 |
 |
|
Posts from the 'Blog Bits' Category
July 21st, 2008 by Allen Voivod
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.)
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.
July 18th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
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.)
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.
July 10th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
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!
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.
June 16th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Still think blogging isn’t powerful? Tell that to the 64 people who’ve been arrested since 2003 for blogging.
Yep. Arrested.
And it’s getting worse. The arrest rate has tripled from 2006 to 2007. We just read about this in a BBC news report, and you can read the whole report referenced in the news at the World Information Access site.
And here’s the sobering closing paragraph from the WIA’s own blog post about this:
After surveying our data, we predict that the number of blogger arrests will rise in 2008. The popularity of online blogs continues to grow and inspire more media coverage of arrest incidents. Countries are enforcing greater Internet regulation, which will only increase with the elections in China, Pakistan, Iran and the United States this year. Assuming a pattern similar to Egypt’s occurs, the number of political blogger arrests has nowhere to go but up. With already four incidents in January and February, we expect the number of arrests in 2008 will exceed that of 2007.
Take advantage of the power you have at your disposal with blogging.
And with that, I’m stepping down off my soapbox.
Posted in Blog Bits | No Comments »
This entry was posted
on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 11:01 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.
May 21st, 2008 by Allen Voivod
How do you like our new blog?
What? You say it looks the same as it did before?
Well, that’s great news, considering that it’s been on the equivalent of the operating table for the past week. We were running what I’m told is a ridiculously old version of the Wordpress software that runs our blog.
And we’d been hearing of other folks recently, with the same version, who’d had their blogs hacked because of security vulnerabilities. We’re collectively breathing a sigh of relief that it never came to that for us.
So the nuts at Acorn Creative told us to lay off the blog for a while, and they worked us into their schedule for the update. And a fine job they did! Kudos to Renee Capen and Dan Kleiner for taking such good care of our baby for us.
 In the meantime, I hooked up with Bisson Barcelona for a blogging clinic, focused on the topic of making money with one’s blog. Our instructor for the evening was Ben Adams, owner of Spiral Media, a company which “specializes in online marketing and promotion through a combination of search engine optimization, sponsored listing services and Web 2.0 technologies.”
Traci Bisson asked me via email this morning for some feedback on the clinic (great to see you again, too!) - here’s a link so you can see the topics covered for yourself.
I hadn’t met Ben before, and for me, the best thing about it was the fact that Ben proved himself to be an avid researcher and very generous with his knowledge. I came away with a notebook full of websites and monetization opportunities, many of which I didn’t know existed (or think were possible) until Ben’s clinic. And he also referred me to some folks that, from a networking perspective, would be very good for us to know.
Ben had all his ducks in a row for the two sessions, and I’d definitely say I got my money’s worth out of the clinic.
As far as anything that could be improved, I only have a piece of advice to throw out, which applies to anyone who’s considering taking any sort of blogging class. Bisson Barcelona put up a “Must Haves” qualifier for people signing up - that they must have a “blog, have burned a feed for their blog, and have publicized to get blog readers and feed subscribers.”
I’m perhaps slightly embarrassed to say that I hadn’t burned a feed (or really knew what that meant) until the day of the workshop - our brand-spankin’ new Feedburner feed is here. And as a result, I haven’t publicized to get subscribers to our Feedburner feed. (We’ll have to get Acorn to get that onto our sidebar, I guess!)
That said, it worked out okay for me, because I know just enough about blogging to be dangerous, and I didn’t get questioned about my Feedburner status. To make a long story short, with any tech-related class, my own personal advice is to be more aggressive about the requirements - as in stating blatantly and more prominently that if you don’t meet the must haves, then don’t sign up for the class.
Why, you ask? We’ve all been in clinics where some people weren’t as far along as the rest - and yes, I’ve been on both sides of that divide. And it slows everyone else up, which makes half of your audience frustrated. I feel sorry and embarrassed when I know I’m slowing a class up, but I can’t help it. If I don’t get it, then I’m going to be frustrated. And so is the other half of the audience that’s too shy to speak up.
The session I attended was part two of a two-week clinic, and though we didn’t have this problem, Ben did say that the divide was present in part one. So if you’re thinking of taking a class, please, for your own sake and the sake of your classmates, be as careful as you can about what you sign up for.
