Above Ryze?

Imagine the power of Ryze with 40 million participating members.

My company, Monster Worldwide, is launching an online networking community, Monster Networking, the beginning of next year. I know about as many details as is in the press release but I think the potential is incredible. Monster has 40 million job seeker accounts and thousands of recruiters all on Monster with the purpose of advancing their careers and/or business.

Monster Networking is an online community where professionals across all industries and levels can exchange information about jobs, offer expertise and help others achieve their goals.

Monster will serve as the host in this community, fostering introductions between members and encouraging them to share career advice, cultivate long-term professional relationships, and support each other's goals. Proprietary matching technology will allow Monster to proactively initiate introductions between participating members as well as promote relevant career opportunities based on criteria in a member's professional profile. Member profiles will include skills, occupation, employment history, schools attended, titles, interests, and geographic location.

VeriSign Says Adios to .net and .com

Not sure what this all means, but I am sure there will be much commentary: VeriSign exits '.net', '.com' domains - 2003-10-16 - Washington Business Journal

Micropayments, Blogs and Content

Rick Bruner has a much more thought-out response to the micro-payment issue that I only gave a few seconds thought to below.Micropayments: An Open Letter to Tony Pierce, Clay Shirky and PayPal

Kelsey Group Conference Digital Directories & Interactive Local Media

I'll be attending the Kelsey Group'sDigital Directories & Interactive Local Media in Alexandria, VA October 22-24. Looks like there are some great panelists and speakers. Hopefully, see you there!

Blogger Con: Webcast

Video of BloggerCon! Blogger Con: Webcast

Debbie Weil's Top 20 definitions of blogging.

Paid Subscription Blogging, Part 1 -- A Catch-22

Pay to read a blog? Vin Crosbie entertains the thought with commentary from Rick Bruner.

I don't know -- to me blogs aren't content, but pieces of conversations. The more involved in those conversations a blog is, the more valuable the blog. If you pay for access to blogs, you limit the number of participants who can enter the conversation, thus making them less valuable.

Business Blogs are really a new form of marketing or PR. They are a way to engage with a customer base to grow a customer base and keep that customer base engaged with your business.

For the most part, the business blog isn't a business ends, but a means to more business.

The New Communities

Great column by Sean Carton in ClickZ about communities and their potential in marketing:The New Communities

If Spam Dies, is Email Still Broken?

My email inbox at work is a nightmare. I was embarrassingly showing a co-worker the depths of my inbox. August 22, 2002 was the last email I had. Sorry, whoever you are. I have 84 un-read messages. That's not to say they haven't been read because I know they all have been. Un-read is my way of telling myself, "do this." Not a great system.

SPAM isn't the problem. It's just the volume of legitimate email. David Gelernter in the Weekly Standard has a great write-up on my email overload problem (okay, yours too) and offers some possible solutions. (via Many2Many)

Sheer volume has turned email into an unreliable medium. Spam to the side, there is already too much (honest, legitimate) email for people to manage, and so they overlook messages or forget to answer them, in consequence of which conversations peter out into nothing--and no one is quite sure why, or what to do next. Excessive email volume is a fact of life and is never going away. The threat--which is guaranteed to force a massive retreat from this spiffy new medium within a few years unless we solve it--is the growing opacity of email, the Black Hole problem. If you haven't encountered it yet . . . just wait. Spam makes it worse, but it was a problem before spam and will remain long after spam is cured.

Here's how it works. You get an email (maybe longer or more complicated than average, or from someone you don't know); you have no time to respond right now, but you mean to answer--but other emails stack up, and you answer those first--but you still plan to reply--but more emails keep arriving. . . . Meanwhile the sender is wondering: Is he ignoring me on purpose? (I'll cross him off my list and forget about it.) Did he mean to reply, but has since forgotten? (Resend my message.) Or does he still mean to reply and just hasn't gotten around to it? (Don't get mad or resend.) All three possibilities are real, and happen all the time.

As volume rises, more email conversations trail off into nothing for unknown reasons, the medium is devalued further, and the problem gets worse--people set even less store by a mail message, send one out on even less provocation, volume rises, more email conversations trail off into nothing for unknown reasons, the medium is devalued even further.

