News Blinks & Pointers: July 15, AM ’05
- FT on Blogging (logon req). Same old stories. Same old spokespeople. Is anything new happening?
"The answer is this: blogging is transforming the way companies communicate and, for a customer, direct contact with an employee is so much more preferable than dealing with a huge faceless corporate behemoth." FT
- BizWeek on viral advertising that, oh my god, use blogs… (yep, logon needed here as well)
Donovan Unks, a 28-year-old biotech researcher at Stanford University, spent valuable minutes every day for three months to follow an Audi marketing campaign. The ads for the new A3 hatchback, appearing in magazines and on TV, billboards, and the Internet, wove a complicated serialized mystery of a stolen car. Some 500,000 people, according to Audi, tracked the story by following online clues. But Unks and his friend Laura Burstein didn’t just play the game. They were drafted to be characters in the plot by ad agency McKinney & Silver (HAVS ) in Durham, N.C., after they answered an encrypted ad that only solvers of binary code could read in The Hollywood Reporter. In their Audi roles, the two drove all night to a music festival, crashed a party, were blogged about by fans of the story, and Webcast worldwide on the final night of the drama at the Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., on June 30. – BusinessWeek
- Motor City, Motor Mouth… BizWeek on how DeLorenzo uses his blog to blast the auto makers and how, they read and then pay for more…. Ooooooo, what a cool idea… Sound just like industry analysts right 🙂
If it’s Wednesday in Detroit, then it’s likely that everyone from Ford (F ) Chairman and Chief Executive William C. Ford Jr. on down is logging on to Autoextremist.com to catch Peter M. DeLorenzo’s weekly rants, raves, and often astute observations about the car industry. DeLorenzo’s six-year-old site draws some 65,000 readers a week and could soon rival the industry bible, Automotive News, in popularity and clout. – BusinessWeek.
BTW – he has an interesting post by Allen Bukoff titled: Losing the PR war: An Example from Research. Not sure if this is just a valliant effort to promote thier own research…
Be A Corporate Overlord
I might get me one of these.
Disintermediation…
Great Op-Ed in AdAge on disintermediation by John Battelle. Bloggers are the new middlemen. The thing that really resonated with me in this story is the notion that content is being trumped by intent. I now search. Search overrules any predispositions I might have had based on content.
"If content is not found when intent is declared, well, you lose." Search engine optimization and search skills will become hallmarks of great communicators going forward.
Do As I Say, Not As I Do…
If I’d really thought about it, you’d be linking to www.andylark.com/blogs. I would have thought carefully about my URL. But hey, I was all swept-up in the rush and excitement of blogging. Now I’m kind of stuck with it. Unless I can get everyone to update their links and do all that other necessary stuff.
Harry Joiner just made the big URL switch so I’ll be watching to see how he does. You can now find him over at Marketing Headhunter – which says lots to those that don’t know Harry about what he does.
And bonus… straight from Harry’s site, a link to Larry’s site with some interesting marketing trends.
People Just Don’t Understand…
… this whole blog thing according to a BW usability study:
- No participant understood the mechanisms associated with RSS/subscribing to a blog – not even the minority familiar with the term “RSS.”
- Few participants even recognized that they were on an actual blog – and once they did, had a very different reaction to the information presented.
- A minority of participants understood how to navigate within the blog itself – with most being confused by areas for recent posts, categories, trackbacks and even the comments and archives functions.
Download the study if you’d like more. Their conclusion is:
broad comprehension is fairly far away – and better design and terminology are essential. All those tested were optimistic about blogs following the test, with many expressing interest or enthusiasm for what had been a new experience. However, few felt that the presentation of functionality and navigation was intuitive, and many wondered why more effort had not been put into education.
Oh what to do…