And by the way, since I haven’t said it yet…
Ahhh. It’s so GOOD to be blogging again!
Posted in Blog Bits | No Comments »
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 2:40 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.
March 20th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
We get this question all the time from small business owners and lifestyle entrepreneurs diving into the blogging world, and the answer is, “Anything related to your business, products, services, industry, which would also be informative and entertaining (and not sales-y) for your Ideal Audience.”
And that answer, while accurate, just isn’t helpful.
Because (as we’re finally realizing) when our clients and prospects ask what to blog about, the question is also a stand-in for a host of other concerns:
- What’s the point?…
- How will this get me more business?…
- I’m not a writer…
- There’s fear involved in “putting myself out there” in this way…
- I don’t know where to start…
- I’m overwhelmed by the idea, the technology, the fitting-it-in around the rest of everything else I have to do as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer in my business…
You get the idea.
Assuming for now that you will be jumping in to the blogging world, here’s the easiest formula I can come up with for a successful blog post, which I laid out for one of our clients in a Progress Report last year:
To sum up, blogging can be as simple as:
1. Reading an industry news story
2. Formulating your opinion on it
3. Typing up your opinion and supporting it with your unique set of knowledge
Could each of [your exceutive team members] do that in 15-30 minutes or so, once (or twice) a month? If so, your blog will be a roaring success.
As an example, ClosetPlace, a storage and organization systems company out of Wolfeboro, NH, is going through blogging training with our buddies at Acorn Creative as I write this. Their new website is going live this week, and they’ve opened a new showroom as well - big year for them!
I met with ClosetPlace’s Bill Huntley yesterday, and we got to talking about how new closet systems affect the resale value of homes. I checked out Remodeling magazine’s 2007 Cost vs. Value annual report, and was surprised to see that they didn’t include anything storage or organization-related.
That lack of inclusion is blog-worthy. In fact, if it had been included, it would also be blog-worthy, but for the specific situation, let’s put it this way:
Imagine you’re Bill Huntley, and you’re at a cocktail party. Someone comes up to you and says, “I heard Remodeling magazine didn’t include storage systems in their Cost vs. Value report. What do you think about that?”
“I think that’s short-sighted,” you say.
“Why?”
“Well, some custom closet installs run about $12K, which is in line with some of the lower-cost projects they’re tracking. Storage and organization is a multi-billion-dollar industry, so it’s worthy of Remodeling’s attention. And a closet system is just as much of an upscale addition as a kitchen remodel, in terms of making the home more attractive to potential buyers. In a tough housing market, that could make the difference between selling and sitting on another year of mortgage and escrow payments.”
That exchange is, literally, what Bill could post on his new blog about that report. He has his own inimitable personality and style of talking and writing, so it would end up reading differently, but in terms of creating the outline of a blog post, that’s exactly all he has to do.
Of course, he could add one more thing. He could then write a question and a call to action for his readers: “Was the sale of your house affected by a closet system? Or was a closet system one of your deciding factors in choosing to buy one house over another? Leave a comment and let us know!”
And I’m about to do the same thing, for our own purposes. So, does that example give you an idea of what to blog about, and how? Leave a comment and let us know!
Posted in Blog Bits, Inciter Articles | 3 Comments »
This entry was posted
on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 11:25 am and is filed under Blog Bits, Inciter Articles.
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.
October 10th, 2007 by Allen Voivod
So the last post Lani wrote, about Rob Schultz and audio and video trends, claims to have been loaded to the blog after 5:00am on Friday, October 5th.
News flash: It was, and it wasn’t.
If the idea of blogging every day, every other day, every week even, turns you off, then take heart! Instead, you can just pick a day, write a bunch of blog posts, and use the WordPress “Post Timestamp” box to future-date your blog posts. And when the future date/time arrives, bang! It automatically releases your post onto the Wild Wild Web.
 And if you don’t tell anyone, they’ll be none the wiser. Obviously, I’m bending that rule a bit, because after 5:00am on Friday, though readers may have thought Lani was up early and blogging, she was actually getting a shot of Nubain to take the edge off her contractions.