Rush Limbaugh confirms this point.

:-(

Today is a sad day indeed because I just confirmed one of my favorite lunch spots, Chipotle, is a big calorie fest. This report shows their burritos have more calories than 2 quarter pounders with cheese!! And I thought this was a healthy alternative! I guess the only saving grace is I get chicken burritos, light on sour cream and cheese.

Eye for Intelligence: Good weblog with links to stories on Internet marketing news and information intelligence. Like MarketingWonk but without the smart-ass comments ;)

It's the Contact, Stupid

Great quote which, if followed, will propel online marketing to 2.0 "In an interactive space, content is not king. Contact is." -- Douglas Rushkoff

Hello?

I just dowloaded Skype. Of course I don't know anyone who is using it so it's kind of hard to see how useful this will be. Seems like it'd be a great dating tool ... although I don't have any use for that anymore. Be available to anyone who wants to chat seems a little scary too. There should be some way to at least search for people by interest. Also, how is Skype protecting against spammers? okay, more questions than answers, guess I just got to try it.

Cool discussion forum / blog thingie on the mobile internet I just came accross .... The Feature

Lucky

I was just starting to blog about how I wasn't going to make it back from Chicago because of Isabel and what a pain it was going to be to get my travel plans situated.

But 60 Minutes II was on and Dan Rather was interviewing two soldiers from the Iraq war who were held prisoner for 21 days. They were beaten with sticks, kicked and hit after being captured. Moved to a jail in Baghdad with a "tin roof" during the most intense bombing by the Americans. Their 3-foot thick jail cell walls shook. They never comprehended the might of U.S. force until they witnessed it first hand. They thought they were going to killed by friendly fire while held captive. One smiled at the guards every time a bomb dropped while the whole building shook to give himself a small victory. They heard American tanks roll in and thought they were about to be rescued just to be swept up by guards and driven around to probable targets to be killed. They were driven through the cross fire at 100 mph in the back of a small ambulance which leaned on 2 wheels as it took turns. They were brought into a small village and kept captive in a house. A Commander got a tip they were in the house. And with "professionalism, just how they were trained" hard-fought Marine killers who marched from Kuwait stormed the house and rescued the U.S. soldiers.

Mixed up travel plans aren't so bad after all.

Consumers: An Open Source For Open Source Innovation?

Renee Hopkins posts a very interesting conversation she had with Andy Hargadon, author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate. Andy argues that using lead consumers in the development of your products is a kin to open source and innovation in the early days.

Good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity came mostly from the "open source" nature of the early mechanical equipment used in agriculture and manufacturing. The wheels, gears, cranks, belts, pulleys, sifting, sorting, bundling, bobbing, and weaving were all right out there. If anything broke, workers in the field and factory fixed it — and if they were worth anything, improved on whatever it was that broke. James Watt "invented" the steam engine when he was asked to repair a Newcomen engine and turned it from a single-stroke to a two-stroke piston action. Much of America's rapid advances in industrialization in the 19th century came from these self-taught mechanics who moved from fixing equipment in their small towns to developing their own more radical innovations....

Is this bad? It depends on whose perspective you take. McCormick (of the reaper) and many others found that farmers and local craftsmen were knocking off their products (and improving upon them) in ways that both made it hard for them to amass fortunes, but also in ways that rapidly improved on the technologies. Patent and copyright laws protect the first to claim legal ownership, but deny the origins of their work and, as badly, forestall future improvements by others.

more on enabling lead consumers in product innovation here.

Washington Post covers Tuesday night's business blog panel here.

Last Night's Blog Panel

Last night's Conversations with Your Market blogging panel went well. The audience was surprisingly light on bloggers -- most were just interested in learning more about "what all the hype" has been about. I'd say the break down was about 40% bloggers, 40% blog "voyeurs" (a term used by panelist Mike Hazzard), and 20% just curious.

The panel discussion was engaging and typical at the same time. It was probably the right mix for audience we had. No new ground was broken and Debbie Weil (who I realized I had been mispronouncing her name since subscribing to her newsletter --- its 'wile' not 'weel') said as we were leaving "It went well, but I'm not sure what we accomplished" to which I replied "Isn't that what blogging is all about?"

