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Relearning Less Is More for the 100th Time

Bottom line, least common denominator messages demonstrate you know something to a wider group of people than the specialist stuff you probably like best.

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Measuring your site visitors is eye-opening. For instance, you find the site you are empassioned about is pulling in 40 visitors per day, 56% of those from search. Hmmm, could this be a full time activity? Well, not at those levels. But as Darren Rowse points out, maybe the better lessons come from looking at what makes people suddenly start to come visit you.

Recently, we began to start releasing some of our podcast videos from MuscleVentures onto the popular service, youtube as well as google video. By far our biggest hits are coming from footage of a bodybuilding show. Why? Well, I suspect it is a least common denominator effect. People can look at it and appreciate it without really having to have any particular, arcane knowledge or exerting much effort to understand.

You might be tempted to recoil at that, but in almost all activities, only a few people have time to become experts. If you want to make money in your area of expertise, you have to find ways to immediately make people see the value of what you are doing without having to think a lot.

Bud posted this on May 31, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

FastLane and Hass MS&L Blogworks — A conversation with Mike McClatchey

Hass MS&L Blogworks is a marriage of PR and technology services with GM's FastLane as its most noteworthy client. One suspects that this mix of PR and technology is what will carry the day in the emerging field of Internet buzz marketing.

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I had a conversation with Mike McClatchey at Hass MS&L (part of Publicis, a giant PR firm) last week. We talked about how GM's FastLane Blog had been done by their Blogworks practice, run right here in Ann Arbor. Based on our conversation, Blogworks' strategy, as illustrated in the GM case, represents an innovative marriage of PR and technology done at a large scale:

  • Blogworks has a “Movable Type server” which they use to host FastLane and other client blogs. This arrangement effectively insulates GM and other clients from technology management while still allowing a custom solution. Blogsite, another Ann Arbor company, is also an example of this strategy, though starting more from the technology end. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more integrated technlogy and PR efforts. It's clear that the value add of the technology service is to reduce complexity for clients, getting the sales pitch back to pure business value terms.
  • Hass MS&L is also handling comment moderation for FastLane. It winds up that two types of comments are moderated out of FastLane. If a customer comments on a post with specific problems they are having with a vehicle they purchased, the comment is routed to customer service for that vehicle. Inappropriate comments are also routed out. There is only a handful of this latter.
  • Otherwise, Hass's blogging strategy is similar to that of other firms. As publicly illustrated by Steve Rubel's and Robert Scoble's open recommendations to the Target chain, Hass advocates a listen first, blog second approach. This makes a lot of sense as listening is so cheap on the Internet, something I will emphasize in my May 10 talk on blogging analytics. Listening is an easier sell to businesses. They can watch without the risk of participating.

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Bud posted this on May 6, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)