And four hours after the blog post went live, our second son entered the world. Of course, it took us five days after to blog about it, but that’s what sleep deprivation’ll do to you. Maybe next time, we’ll use that timestamp feature to back-date the post, so future readers will never suspect what really happened…
Posted in Blog Bits | 5 Comments »
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 5:20 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.
August 25th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
Good writing makes me giddy inside. Great writing makes me long for a post-sex cigarette. And I don’t even smoke.
Tara Zucker’s writing makes me want to join a naked hippie commune so I can revel in an ecstatic and hedonistic existence of reefer, bongo jams, and round-the-clock sensual massage parties.
My most recent dip into the impossibly dry wit, fantastic humor, and stylistic sensibilities of this talented chick is in the singular universe of her “Doll Cannot Fly” blog.
Even the name of the blog KILLS me. You see, I met Tara while we were both “Content Specialists” at Mattel (home of Barbie, among other toys ‘n games). As you’ll see from her blog’s header, the blog’s name is a nod to our good ol’ corporate days, when Mattel’s Legal department always made sure we included cautionary tales with our fantastical copy.
Anyway, Tara and her husband Rick co-own a “small but feisty” (or should I say “fesity“?) media company called Post Haste Media. They specialize in things like promos, trailers, music videos, behind-the-scene vids, etc., and they’ve got 20+ years of experience and serious bragalogue street cred from working with the likes big names like Thomas Dolby, John Fogarty, Burt Bacharach, Sly Stone…even the incomparable Rick James!
So Tara has begun to weave her day-to-day biz experiences with cultural non-sequitors, meandering musings, and a healthy dose of self-flagellation. The “Doll Cannot Fly” blog is filet mignon for the solopreneur or microbusiness used to dining on the gristle of overused marketing lingo and drab biz blather.
Check out why she doesn’t want you to check out their company’s website, how she almost outed Jimi Hendrix, or how some missing powdered sugar inspired her to question her worth as a hostess and write a letter to the makers of Chantilly cookies.
It’s her willingness to be totally transparent as she and Rick navigate their biz successes (and oopsies) around their lives and dreams that I really respect and appreciate:
The great thing about having your own company is you can make mistakes and no one is really going to yell at you. The bad thing about having your own company is you can make mistakes and no one is really going to yell at you. You have to be all over yourself like a cheap suit, watching yourself, giving yourself your own little staff evaluations (”Tara, we feel you need to make more of an effort.” “Thanks, Tara. I’ll work on that!”) When you’re your own boss, you have to set the bar high for yourself. If we promise our clients that we pay attention to the details, we can’t be making spelling mistakes all up in here, can we? Hopefully we’ll catch all our errors, but I know that inevitably things will slip by. We’ll just have to hope that our brilliant ideas and sparkling personalities will prevail, despite our tendency to occasionally be a little “fesity.”
Tara and Rick are in this crazy adventure with us. They get it, and we feel less alone having them in the blogosphere with us.
Posted in Blog Bits, Fun With Marketing, Microenterprises R Us | No Comments »
This entry was posted
on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under Blog Bits, Fun With Marketing, Microenterprises R Us.
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.
August 24th, 2007 by Lani Voivod
If this isn’t a meta-testimonial for the magic of blogging, I don’t know what is.
Earlier this year I got an email from a guy who said he was a book editor, and he was getting an anthology together. His name was Philip Martin, and he asked me if he could include one of my blog rants on blogging from earlier this year in the book.
While this wasn’t exactly an email from a exiled Nigerian prince asking to use my bank account to deposit millions of dollars, I still harbored a healthy bit of skepticism. So I emailed Mr. Martin a “Yeah, sure. That’d be great,” muttered an “I’ll believe it when I’m holding the actual published book in my hands” under my breath, and went on with whatever I was doing at my computer that day.
 Turns out Mr. Martin was for real. Thanks to that rabid post I threw out to the world back in February, I’m now among an elite group of contributors of an annual anthology on the craft, passion, marketing, and business of writing. Woohoo!!!! (I blogged some of the emotional, writer-ly deets here on my Wild Quills blog. This blogging thing is nutty, ain’t it?)
The impressive, wildly readable, utterly practical, and wonderfully integrated writers’ resource is called (drumroll, please…):
The New Writer’s Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career.
