Community Guy – Jake McKee

Amazon adds more new features

I know I tend to report most of Amazon’s new features, but there’s a reason I pay such close attention to them. When Amazon adds new features, many many e-commerce businesses follow.



This morning I discovered several impressive updates:



RSS Feeds on Wishlists

That’s right, now you can subscribe to your wife’s wishlist via RSS.


Shopping Lists

As Amazon puts it, Shopping Lists are meant to:

Gift Organizer

Now you can get a handle on your gift giving. This new section adds several new features:

• Keep track of your friends birthdays
• Associate all past purchases with a person, so you can remember what you gave them year to year
• Gift Lists for your friends (think of a wishlist that you create for your friend)

And of course, they still have the Wedding and Baby Registries.



Amazon is doing an amazing job of finding incredible ways to slice and dice their impressive product portfolio. I’m already working on a gift list for my Mom, one of the hardest people in the world to shop for. Hopefully between now and her birthday at the end of the year, I’ll be able to save a few items that she may be interested in!

And the backlash begins…

You know you’re doing something big when the parody starts….



Check out the latest social networking site (sorta): isolatr.com

What’s "interesting"?

At SXSW, one of the audience members in one of the panels asked something like:

The simple answer: Not in the slightest.



The reality is that we don’t tend to see companies as groups of people, working hard to do something cool. We tend to think of "companies" as that big cold corporate entity in the sky. If your company has 3000 bloggers actively blogging in a way that your customers can find about nothing more than what their hobbies are, you’ve done something amazing. You’ve introduced yourself to your customers. The next time they think about yelling at customer service about a faulty product, they’ll be thinking about Jim the mountain biker who works in the call center, not that damn company who can’t spit out products that actually work.



Now, that said, if you can get your employees blogging about their work as well as their hobbies, even better.

Agencies and Customer Interaction

Even though I’m currently on the agency side of the fence, I love my client side brotheren. After all, it’s only been a few weeks since I made the transition. And since I still feel the love for you client side folks, I’m going to share a dirty little secret. You ready to peek behind the agency curtain? Here is goes…

Marketing agencies that offer to run your blog for you so that you don’t have to spend the time yourself don’t care about you or your customers. Not even a little. If they did, they wouldn’t be offering to run your blog with you.

Your blog should be part of a larger strategy to connect to your consumers. It should be part of a process of opening the kimono, of forming a real, long-term, honest to god relationship with the very people who keep you in business.

Any agency that pitches you on the idea that you don’t need to be involved in that relationship building process is not only short sighted, they’re absolutely clueless when it comes to the larger picture playing out in front of us. Consumer expectations and empowerment are changing in massive ways. They’re seeking more, deeper connections to brands and companies. That’s right, they want a real relationship.

Now think about all the relationships in the rest of your life. Imagine you meet someone attractive at a party. You chat them up over the course of the night, and do the phone number exchange. You arrange a date, show up at the restaraunt, and there’s someone else sitting across the table. You’re confused – you inquire.

You: “Uh… I was supposed to be meeting _____ here. Who are you?”

You: “So you’re closely connected to ______?”

Stranger: “No, he just paid me to be here and told me what to say. It’s OK though, it’s more about having the communication than the quality of the communication, right?”

Check please.

My approach to this subject is different – rather than the agency trying to place themselves as the “invaluable middleman”, I believe the agency should be more of a marriage counselor helping the two parties to connect. Lesser agencies fear that doing this will result in them getting less future business. The reality is that if you help your client achieve that kind of success, they will not only want to work with you again, but they’ll be in a position to push the envelope even further. This means more money for you, Mr. Agency Guy.

Clients, please remember that marginal agencies try to make money by looking out for themselves. Great agencies make money by looking out for their clients.

More SXSW randomness

Continuing my run down of my notes:

• Great quote: "Don’t blog what you don’t own" – meaning don’t talk about things that aren’t yours to talk about.
• I hear that Dave Winer’s leaving the blogosphere. Can’t say I’m that upset. Maybe it’ll give him time to let his ego deflate a bit.
  
• In trying to make money off your blogging efforts, keep in mind that people are much more willing to pay for tangible items (t-shirts, mousepads, stickers) than they are for basic content.
  
• I noticed that many of the panelists came off as a bit… egotistical and perhaps arrogant. Note to self: be more humble when speaking.
• In the discussion of whether spouses with blogs are more or less connected by following the other’s blog, someone made the point that it helps them to connect to their spouse beyond the normal discussions. It’s as much about what they’re paying attention to as what they’re saying/feeling.
• Jory des Jardins had a great quote: "My boyfriend and I are in a mixed relationship – he’s offline, I’m online"
• Chris Pirillo challenged his panel audience to try to write 100 things you like about your significant other. He says around 50, it becomes insanely hard.
• Another great quote regarding whether online relationships are "real" relationships: "If they’re not real relationships, why can I get my feelings hurt?"
• Another great quote: "Don’t forget your a member of your own community"
• Craig Newmark: "Tivo will save democracy" (Download the full videocast to see what he means)

SXSW random thoughts

So I didn’t want to miss quality content during the SXSW sessions, so I was doing it old school – pen and paper, baby!



Here’s a few of my random thoughts from my chocked full notebook. I’ll probably break this into a few posts, so check back for the next couple of days. No particular order or weight – just things I thought of along the way.