One of the topics included whether aggregators will replace email newsletters. Not until recently have I thought perhaps. But it makes total sense to me. Why not subscribe to RSS feeds and have them pulled from a website when email is overwhelming in its volume of not only spam but legitimate email. I give it 2 years until most email newsletters are delivered via RSS. Some of the audience members gasped when Bill Kearney, RSS guru, suggested such a thing.

One other interesting thought I had about the panel was Jeanne Jennings who is an email marketer, kept referring to herself as a contrarian. I thought business blogger proponents were the contrarians. It seems that a shift was made. She's not anti-blog, but thinks they aren't the most effective business communication medium. Jeanne made a terrific point about business blogs .... "I'm a business person, if it's not affecting the bottom line it's not for me." Great point, but I think we need to look at the long-term effects in terms of customer loyalty. If anyone can take a look the recent Harvard Business Review, Hailley Suitt has a terrific fictional case study about a woman at a medical supply company who started a blog without the knowledge of management and attracted quite a loyal customer base for a line of gloves her company was selling. If blogs can create that kind of affinity and can create conversations within a market among your customers you're achieving something that marketers rarely could do, leverage word-of-mouth. Even business people should like that. ;)

After the panel there was some good mingling in the crowd. For the blog newbies, I found some skeptics. Who is going to pay someone to blog all day? Who has time with all the other things that go into a typical work day? I see no difference between blogging and discussion groups. All valid points, but I'm sure someone's salary is much cheaper than most advertising. I bet within any organization larger than 20 people there's a natural born blogger in there that is waiting at the wings to let it all out. Blogs, unlike discussion boards, give the blogger ownership of a website. Conversations are carried across websites, as opposed to on them.

Several audience members told me they learned a lot. It was a great experience for me as well, as I had never moderated a panel before.

Conversations with Your Market ... and Me

Tom Tweedy has asked me to moderate the New Media Society's panel on business blogging tomorrow night. So if you're in DC, be sure to come check it out. I've very excited as there are some super smart and super successful people on the panel. Debbie Weil, Stowe Boyd, Michael Hazzard and Jeanne Jennings.

UPDATE: Unfortunately Stowe Boyd is working on the West coast. But Bill Kearney from Syndic8 has graciously agreed to fill-in last minute.

Thanks to Rick for passing along my name.

Low Blog Summer

Wow, most of what I've blogged about this summer is how little I've blogged. It's honestly been nice getting back to some offline world activities. Work is lively. And I've enjoyed spending time with Amy when I'm home. Interestingly my traffic is increasing. I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Hmm.

One of my favorite email pubs started a blog .... MarketingProfs. Check it out.

Anyone in the DC area should be sure to attend the New Media Society's panel on business blogging. I'll be in attendance and Debbie Weil will be a panelist. They claim to have 70 people registered so far! Looking forward to it!

And check back here soon as things should pick up.

Beyond Branding

When I read Gonzo Marketing and The Cluetrain Manifesto a couple years ago the ideas presented seemed so right but so out of reach. Gonzo and Cluetrain took what marketers were missing online and gave us a whack on the side of the head. The ideas in these books have continued as conversations on the net (where and how they started) and I think we're on the brink of a real marketing transformation.

The evidence is more apparent every day. For the past few years at work I've had this feeling of the kid in the back of the class with an idea waiving his hand but chickening out at the last minute because he thought no one would understand where he was coming from. "These people only know the old paradigm. How could I possibly get them to understand the new. It's so foreign to them." Perhaps Cluetrain and Gonzo led me to believe this too much.

But as I see things like Up2Speed playing a dominant role in shaping online marketing and advertising and I hear things like "community of trust" and "connecting buyers with buyers" in my 35 year old company's strategy meeting .... really making something out of our company's 'noble purpose,' "Bringing people together to advance their lives" I feel like the sales job is going to be a heck of a lot easier. People are starting to get it.

