Well, they didn’t adapt, that’s for sure. And for a modern-day variation on this scenario, look no further than the Associated Press.

In the Web 2.0 world, where bloggers often post snippets of other people’s work and then link to the full details, AP has gone the way of the cyber-dodo and filed multiple Digital Millennial Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests against bloggers.

The non-gobbledy-gook explanation: Claiming misuse of copyright, AP filed a complaint with the bloggers’ hosting companies. Because the DMCA is a guilty-until-proven-innocent law, the hosting companies had to comply.

Check out Mike Masnick’s Techdirt analysis of the situation, a response to the AP by Rogers Cadenhead (one of the takedown-ees), and a pointedly funny response by Silicon Valley blogger Michael Arrington to get the full scoop.

Me, I think the whole thing about using a snippet in a blog and linking to the article is the high-tech equivalent of how we used to use footnotes and bibliographies, back in the days of secondary school. It’s a good thing no one from AP was sitting in any of my classrooms, waiting to sue me over a reference in a history paper, or takedown my final essay in civics. Sheesh, I’d have flunked if that were the case!

C’mon, AP. Adapt. Get with the new.

(Thanks to Kevin Skarritt at Acorn Creative for flagging the issue for us.)

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Posted in All About Content, Blog Bits | 2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under All About Content, Blog Bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Over at another blog for which I write, I’ve had to let a couple people know recently that the comments they wrote in response to a couple of my posts were solely promotional, rather than adding to the conversation.

Why is this important? Because the etiquette of blog posts themselves, as well as the comments on the posts, is that they’re supposed to be part of a dialogue, rather than direct advertising of what you sell.

The fact is, a blog is already promotional in a sense - by sharing your knowledge, opinions, expertise, learning, and research through a blog, you’re proving to the world that you know what you’re talking about. That’s half the battle in getting someone to hire you or buy from you!

So there’s no need to do anything more than that with your blog or your comments - otherwise, it just reeks of blatant shilling.

I deleted the comments from the other blog, but we got one here not too long ago that’ll serve as a perfect example of what not to do. This comment came in response to Lani’s post about “Pink Boa Marketing” - aside from removing the identifying details, this is the comment in its entirety:

Sounds like a wonderful group! Since you like networking done the right way, want to be sure you know about our book [book title here], by [authors] ([publisher], [date]). Our approach is based on teaching people about your character and competence, not shoving your business card in their face! Best to you, [commenter's name - and commenter is one of the book authors] [commenter's phone number].

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful that people are taking the time to read and comment on the blog. (Thank you!) But the ironic thing about this is that the writer claims to teach networking without “shoving your business card in their face,” yet the writer’s blog comment above does exactly that.

So what do you do instead? You add to the conversation. You don’t have to agree with the blog post - in fact, that often makes for even better conversations. Just politely state your own opinions, ideas, and experience. If someone reads your comment and wants to learn more about you, they can click through the link in your comment signature. (Pretty much all blogs have a field where you can enter a link back to your website - that’s all you need.)

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Posted in Blog Bits | 3 Comments »

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 12:28 pm and is filed under Blog Bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

We’re members in Melanie Benson Strick’s “Ultimate Wealth and Success Circle” coaching program, and part of it includes access to their forums. Lani posted this little story under the title “Cool things, small world, serendipity abounds”:

So I recently joined a local networking group that’s just celebrated its one-year anniversary called “Women Inspiring Women.” Leslie Sturgeon, the President and Founder, has already demonstrated an authentic bent toward being truly supportive for our biz in many ways, including asking Allen and I if we’d be open to putting on workshops on blogging, branding, social networking, etc. in the future. (Heck yes!)

Soon after I joined, Leslie asked if I was available for an evening phone call. Of course, I said yes. We ended up chatting about everything under the sun for 2+ hours, which was fab, but the thing that drove her to want to connect to me in such a powerful, intentional way is this:

She had recently heard about this amazing lady named Melanie Benson Strick. She’d been reading Melanie’s ezine and checking out some of her blog posts, etc. One day she decided to take Melanie up on an offer to check out a CD on “How to Get Out of Overwhelm.” You know, get the CD and only pay for the shipping. As she was listening to Melanie in her element, she heard a familiar voice talk about a breakthrough. This familiar voice was laughing, and mentioning her husband Allen, and sharing a story about how she went from five calendars all over the house and office to one main calendaring system after just 20 minutes with Melanie.

Turns out the voice this woman heard was mine.Moral of the story?

It’s a very good thing for a community leader and networking maven to hear you rubbing elbows at a boot camp with the visionary behind Success Connections.

Leslie now knows I’m on the “bleeding edge” of success-minded lifestyle entrepreneurs, that I’m spending my time and energy pursuing the things she’s trying to infuse in her own life and networking group.

I just love this kind of serendipity, don’t you?

Great little story, right? Well, Melanie saw it, and said:

This is such a great story, thanks for sharing it!

I hope you don’t mind but I have to post this on my blog…it’s a great story and it made my whole body tingle when synergy shows up like this!

Which she did, here. And she also referenced it as part of the regular content in her weekly communications to the Ultimate Wealth and Success Circle as well as her Fast Track to a 6 & 7 Figure Lifestyle Business groups.

That’s how easy it is to make content work harder for you - sometimes, you don’t even have to create your own to get your message, mission, and vision “out there”!

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Posted in All About Content, Dances With Gurus | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under All About Content, Dances With Gurus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Lani and I are in beautiful New Paltz, NY, now at the end of three wonderful days spent with Guido Orio and Eve Orio of Golden Summit, experts in online, film, and video content. The professional (and personal) relationship was cemented a way back in 2001, when Lani, Eve, and Orio worked at Mattel, and though we’re now on different coasts, we’ve still maintained a great friendship with them.

It just so happened they were at a wedding not too far from here, and heck, when being 3,000 miles apart is suddenly reduced to 300, you can’t miss an opportunity like that.

Of course, we’ve been catching up a lot (and watching our older son and their daughter play together like old friends, too, and not kids that last saw each other two years ago as toddlers), we’ve been talking a bit about return on investment (ROI) on websites.

It’s one thing if you sell physical product on your site - you can make the calculation pretty easily: Add up your costs (hosting, design, programming, maintenance), and divide it into your sales.

But what if you don’t? What if you can’t cleanly tie your website to your bottom line? Stonyfield Yogurt “CE-Yo” Gary Hirshberg addressed this in an interview with Business Week about the Stonyfield blogging effort:

Q: What are you getting from this, really?
Hirshberg: It’s impossible to say what we’re getting. But if you press an ad agency really hard about their best ads, their best copy, and ask them to prove that that ad resulted in an increase in sales, it’s the rare case when you can spell out cause and effect.

But what I know in my gut from 22 years of doing this is that we have an emotional connection with customers. That helps explain why we’re growing at four times category rate in some markets and three times the category rate nationally.

What he’s talking about is essentially the same as “goodwill” - that part of a company’s stock market value not attributable to earnings or investments. Some of your company’s revenues are coming solely as a result of your brand’s value, which exists only in the mind of your customers.

Get your head around that on an early Thursday morning! So here’s the takeaway - if you have a website, but it doesn’t directly produce revenue, then add it to one more marketing category - branding.

Any sales you can’t attribute to directly to a specific PR or marketing effort have to be considered the result of branding - and at least partially due to your website.

Try it, and let us know if that makes the picture clearer for you!

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Posted in Blog Bits, Brand Funk | 2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 9:03 am and is filed under Blog Bits, Brand Funk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.