• First off great event, lots of fun.
  
• The biggest problem I had with the sessions was two things – a) the extreme focus on mostly blogs as the content. Yes, they’re important and cool, but they’re not all that’s going on these days. b) many of the sessions were giving by people who though they were much more important than they really are, or people too young and/or inexperienced in how to talk about their business. (this was both good and bad, really)
• Please please please shut up about how sad it is to get fired for blogging rude stories about your co-workers. We’re all sick of hearing it. When you start railing on your co-workers, even outside of work, your employer has every right to can your ass. Calling your boss an ass in public is the same in a conference room as it is on the internet.
•  I heard a great word at SXSW – Instalanche (Instant avalanche…of blog comments)
• I also heard a word I care less for – Transculture (i.e. having parents who are not the same race, for instance). I have nothing against anyone, especially based on race or anything cultural. My beef is with the continued niching of how we describe ourselves.
• Speaking of culture, it’s new to me that so many (straight) people from San Francisco don’t have husbands or wives, but partners.

More soon!

Biz Blog Essentials Final Thoughts

OK, so maybe my last post about the Essentials of Business Blogging came off as a bit harsh. It certainly wasn’t meant to be. I think there was some great content shared, and I got the feeling that most people in the room were happy with what they’d learned.

I still feel like there’s a major problem with the direction this seminar took from a high level. As I mentioned, the seminar to me had the feel of giving a 14 year old a new car and telling him to take a road trip… not yet having had any drivers training.

While the session successfully mentioned some of the pitfals of business blogging, what they didn’t do was anything related to the discussion of how business blogging fits into an overall strategy, an overall direction. Anyone who’s seen a homeless man yelling at you about Jesus as you pass by, simply having a conversation isn’t necessarily an inherent “good thing”.

Business blogging is important, significant only if it fits into a larger strategy by the company to form a real relationship with their consumers/customers. Simply yapping at them in a one-way, directed way is simply using new tools for old school tactics.

So I guess my final thoughts on the matter are this – if you already have a clear idea of the why, then head to their next seminar to find out the how.

SXSW podcasts and videocasts

Couldn’t make it to SXSW? Check out the podcasts and video footage from the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

According to the SXSW site, they’ve recorded 85+ sessions, and they advise to continue checking the site as they’re continuing to add content.

Be sure to checkout the session with Doc Searls about Cluetrain Revisisted. Excellent session.

Business Blogging – more live blogging

More random thoughts -

Great quote: “Blogs are to cats what the Web is/was to physics documentation”

Sites mentioned:

• Inflight HQ
• GoogleAlert.com
• FeedFire
• Feed43

A audience member mentioned that there was thick fear in the room about blogging. Absolutely true.

People are asking a lot about how much ad revenue can be expected, or how to find bloggers to take to the load off internal employeesk, or how to ensure the agency hired will do their job right in engaging the bloggers without the company participating. And the sad part is that nobody from the speaker list is responding with “what’s your overall strategy”. If you’re a trying to create a “expert blogger” persona about yourself, for instance, your strategy would quite simply preclude ads.

Speaker Janet (former Enron employee) mentions “Act on the outside like you do in the inside”. She mentions that if blogging was as big back in the day, Enron scandal wouldn’t have been the size it was.

Anil mentions IBM has a great blogging policy.

Janet mentions that the best place for PR agencies in the process is helping to define and prepare crisis response.

Essentials of Business Blogging

So here goes my first quasi-live blogging experience. I’m at the Essentials of Business Blogging seminar, and I have to admit that I thought this was going to be a much different event. I realized last night that this isn’t the Blog Business Summit that I heard such great things about from last year. Yes, I’m a bonehead.

But when I realized that I was going into a session for Business Blogging newbies, I was quite excited.

The event has been marginal. The focus has been solely on tools, which while an important part of the discussion, is only a minor part of the discussion. Talking about business blogging without talking about the ethics, and the right mindset for  the concept is like giving a car to a 16 year old without any driving experience – it’s dangerous, someone’s going to get hurt, and it’s going to cost money you don’t want to send.

The current speaker (Janet Johnson from Marqui) has just talked about how their strategy a while for paying bloggers to blog about their product. The basic take away she’s pitching to a group of total newbies is that paying bloggers created controversy and increased brand awareness, therefore all is good.

I have to tell ya, I’m about to jump out of my skin. I asked Janet the question “Why pay bloggers? Could you not find any that would be willing to work with you?” She brought it back to how the controversy drove traffic. (This is a company that mentions helping you “Guarantee Brand Integrity” as part of their product positioning on their home page)

But what about a longer term relationship? What about longer term brand ambassadorship? What about making a real connection to current and potential users?

The Paris Hilton Approach may work up front in a limited way, but it’s certainly not a real solution.

UPDATE: The conference organizer just said something to effect of – if people in your company don’t like the idea of comments from people telling you they don’t like your company, just turn off comments.

Check please.

IF the lack of comments is part of the strategy for your blog, great. If your blog grows to a point where comments aren’t adding value or are overwhelming in quantity or hell,  great. But if you simply want to avoid having to listen to consumers, that’s not a good enough reason. Why bother with a blog in the first place? Issue press releases and save yourself some late night typing.