our vision of a parade of publishers come to this site waving increasingly large wads of money in our faces, Neil seems like the kind of guy who would do this part well for us.

That, of course is the upside.  The down is that for any and all writing parts of The Red Couch project, Neil gets 15%. This impacts me, more than Robert, because the upfront money comes to me, with Robert making it up on the back end--if the book does well. 

At this point, we want to speak to more agents.  If you know one, please send them to this site and if they are still interested, please send him or her to us, either by email or by posting on this site.

We don't need to decide on whether to go with an agent or not, and then which agent to go with until mid-January, when our proposal gets closer to what we consider a finishing point.

Keep those cards and letters coming in.

Blogger gets $275,000 advance

Whew. When we went into this a whole two weeks ago we never thought there might be real money in writing books. But a blogger was just given a $275,000 advance for her book.

So far publishers haven't offered us anything (which is fair since we are still working on the vision/TOC/proposal for ours) but they hinted that they'd be willing to pay in the $20,000 to $50,000 range for an advance. Now, that might sound like a lot, but we expect to put a man year or two into this book.

Like we said, you don't write a book for the money.

Or do you?

Cluetrain & TRC

Tom Guarriello, on his TrueTalk Blog likes Robert's description of how TRC will be different from Cluetrain Manifesto.  "Cluetrain told you what to do and why to do it, this book will show you how. That's a great idea. "

He also refers to "Scoble & Shel" as "S&S" a term I like because it's impossible to determine which of us has top billing.

Our 'Local Merchant' Blogger

I was enjoying enterprise rss, a new useful blog by someone at Newsgator who is not Greg Reinaker and checked out their case study section.

I came across this gem, on a sign maker who displays Robert's two primary criteria for a great market blog--authority and passion.  This is a great example of a local merchant who sees the power of blogging and is a strong candidate for coverage in TRC.

The Couple Gets Less Odd

Less than a month has passed since I first visited Robert to pitch him on what would become The Red Couch Project. It's been two weeks and a day since Roberted opted to make this project transparent via the Blogosphere.  Our greatest challenge has been to work out our process of working together--even greater than determining the book's contents. We've come a long way.  The Red Couch will contain more of Robert's thinking and more of my writing.

This is as it should be.  Robert has a passion for and understanding of blogging that very few people can match. His vision and knowlege have been demonstrated in thousands of postings over more than four years. His story--and how it has changed the face of Microsoft--is applicable to other businesses everywhere and it will be woven into the fabric of The Red Couch.

My job will be to to organize and articulate his thoughts, with yours and with the many case studies we discuss into a cohesive argument that businesses must adopt blogging or face extinction.

This is no small task. As a marketing consultant in the past year, I've advised clients more than a dozen times to start blogging. There is progress, but it is slow.  A year ago, the suggestion was flatly dismissed and my suggestion to do it was poorly received. Today, clients are thinking about it, asking more questions, trying to understand, then dismissing it because they don't fully understand and because they consider other marketing "deliverables" of higher priority.

Next year, I believe a few will clients will try out blogs, but will do it all wrong. They'll relegate blogging to a mid-level marcom who will port language from press releases and collateral materials onto the blog.  They will review and polish what gets posted. They'll filter comments and screen out the nastiness. In short, they will treat blogging as another channel to communicate the same stuff in the same manner as all their other marketing messages.  Blogging will be an add-on tactic.

That's what I see happening next year.  The year after, I hope they will be reading a book by Robert and me, and that book will bring them to understand that blogging is strategic--not tactical.  That it replaces the committee work of marketing technicians and it's efficiency and effectiveness supercedes everything that has come before it.

The year after that, I hope, like Jeremy Wright, to spend my time on book promotional tours and telling clients how to improve the effectiveness of their blogging programs, without corrupting their credibility.  Robert, of course, will have his own TV show, perhaps replacing Donald Trump and it will podcast as well.

