Two days ago we noticed that Weblogs Work was ranked 24th out of all PR blogs and blogged about it here. Moments ago I read on Alex’s blog that Weblogs Work was ranked 6th - I figured he must have misread the rankings, but he didn’t! According to PubSub, Weblogs Work is now the sixth highest ranked PR blog. Imagine if we had the time to really start blogging!
Another project I am involved with is the production of a HD television series called MotorSport Ranch. I blogged about my experience producing the pilot on a TypePad blog found here. I have decided to continue the project "The making of…blog" and started posting again detailing the production of 13 additional episodes for VOOM.
Interestingly, I barely had time to close the TypePad editor on my second post before my phone rang. The calls started coming in from the talent who appear in the pilot asking to appear in the series, the original director, the director’s agent, prospective talent, the track owner and so on. Make a TV series is a lot like beating yourself over the head with a hammer - no one is happy until the final tape is in the can.
Why? It seems like communication is the hardest part about production - everyone wants to know, "what is going on." I think 50% of a producers time is taken up explaining the current situation. Now I just point everyone to the blog.
Brian and I have been talking about ‘event’ driven blogs and how businesses can use them in conjunction with traditional marketing/pr promotions. One great example of an event driven blog is the GM Smallblock blog.
GM started the blog to talk about the 50th anniversary of the Corvette’s small-block engine. Now that the anniversary is over, so too is the blog. According to Debbie Weil GM did consider turning it into a powertrain blog, but one astute reader suggested, "Keep to one topic… don’t try to take on too much in one blog."
Maybe you just need a bigger box? John Moore, from Brand Autopsy, points us to Douglas Rushkoff’s book, "Get Back in the Box" which explains that, "…if you always have to think outside the box, maybe it’s the box that needs fixing."
The book has yet to be released, but Douglas started a blog to release short excerpts on his blog.
Shel Israel, the coauthor of Naked Conversations, is here at Blogging Enterprise. He had an interesting post titled What Must PR Do? that I thought might be popular. Shel indicated, "Sometime in the last month or two, blogging reached its tipping point. Businesses are no longer dismissing the blogging phenomenon and, except for a few believing readers of Forbes magazine, they are no longer even angry. They just want to figure out what to do about it and how to fit it in to existing corporate boxes and processes." Here are his suggestions:
In a first, Budget Car Rental is using ‘blogadvergaming’ as a marketing tool. Budget is hiding a $10,000 prize in four cities over four weeks giving away $160,000 total. Clues will be delivered on Budget’s blog in cartoon format (featuring our favorite cartoonist Hugh MacLeod). The ‘blogadvergaming’ program was organized by B.L. Ochman. Via Adrants and Business Week.
Technorati Tags: adrants, blogadvergaming, budget, budgetcarrental, hugh MacLeod
Last week I sent my final email to my electronic distribution list and much to my surprise it caused quite a stir. First, several folks were upset that I sent them an email that seemed to be SPAM. Still others were glad to connect in a new way - via RSS. Finally, a few were upset that I declared “email newsletters are dead.”
This final reaction surprised me. I assumed that everyone agreed, boy was I wrong! Clearly I had underestimated the investment various professionals continue to make in their electronic newsletters. Our IT services company, Architel, provides support for various companies that continue use electronic mailing lists. Each time a client sends out a mass-email Architel’s engineers must work with AOL, Yahoo and other ISPs to remove the client from their blacklists. Architel spends hundreds of hours per year to keep their clients’, who insist on using mass-mailing lists, email systems available to all networks.
Why do users of mailing lists get blacklisted? Sometimes a person on the mailing list forgets that he signed up for the list. For example, this guy, an editor of a magazine, slammed me in his blog for sending him SPAM. He could have just as easily reported my email to his ISP as SPAM and our domain would have been blocked from the ISPs servers. This is clearly the most common reason companies get blacklisted. Still other firms use automated software that can detect ‘mass-emails’ and submit them to popular blacklist providers. The recipient will never see the newsletter and the sender’s domain will likely be blocked by various providers.
Finally, professionals put time and effort creating weekly or monthly newsletters. Studies suggest that technology (such as SPAM filters) are blocking more than 50% of recipients and readership is less than 10% of this number (i.e. 5% of the total number addresses on the mailing list). The truth is, very few people are seeing their work. How can you get it to the right people? at the right time? forever (not just on the day you send it out)? Start blogging instead - your blog lives forever - your posts live forever - and those who are interested in your material will read it when they need the information.
Technorati Tags: blog, dallas, dfw, email, newsletters
BMW is pulling the plug on its four year old ‘The Hire’ smash-hit short film series. WIRED magazine awarded the series the "Best Excuse for Broadband" award in 2001. If you have not seen the series check the episodes out at BMWfilms (episodes include: Ambush, Chosen, The Follow, Star, Powder Keg, Hostage, Ticker and Beat the Devil). BMW also create a comic series based on the episodes found here. BMW is going remove the films from it’s website, so you need to act fast if you want to see the show that over 100 million people have watched over the past four years. To learn more about the marketing genius behind the films click here.
Chris Shipley reports from BlogOn today about the Blogging in the Enterprise study. 90% of the marketing/communications folks surveyed said they are currently or plan to use blogs as part of their marketing programs. Chris notes that as a significant uptick in interest in business blogging since the last BlogOn. I’d say it’s a slam dunk.
Technorati Tags: blogon, business+blogging
Alex Muse ditched his newsletter yesterday. He had built 11,000 contacts in his newsletter database, and told them all yesterday that the best way to get information his current projects is by reading his blog or subscribing to his feed. It’s certainly more efficient. Much more of an nuanced conversation. More welcomed by the folks who opt in by reading his blog or adding the feed to their newsreader. He doesn’t need 11,000 sometime contacts who get email. He needs like 50 engaged comrades who are as excited about (and I’m going to say it) Web 2.0 apps and opportunities as he is.
Maybe you should ditch your email newsletter and use blogs and feeds as a better way to get your ideas out there. Plus, you can always give people the option to get your rss feed as an email if they’d like.
Update: see, the thing is, unsolicited email seems to really aggravate folks. Witness this sort of bizarro post/comment/email two-step between Alex & Light Reading editor Phil Harvey.
I will have to admit that product placement works for companies selling to me. BMW used their 745i in the first Transporter movie and just before my M5 fell out of warranty I traded it for a new 7 series. Jason Statham trades his BMW for an Audi in the second installment of the Transporter and I it has caused me to start considering the Audi for my next ride. So what? Audi figured out a way to get ‘way’ more bang for their buck by using blogs to get their message out.
Brian Clark, CEO of GMD Studios (Audi’s ad agency), indicated that almost a third of the traffic to Audi most recent A3 compaign was generated by advertising on various blogs. The most interesting thing Brian revealed was that these advertisments only took one half of one percent of the budget. McKinney + Silver and Adrants indicated:
"The media cost of the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost for one ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo!" Of course "one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo" is a nebulous statement at best, however, again 29 percent of traffic to an A3 promotional website came from one half of one percent of the budget. Shall we say it again?
Hugh MacLeod continues his running argument that blogs and the other new communication tools will cause a sea change in how we think about advertising. [via David Parmet]
[PS:] Blogs are just the tip of the Cluetrain iceberg. It wasn’t the tip that hit the Titanic.
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