Who is this woman? Does she work at Sales Genie? Is she a customer? Does her excellent hairstyle and tailored suit have anything to do with the quality of these mailing lists?
Of course stuff like this works. Of course it’s a lie. It’s something that customers (of both genders, apparently) respond to.
IF a computer can do it
AND someone can make money from it
AND they can do it anonymously
THEN it’s pretty clear it’s going to happen, even if it ruins a good thing for the rest of us.
Blog growth is accelerating. It’s now doubling every five months or so, with 30,000 new blogs coming every single day.
Except that’s not really good news, because a whole bunch of those blogs are being created with computers automated to spew out countless brainless blogs.
Here’s how it works: you create a program that develops hundreds or even thousands of blogs, all of which are busy referring to each other and to your products. Soon, you start showing up on automated services like google or technorati. You get more than your fair share of traffic.
Hey, it’s not against the law.
But yeah, it’s selfish and it denigrates a valuable resource that the rest of us depend on.
One more time, I’ll say it clearly: anonymity is bad for the net. Wouldn’t you like a switch that would prevent all anonymous email from showing up in your inbox? Or a similar switch in google, which would filter out anonymous trash sites? The Wikipedia would work even better if all its contributors were maskless.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The problem with anonymous (part VII).
Link: Fast Company | Change Agent — Issue 51.
Thanks to David Sifry for working so hard on the spam issue and for the incredible service technorati performs. Check out his blog for more on the rapid creation of new blogs: Sifry’s Alerts.
Jupiter just published a report that says that 10% of US Net users delete the cookies on their web browser every day and 40% do it (in aggregate) every month.
Let’s do a reality check here. This is the same population that can’t get rid of pop ups, repeatedly falls for phishing of their Paypal and eBay accounts, still uses Internet Explorer, buys stuff from spammers, doesn’t know what RSS is and sends me notes every day that say, "what’s a blog?"
Forgive my skepticism, but it’s inconceivable to me that 40% of the audience knows how to use their browser to erase their cookies.
The echo chamber effect on the Net is stronger than it is anywhere in the world. Yes, professional women in New York think that lots of women keep their maiden name when they get married (it’s actually less than 5%). Yes, people who work out all the time figure that most people do (they don’t.). People who run wineries figure that lots of people care about wine (they don’t.) But on the Net it is at its worst. The heavy users figure that everyone understands what we understand. (They don’t.)
My favorite bit of proof: One of the top 100 things searched for on Yahoo! was "Yahoo". Also on the list when I was there: "web" and "search".
People aren’t stupid. They just are too busy or too distracted to care as much as you do about the stuff you care about.
For the infrequent visitor, here’s a quick look at what’s been happening at Seth’s blog since the beginning of the year. I picked them for variety, for the frequency of referrals and because they made me think.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Don’t Shave That Yak!.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The ever-worsening curse of the cog.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The persistence of really bad ideas.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The secret army of ad clickers.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Step by step.
Link: Seth’s Blog: What you need to know about BitTorrent (part 1).
Link: Seth’s Blog: More about words.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Numanuma
Link: Seth’s Blog: Care.
Link: Seth’s Blog: Mob justice
And two bonuses for you!
My new blog: Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog
and last year’s list: Seth’s Blog: The Best Seth Godin Posts of the Year (2004).
I ended my book Purple Cow with the admonition that "very good is bad." A few folks were confused by this, but a post on John Battelle’s Searchblog reminded of my point… it’s worth another look.
become.com is the brainchild of some of the founders of MySimon and other shopping sites. It is supposed to be the next big thing, a google-killer.
Become is very good. A quick bunch of searches demonstrates that it’s a totally fine alternative to Froogle or some other shopping engines.
But there’s no way in the world people are going to switch.
Customers don’t switch for very good. What they’ve got is already very good! Google wasn’t a very good alternative to Yahoo. It was something far bigger than that.
The only way to beat Google or Kodak or Fotomat or McKinsey or JetBlue or you name it is to be over-the-top better, to be remarkable, to change the game.
It’s a great time to be a consumer. And it’s harder than it’s ever been to create stuff worth switching for.
It’s hard to remember back when a cup of coffee for a dollar was considered extravagant. When I was in college, my partner and I ran a coffee shop in the student center. We sold coffee for 50 cents and cleared thirty cents a cup. And sold thousands of cups a day, all outsourced.
Of course, no one buys coffee today. We buy an experience. We buy a story and the way that this story makes us feel. It’s a complex story, involving smells and tastes and the sound of the shop and words and more.
I’ve started a collection of bad photographs of coffee store menus. Here’s my first one.
The lesson? Your menu (whatever your menu is, and yes, you do have one) is at least as important as your beans or your bread or your spreadsheets. Not because I say so, but because your customers demand it.
After everyone is safely in the ambulance, the accident scene people (and the lawyers) show up. They bring cameras and tape measures and little devices that measure tread wear and stuff. All so they can prove what happened.
Of course, if three people see an accident, there are at least three descriptions of what really happened. It doesn’t really matter what you can prove. What matters is the story I tell myself.
Smart lawyers win cases where the facts don’t back them up. That’s because smart lawyers know how to tell a story that people will want to believe. It’s a story that makes a juror feel competent and ethical and satisfied. It’s a story that has very little to do with the facts and a lot to do with the lies we insist on.
i think most marketers spend way too much time worrying about their version of the truth and not enough time be authentic and telling stories about what they’re up to.
The neatest blog invention of the week: a persistent blog entry that stays right on top of your blog.
All the data I can see makes it clear that most blogs don’t just have a loyal RSS following. People show up in the middle. They miss a month or a year and then they come back.
And since this is the web, they’re impatient. Impatient people don’t sit still and grok the whole page, check out the archives and figure out what’s up. They read a sentence or two and then leave.
So, working with my friend Red at Silkblogs.com, we built just such a feature.
You can find it here:
My plan is to change this peristent blog entry over time, adding, for example, a link to the top 10 posts–once I have more than ten.
If you like it, let the folks at Typepad know. Maybe they’ll add it.
Perhaps they should have.
When Monty Python’s Broadway production of Spamalot has a security leak and exposes 19,000 email addresses (get it… spam a lot…) it’s sort of funny. When it’s your business, probably not.
I’m on the list, the question is, how will I be able to tell the Python spam from the other spam? Too existential for me.
Link: The New York Times > Theater > News & Features > What to Expect of ‘Spamalot’? A Lot of Spam.
Whenever you try to take a prospect or a customer or a student or an employee through a process, you run the risk of losing them. Sometimes just a few out of a hundred drop out along the way. You lose a few at every step. Sometimes, though, it’s a much bigger number.
Too often, we forget to to measure to discover the wall, the one step in the process that nails a huge portion of the population. Maybe, if we left that step out, we’d get a little bit less, but we’d get it from a whole bunch more people.
I was registering an Apple product while the software was installing. I made it to step five, and they wanted to know not just the kind of product, but the "Marketing part number."
I bailed.
The benefits of being registered (dubious at best) were overwhelmed by the hassle of finding out this number. Bye.
Now the marketing gurus at Apple get no data instead of most of the data. My bet is that this is a wall, a place where a huge percentage of people abandon the process.
The same thing happens when people learn trigonometry or apply to your firm for a job or decide whether or not to read about your new products.