EBay Stays Tough on Jeremy

We're probably going to have some troubles with our plan to have publishers bid on The Red Couch at eBay, an idea which was inspired, in part, by Jeremy Wright's auctioning his consulting services over there. eBay and him have been bantering for a while, with eBay saying it is for products not services then adding some slightly acrimonious charges, or so it seemed to me.

eBay refuses to talk to him, except online and has issued its final edict, as Jeremy reports.

An eBay mucky muck opines: " I have determined that while your auction was in violation, you were provided with the incorrect violation notice. Please accept our apologies for this mistake.

Your listing for “Blogger for Hire - Start or Improve Your Blog", item number 5142129647, was actually in violation of our Circumventing Fees policy because of the following information in your listing:

'If it is a fit, the blogger is happy to negotiate a deal to make the position a more permanent contract position for a reasonable fee'

This information indicates that you are willing to offer additional services outside of the auction to interested buyers. This is not permitted and a violation of our Circumventing Fees policies.

At least he received a reply.  I inquired as to whether they would accept The Red Couch Plan and got an answer telling me they'd let me know in 24 hours. That was five days ago.

Extreme marketing makeover?

A few weeks back I got to know the people who are putting on ABC's "Extreme Home Makeover" (ABC's top-rated show on TV). They basically find a deserving family, send them on vacation, rip down their house, and rebuild it from scratch.

Wouldn't it be fun to do that for the book?

Rip down a company's marketing plans, send the team on vacation, put up the new site, and let them see the reactions?

Now, obviously, we can't do that for a big company like CocaCola or Nike, so I was talking to Shel yesterday and said 'what if we found a local merchant and talk him or her into letting us build them a blog and watch what happens?"

What do you think? Does anyone know a small-business that would make for a deserving "extreme marketing makeover?" Someone like a plumber, electrician, a winery, or maybe someone with a store?

She cares...

Great books, great blogging, great businesses really come down to:

1) Are you an authority on what you're trying to sell me? (Authority translates a whole lot of things, including whether your work is respected, etc).
2) Are you passionate about what you're trying to do for me?

It comes down to two words in this blog post: "she cares."

See, TDavid pointed out what a business wasn't doing well. And the business responded.

This is how business has changed. Blog or die. That's the new rule.

How are we gonna be different than the ClueTrain?

Someone asked "how will you be different than the ClueTrain Manifesto?"

I said "the Cluetrain told us why and what, we'll show you how."

See, the Cluetrain told us "markets are conversations." But, I've been living inside the conversation now for four years and learning some techniques that we'll get in the book.

For instance, what do you do when someone criticizes you, or your company? It will happen. Look at the Apple iPod. It's the product of the decade. But there still are people who criticize it (search on battery replacement, for instance and you'll find bloggers who are less than happy). If the iPod can be criticized, I'd imagine that just about every product or service will occassionally have a detractor.

There are a few ways to "make the hatred deeper" and there are a few ways to answer detractors that'll build long-term trust and turn around the public discussion.

Also, when it comes to the market conversation, we'll show how to listen to the conversation and be a part of it.

These techniques will be relevant to everyone from small businesses to people who are running major businesses like General Motors or Procter and Gamble.

You'll discover how to use weblogs to build relationships (David Weinberger called it the "hyperlinked corporation") both inside and outside your organization that can help you make friends, influence people, and build new businesses.

We'll look at lots of case studies of how bloggers are using online-communication to build businesses, get new customers, strengthen relationships with existing customers. Build partnerships (even with their competitors) and participate in the word-of-mouth conversations that are becoming more and more efficient with every day.

But, this is all a lot of hype. The hard part of writing the book (finding the case studies we'll put in and interviewing people like you who are using blogs to change the world) is ahead.

Really, this book will be how to hop on the Cluetrain and how you can too!

Hint: you either get on or your business will die. Blog or die. Cluetrain or die.

Are Agents Worth It?

