DISQUS

The man is also a Rhodes Scholar...

Who sells these shirts?

Did you ever hear of the social network Capazoo? I did 'cause I worked for them.

They had a tipping system for users, and they got nothing but flack for it -- well, that and a kind of referral program that tipped users for referring their friends.

The point is that users tend to be very suspicious about anything that compensates them for their participation. It carries the connotation that the product is (1) not good enough on its own, and (2) if you're actually paying users, there must be some ulterior motive for luring them in.

Hopefully for Salon, the fact that the entire tipping system is peer-to-peer will remove some of that anathema of a virtual micro-currency. It did, after all, work for SecondLife. However, there might still be a danger that users will be too suspicious to participate just because the incentivization system is there.

This is precisely the kind of approach to blog seeding that we advise our merchant-partners to do. I think, however, a lot of retailers just don't get it. With marketing staff who are from a FMCG world, anything that doesn't directly lead to a measurable sale (e.g. coupon, CPA ad, etc.) they are just not willing to entertain because they can't measure ROI.

What did this really cost Garmin, however?
Google Alert: $0
Communications Personnel: Annual Salary (doing other things anyway)
A single Garmin unit: cost

The Google juice from Brogan's blog post alone would be worth that, but I would be very surprised if 10 of Brogan's readers/followers didn't end up buying a Garmin.

I think that there are two things going on with how email marketing is evolving.

(1) A generational effect: younger demographics see it all as spam (in my opinion).

(2) The idea of permission based email marketing is changing. It's now more about community -- e.g. marketing a product to me that I'm already a consumer/user of. That is, I think that users aren't interested in being pitched through their inbox. Rather, they want content that's relevant to them, and if that content is what's in the email, then your open and click through rates will probably be a lot higher.

Your point about many SMEs not having the budget or know-how to get ecommerce enabled reminds me of MySpace. That network started out as a website solution for bands; it just turned out that there were more fans than bands, and some unsustainable growth ensued. The only questions now is whether MySpace will survive that unsustained growth long enough to revert back to being a network of band pages.

Something about the "Centralized Me," however, is at odds with social media -- namely that it's egocentric. I think that a huge advantage that social network pages have over a run of the mill website is they are integrated with other pages and (therefore) individuals. That gives them a lot more reach, I think, in providing some kind of trust-meter.

Then again, that just underscores your point about data-portability and how we need a way to carry trust from one network to the next. I agree that there's a huge impetus for something like Friend Connect or Facebook Connect.

This all goes to beg the question, then, with that kind of data-portability, will anyone really need their own site anymore?

I mean, wouldn't an eBay or CafePress site suffice?

After all, with portable personal data, the communities to which we belong would be accessible from anywhere on the net we go.

Go for the sleep, Jeff. Whatever is going on out "in the world" is fleeting and will probably re-occur via some reasonable facsimile. Your children, though, only grow up once, and it's so sweet to be well rested enough that you can fully enjoy their company and exploits.

This is gold...

This is gold...

I've had some trouble getting the attention of high traffic blogger. They receive so many back links and trackbacks, that I've gotten lost in the storm.

In any case, congrats on the post. Brian's blog is kind of a big deal. I've been doing some guest blogging myself lately, and I know how great it is to reach a new audience.

You know, Vlad, you don't really need something as high end as a camcorder to vlog. I look forward to your vlog posts nonetheless.

You know, Vlad, you don't really need something as high end as a camcorder to vlog. I look forward to your vlog posts nonetheless.

This might be worse than blog scraping.