Which brings me to the title of this entry and a new book coming out in the fall, Beyond Branding. While I've only read the website, this book looks like it encompasses what I see as true branding. All companies brand, whether it's the image they wish to portray or the reality of the organization. The book includes a whole slew of authors coming from various branding backgrounds and talks about "a long term, people-centric view that stresses substance over hype. [It] will help to restore credibility and trust for brands. It will re-affirm the mutual commitment of the employee/employer relationship. It will give power to the consumer. And it will stress the pre-eminence of the genuine shareholder over the speculator." With sections on Authenticity, Transparency and Brand Ownership, this looks to be a good addition to the latest in ideas on the transformation of marketing.

(thanks to Ton for the Beyond Branding link)

Pardon the Intermission of the Intermission

Wow, it's been a while since I've done any heavy blogging. I've been going through the blogroll, catching up. Seems that Tribe.net is the new social networking site of late. Looks to have potential, and I like how it specifically aims the wants (i.e. seeking a job, posting a job). I've joined several tribes, which I'll eventually add to the blogroll.

The reason blogging has been light is I've been spread all over the place. Literally. Okay, not literally because that would be quite disgusting. But I've been traveling like a madman. I was in San Francisco the beginning of the month and from there headed to Sonoma for a client convention. In San Francisco I learned that I had been accepted to participate in a strategy workshop for my division at TMP with Earnst & Young which was quite an honor. I had to hop back on a plane to Boston the day after getting back from my trip out west. But it was well worth it. It's got me quite pumped up about the direction of my division and my interest is piqued at some of the things going on at Monster. If you read this blog regularly you know what my passions are ... and that's about as specific as I can get. Back from Boston I had a full week at work last week catching up but am back on the road this week in Chicago where I'm working with our office here. I really like Chicago. And really like the people in this office. Smart, hard working, passionate. It's a nice environment. I'm fly home tomorrow night but heading to a friend's bachelor party on Friday. Get back Sunday afternoon and leave sunday evening for a BIG client meeting in Vegas and finally am finished up there and back home next Tuesday evening. Whew.

Needless to say, you can tell why blogging has been light, and will probably continue to be so. The traveling has been exhausting, but fulfilling. Especially since fun has been mixed in and even the work places ain't to shabby. Not to mention some good things going on at work.

Back from my trips, but lots of catching up to do. Does anyone know any franchise owners who blog or blogs relating to franchisees?

I'm back, but back out. Back from San Fran but now in Boston for business. All day business. So continue to expect things to be lite around here. But in the mean time check out this blog on Social Software in Business.

Blog vacation here, but blogging away about our trip on my (and maybe Amy's) other (new) blog.

Off to San Francisco for vacation until next Sunday. And a blog vacation too...

Bulg? Bowleg? Blob? Bloop?

These are some of the options one gets when he or she searches for "blog" on Merriam-Webster online. The Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary is out, and it doesn't appear to have "blog" in it, at least according to it's free online site. There's probably no connection to m-w, but it's starting to drive me crazy that online spell checkers don't have "blog" in their dictionaries.

Pop Ups Annoy -- Really?

"A recent PlanetFeedback survey that found pop-ups lead all ad forms in levels of annoyance and distrust-even more so than spam." Too bad the same study shows publishers get more $$$ for the ad unit and it generates more $$$ for advertisers. What about long term focus?? What are publishers and advertisers doing to their brands who use these tactics??

San Fran or Bust

Amy and I are heading to San Francisco on Saturday. It's the first time I've been there since I was 4. And being that I was 4, I don't remember much about it.

We snagged a terrific deal on Hotwire at the Mark Hopkins Inter-Continental on Nob Hill. Don't have much of a plan except that we get in Sat. night and leave for Sonoma Thursday morning for a client convention. Looking through Fodor's, I definitely want to hit North Beach and Chinatown. And I'm sure we'll end up in the Wharf. But if anyone has suggestions on what to see, I'd love to hear them.

