gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": kill all beta males

January 31, 2006

kill all beta males

On my radar today:

2. Stowe Boyd fisks Rick Segal, kinda sorta.

Another criticism I saw of my post yesterday? That ideas aren�t what�s needed. I hear this all the time �ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive.�

Oh, really? How many of you thought up RSS? How many of you thought up Flickr? If ideas are so cheap, where�s the new ideas? I don�t see that many being put out there. And, inside big companies I get to see idea generation at work. They simply aren�t there.

Amen, Scoble.

3. This got me thinking: A commenter on the Stormhoek blog poses the question:

You're clearly interested in the feedback to the blog yet there seem to be very few comments here. Do you all read all the comments about Stormhoek on gapingvoid?

To which Jason replies:

Thanks John, yes, we generally do read all of the comments on Gapingvoid and as many as we can on other people's blogs. As you noted, much of the conversation about Stormhoek takes place off this blog.

Lots of people seem to think that blogging needs to about discussions that take place on their blog, but we find that we get most of our 'action' on other peoples', with Gapingvoid being just one of them. Search Technorati, for example, and you will see many hundreds of posts.

The point of what we're doing is not getting people to leave comments on a certain URL. The point of what we're doing is selling wine.

Which makes me ask the question: When does blogging become something else? When does it become "not blogging"?

[GOOD ANSWER:] From OneByOne Media:

Simply, blogging becomes transmogrified into a �conversation� and then the ripples in the pond grow from there. A blog is merely the stone cast into the pool.

4. Just got off the phone with a journalist from this paper. Asking me about blogs. Main point: Blogs won't put newspaper out of business, they'll make them better. This is simply because when your competition is doing it for free, you'd better be good. The papers that don't understand this will die, and nobody will care.

5. About to go pack; I'm flying to Geneva tomorrow for the LIFT conference. Hope to see you there.

Posted by hugh macleod at January 31, 2006 3:58 AM | TrackBack

Comments

nice nice , cute , don't stop , if even one see's it , y'r job is done.

Posted by: Hemaworstje at January 31, 2006 10:16 AM

You shall be seeing me at LIFT, Hugh... :) Doncha worry.

Posted by: gia at January 31, 2006 4:34 PM

I made the comment on the Stormhoek blog having listened to the podcast in which Jason I think wisely said that sales had doubled since they started blogging rather than assign direct causality. I was interested to investigate where the conversations that ripple out were occurring because they clearly weren't happening on the official authentic blog. Initially I thought that didn't matter - after all, to bastardise a phrase, there's no such thing as a bad conversation!

But then I wondered, if the conversation seemingly doesn't occur on the original blog at all - does that blog need to exist? In other words, is it solely a case of generating word of mouth in the blogosphere and beyond? Are the conversations about Stormhoek wine or are they about the role of blogging in Stormhoek marketing? Does that matter and, if it does, are there ways to effect a change without impinging on the authenticity of the conversations?

Posted by: john at January 31, 2006 9:41 PM

John, I think you're missing the point. This isn't about the just about Stormhoek.com, or even the internet.

And as Johnnie Moore likes to say, it's more about changing oneself, not the customer.

Blogging as a marketing tool is easier when you think of it as a chemical catalyst, not as a hammer and nail.

It seems to me what a lot of people are hoping for from the whole blogging-as-marketing thing is a tested method that is (A) easy to implement, (B) easy to replicate and (C) easy to sell to their boss.

Sadly, the Stormhoek story is not that.

Secondly, to say a conversation about Stormhoek marketing is less "authentic" than a conversation about Stormhoek product is a false distinction. They both are part of the same process.

Posted by: hugh macleod at February 1, 2006 5:53 AM

I agree with you - when I talked about authenticity I was thinking not so much of the Stormhoek situation.

I guess I was thinking out loud as to whether other people seeking the cookie-cutter blogging solution you refer to might think - we don't need our own blog (after all stormhoek are doing fine but no conversation occurs on their blog) why don't we just drop our own propoganda into the blogosphere and start conversations there? That to my mind would be unquestionably inauthentic but neverthless it runs the risk of enhancing the "chatroom nonsense" point of view.

P.S. Kudos for saying 'good luck" to those wanting an off the shelf solution, but aren't you just a little bit tempted?

Posted by: john at February 1, 2006 11:25 AM

funny, i just watched the excellent documentary about enron ("enron: the smartest guys in the room") and my exact thought when it was over was "kill all alpha males."

Posted by: cynthia at February 1, 2006 5:10 PM