Archive for December, 2004

Comment Spammers

Comment Spammers - the next in a long line of Internet idiots

Usenet news succumbed to spam long ago. Email was next. Now spammers have turned their attention to weblogs and comment forms. In order to increase search engine rankings you are posting advertisements to our Web pages. What you failed to understand is that bloggers [...]

The craziness of the Internet

Man, sometimes I wonder why we bother with the Internet at all….

Working against you

One of the biggest issues I run into as a community evangelist is that every time I seem to make major progress with the community, something happens in the company at large that sets back that progress pretty significantly. It seems like a constant ebb and flow of two steps forward, one step back. .. [...]

Podcasting and advertising

In the last couple of months a couple of significant things happened:

The Photo iPod came out, allowing iPod owners to sync photos to their iPod and view them later
Podcasting - the concept of making the process of automagically grabbing music files (typically of talk show type content) off the Web and moving straight to your iPod [...]

Start digging

When talking to friends and industry associates about the ideas of “community” as relates to their businesses, I often hear “Yeah, that may work for a company like Apple, but it’ll never work for me”.
On one hand that’s completely correct - not all companies have (or should have) interest in working with the concepts of [...]

Hire these two!

Two out of work, and apparently very good marketing dudes are looking for work. Be sure to check out the hilarious PSA.
 
(Hat Tip: What’s Your Brand Mantra)

Provide the starting point

One thing I’ve noticed about fan groups is that they are essentially a massive tinderbox. They have so much potential for explosion that one spark can ignite them.
Most companies see the sparks as simply fan fanaticism. After all, like a child who has no disipline, without guidance, they run wild.
I see the spark as [...]

Can I just call you?

I was reading this post over on CreatingCustomerEvangelists.com about the fact that it’s nearly impossible to find a phone number to call Amazon.
When I was doing Web dev in the early days, we had clients who would set up a Web site and (despite our protests) shut down their customer service numbers in exchange for [...]

Fan created commercials

 Recently, Wired magazine ran an article about the phenomenon of fans creating their own ?commercials? for a product/service.            Though his ad looks like it was done by a pro, Masters is a            36-year-old high school teacher from Orange County,            California. He created the spot in his spare time. Working a            couple of [...]

Commercial Podcasting

Looks like Heineken has started a podcast for their heinekenmusic.com site.