Sweet 16 for Success

John Audette's (who moderated Adventive's I-Sales group), top 16 for Building A Successful Business and Using the Internet to Further Your Organization ObjectivesAdventive - Communities For Internet Professionals - Tools:

1. Maintain Absolute Integrity


2. Niche With Passion


3. Put the Power of Inertia on Your Side


4. Build In Scalability


5. Keep It Lean


6. Remarket


7. Stay Humble: Maintain a Vertical Learning Curve


8. Honor the Customer's Intelligence


9. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate


10. Yoda Says, "Give, Then Take"


11. Ideas Are Only Sparks


12. Tangibilize


13. Build a Three Legged Stool


14. Build Community


15. Respect the Power of the Index Finger


16. Convert Liabilities Into Assets

Just sent this email to Google's Toolbar team. So if you start seeing it you know who to thank! ;)

Love the new toolbar! Especially the Blog This and Pop-up blocker. Anyway, could you provide a script users could put on their blogs that would keep track of the number of pop-ups the toolbar has blocked? Something like: "My Google Toolbar has blocked 103 pop ads since June 27, 2003!)

Not that anyone cares. But that's how much I'm digging this new tool. BTW, I'm at 38 on my work computer. Not sure what's at home....

Buh Bye

The FTC's No Call list officially got started today. Although I will miss playing games with telemarketers, I think the reward of not getting any calls is greater. I'm registering now.

oops, it 404'd. Didn't they know the volume they would get on day 1?

Cool! I just dowloaded my new Google Toolbar 2.0. I like the Blog This feature. (head's up from MarketingFix)

New blog by a copywriter, John Kuraoka. The profession I always wanted to enter.

MarketingFix Sells Out

jheez, that didn't take too long. Going by the tag line, "Independent eMarketing News (Until We Sell Out)" MarketingFix sold out to Andy Bourland (if you're going to sell out to anyone, it might as well be this guy ... founder of ClickZ, when it was really good). But in all seriousness, congratulations to the guys, I hope the site's style keeps up.

Andy formed a new company, Up2Speed, also acquired Adventive, an online discussion group. According to Rafat Ali's scoop, Andy hopes to use"the mix of vertical-focused weblogs and e-mail newsletters/discussion group ... [to] cross promote the sites through the discussion lists and vice-versa, with ad revenues coming in from both ends."

hmmm.... this is the first time I know of that a blog has been bought.

Looking forward to how it plays out.

[later] -- Marketing Fix has more here.

[later later] so does Andy.

Wall Street Journal Media & Marketing Edition

WSJ has started a special edition covering Media & Marketing. [later] not really new and seperate, but still a good place for info...

Can anyone recommend any books or reading on web usability and/or information architecture? If so, could you be so kind as to use my nifty comments below...

Here are a few blogs I found on Google:
Croc o' Lyle
Designing Usability
Usability and Suman kumar
Elegant Hack

Good business blog piece as a follow up to the Jupiter/ClickZ Blog Conference by Rebecca Lieb in ClickZ.

As I write this on Thursday, the event, and blogs about the event, still dominate Popdex's Web site popularity index (starting at number three) -- even though the conference ended Tuesday....That's reach, frequency, and targeting....

If your organization has staff with the vision, thought leadership, and evangelistic qualities that could make for a good marketing blog, make certain that person checks strategy at the door before posting the first entry. Blogs are good for supporting an agenda or idea, but they aren't a strategy or an end in themselves when used in a business context. Blogs must be personal, an open loop, and, above all, honest.

Actual Business Blogs

Rick brings up a good point ..... lots of talk, but no walk when it comes to business blogs. While I think we're still in the pioneering stages (heck still in the ideas stages), there has been a lot of talk on business blogs. I've been as guilty as anyone ... talking about applications but not having any clients to show for it (although I haven't been seeking any).

But Rick is walking the talk. He posted clients he has set up weblogs for: BizNetTravel and Roundtable Communications. Of course Marcromedia was one of the first, and so was Dr. Pepper and who can forget Barbie. I'd also say that Dave Winer and the whole Radio Userland group is a prime example of business blogs .... although they've never been billed as such. Fellow DC area blogger, James Robertson, blogs for his company Cincom SmallTalk. You might be saying, so what's the big deal, sounds like there're lots of companies out there. Dr. Pepper didn't get it. Barbie is purely fictional. And most other business blogs are from software/tech companies. Rick's are some of the first to break outside of the tech arena.