Robert and I love Hugh MacLeod's artwork and we both feel strongly that our book needs an illustrator like him.  In the spirit of transparency, he posted a blog today saying essentially he'd love to work with us, but we should speak to his agent.

We understand, and we really had no plans of asking him to work for free in this commercial endeavor.  We thought the way it would work is we would get a publisher and urge the publisher to invest in either Hugh or other artists who have approached us.

So that started me thinking.  Do Robert and I need an agent as well? I mean, there's a little irony here, don't you think?  Here we are writing a book, that explains how blogging disintermediates the disintermediators of the corporation, and now we are being referred to the agencts of trusted colleages.  My experience in business is that when the other part calls in a lawyer, you either walk away--or get yourseld a lawyer.  Should we hire an agent, then have our agent call his agent?  Do we need an agent to deal with publishers?

I know some of the people reading this have experience in this area. We'd love to hear your input on how agents add value, in return for their slice of the pie.

Handling Scoble in TRC

One of the challenges in writing this book is how to deal with Robert Scoble as subject matter.  Unlike me, Robert is part of the story.  Blogging has elevated him from being just another liked and respected geeky guy, to being a global influence. His influence has helped to shape and popularize Channel 9, one of our favorite case studies.  As I wrote, long before anyone had thought of this book project Scoble is helping to change the face of Microsoft into something less demonic. His Corporate Manifesto is world-recognized as a guideline for corporate blogging

The question is how do we, as a writing team, integrate Robert's role into the larger story without sounding affected or self-serving?  Our purpose is to tout a technology that improves business for all parties.

So, do we write about Robert in the third person? We'll take the first 100 comments...

The Red Couch Book Proposal Link

This is the link to our original book proposal, where this saga actually begins. We are currently considering all the thoughts people have contributed to us and it will be updated, after we complete the first draft of the TOC. If you are new to this project, please let us know what you think.

Updates From Our New Home

Well, here I am in our new digs, that I share with Robert. I found the the key under the mat right where he said it would be. Lots of space, proabbly because there's only one piece of furniture, a big red couch. It doesn't matter, much.  Robert likes to sit on the floor a lot of the time. We need a shared space for this project so that our comments can be read sequentially, so that we stop tripping over each other with comments, and because too many of you who are following this project have commented that its a pain to jump around.

There are a couple of updates--yesterday, we spoke to a second publisher we like who is clearly interested and who showed some clear value.  We hope more will come.

The eBay bidding concept may not be able to happen.  They have announced, following Jermey's auction of his blogging expertise services, that they only wish to auction off hard good and we are not certain publishing rights are "hard services."  We've asked eBay and they emailed us back that they'd answer us within 24 hours.  That was about 72 hours ago.

Both publishers that we have spoken to have also indicated that they would prefer to do negotiating in greater privacy than the spotlight of an auction, and Robert and I need to pay attention.  More to come on that.

Finally, we've had a couple of comments saying that our posting are going slowly.  Well, the focus is to produce a book, with the Blogosphere being a major help.  We've spent time on revising the proposa, to incorporate nearly 50 excellent comments we received on our three former sites, and we are about half way through the Table of Contents, the second of three pieces that publishers will require before any of them actually offer us the money we will need in advance to write this book.

We hope to post the TOC and a revised book proposal before Christmas.  We hope to have the sample chapter written before February.

Where we came from

You might want to check out where we came from. We'll be moving things in here today and setting up the furniture and all that. Making this new place a home. The two authors are Shel Israel (he has done a bunch of stuff with a bunch of Silicon Valley startups) and Robert Scoble (he is an evangelist at Microsoft). Our old Red Couch site is on MSN Spaces. Great place to blog, but couldn't handle multiple authors, which this site needs.

Welcome to our book blog

Welcome to our book blog. This is where Shel Israel and Robert Scoble will create a book. Really. An entire book will be done interactively right in front of you and WITH you. So, subscribe to the RSS feed here. Welcome.