I’ve posted the publisher’s press release below, so you can read the “official” word on the street about this kick-butt book.
Scarletta Press
News Release
The New Writer’s Handbook 2007
Annual Collection of Expert Advice To Help Writers: Features more than 60 practical articles
GILFORD, NH (AUGUST 24, 2007) — Does the world really need another book of advice for writers? The answer, according to Scarletta Press, a new up-and-coming independent press in Minneapolis, is yes! In fact, they, with handbook editor Philip Martin, think that writers need an annual infusion of cross-disciplinary articles on the craft and career of being a good writer.
The first edition of The New Writer’s Handbook offers an eclectic mix of expert advice, stimulating short pieces, and overall encouragement. Every writer, from newbies to old hands, will find something to put to use in this far-ranging collection.
The 60 articles in this anthology were chosen mostly from pieces published in 2006–early 2007. Contributors include luminaries such as Barry Lopez, Richard Powers, Mary Pipher, Jane Yolen, Linda Sue Park, Ridley Pearson, William G. Tapply, and others. They include winners of the National Book Award, Newbery Medal, and many other honors. Other contributors include working journalists, writing instructors, authors with bestseller books, editors, literary bloggers, and more.
This inexpensive paperback edition serves as a personal annual professional-development seminar, touching on topics from craft techniques to career issues to helpful thoughts about creativity and motivation.
Sections in the book include:
Creativity, Motivation & Discipline
The Craft of Writing
Pitching & Proposals
Marketing Your Work
Internet Skills
Literary Insights & Last Words
Sample pieces include:
“Speaking a Book,” an essay by 2006 National Book Award–winner Richard Powers on why he dictates his books using voice-recognition software.
“Fundamental of Blogging,” an excerpt from Plug This Book: Online Book Marketing for Authors by Steve Weber (2007), provides practical tips on developing a professional blog.
“A Checklist for Character & Conflict Revision,” by NYT-bestselling author Gregory Martin, offers advice on revision.
A number of pieces speak to the deeper purpose of being a writer today, about how to have a positive effect on readers, on yourself, and on the shape of the world, such as Mary Pipher’s excerpt from her 2006 book Writing to Change the World, and poet Gabriel Gudding on writing for those right around you.
A few humorous pieces, like “Thank You for Hating My Book” or “Books as a Gateway Drug,” round out the collection.
“I wanted to offer a different kind of collection,” says editor Philip Martin, “one that would deliver lots of encouragement to listen to other voices in the field. I see a good anthology as a jumping-off point, a springboard for further reading and an invitation to celebrate a sense of community in the writing world. Writers are opinionated and diverse and competitive, and yet we need each other.
“No one else understands a writer as well as other writers,” continues Martin. “I tried to assemble a collection of articles that spoke to that, as well as supplying plenty of practical advice.”
The 2007 edition will appear in bookstores July 10, with an official pub date of August 1, 2007.
# # #
ERICA JONG is the author of eight novels including Fear of Flying, Fanny, Shylock’s Daughter, Inventing Memory and Sappho’s Leap. Her book for writers, Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, was released by Tarcher/Penguin in March 2006. She lives in New York City and Weston, Connecticut. Her website is www.ericajong.com.
PHILIP MARTIN, editor of The New Writer’s Handbook 2007, has produced books that won the Benjamin Franklin and Banta awards and Small Press Award for Fiction. He has edited many guides for writers on craft and career as an acquisitions editor for The Writer Books 2001–2004. He is also the author of several books, including a recent guide to speculative fiction, A Guide to Fantasy Literature (revised edition, Crickhollow Books, 2007), which was called “the best and most reliable guide to this multi-faceted subject” by Newbery Award–winner Lloyd Alexander. Martin lives in Milwaukee.
For more info, to schedule interviews, or to request a review copy, contact:
Philip Martin, Editor, philip_martin@sbcglobal.net
David Unowsky, Marketing Manager, Scarletta Press, david@scarlettapress.com
# # #
Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU to Mr. Philip Martin, Scarletta Press, and, well, my Blog. You’ve given me the gift of an unexpected highlight for 2007 (in addition to that other unexpected highlight currently growing in my uterus), and for that I’m really, truly grateful.
| |
