MyBlogLog Problogger Contest = Win-Win Marketing Strategy

So if you want to win the ultimate Problogger toolset, check out our little contest over at MyBlogLog.

— Tweets from Duzins (aka Robyn Tippins)

In an attempt to lure more customers to use MyBlogLog, a blogging community and analytics service, the company announced the "Become a Problogger Contest" which will hand out one grand prize winner to the community with the most rapid-growth over the period between November 8 to 30.

The grand prize winner will receive:

• One Year Pro MyBlogLog Subscription
• $500 Yahoo! Search Marketing Credit
• A 1-year membership to SEOmoz Premium Membership
• 1 Complete Blog Redesign
• One Year Subscription To Yaro Stark's Blog Mastermind
• A Featured Community for the month of December at MyBlogLog
• An invitation to the invite-only blog gathering, SOBCon 2008, in Chicago

More Details about the contest.

I thought that it's a brilliant idea. The contest is user-centered, and no doubt any contestants will learn from the experience on how to market his/her own site. In turn, the company gains the community audience that it seeks.

When you have a win-win strategy for both the consumer and the company, you have a golden marketing plan. This, btw, is my key take-away reading from reading an article on the October 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, where Jeff Bezos shares his thoughts on leadership through strategic change in a culture obsessed with today's consumer.

Harvard Business Review: he Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos

Related SML Universe
+ SML Del.icio.us: Marketing
+ SML Del.icio.us: Strategy
+ SML Marketing
+ SML Strategy

SML Copyright Notice
©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Digital Agencies: to blog or not to blog

Logic+Emotion has posted a survey on whether digital agencies should blog and it is making rounds on the Internet. The post itself fairly simple, but the discussion (i.e. comment area) is very interesting:

Logic + Emotion: Should digital agencies be blogging?

Related

• 2007-06-03: SML Pro Blog: From closed to open (originally titled Being Open and the culture of corporate blogging)

SML Thank You
I would like to thank Tarky7 / Kit Latham (Google / SML Wiki) for sending this article to me.

SML Copyright Notice

©2007 See-ming Lee 李思明 SML / SML Pro Blog / SML Universe. All rights reserved.

Relationship between world peace and spam

Blogging = Quality spam;
Public relations = Quality blogging;
Diplomacy = Quality public relations;
World peace = Quality diplomacy;

博客 = 優質的垃圾郵件;
公共關係 = 優質的博客;
外交 = 優質的公共關係;
世界和平 = 優質的外交;

Communication is Addictive / Thoughts on Social Networking Sites

Posted originally on Flickr in response to Morgan Carpenter’s comment regarding the addictiveness of Flickr vs. Facebook.

I think that everything that fosters communication is addictive. If you think about it like this:

1. Email, the original means of Web communication, was very addictive. Do you remember the days back in 1995 when you typed and quoted people's emails for 4-page long and conversations which lasted over months?


2. Then IMs came about, and that was essentially a digested form of email, except that you don't really have to edit much because it's not very formal.


3. People like to voice their opinions and made themselves heard, not just to a single person, but to many at once--that's where chatrooms come in, allowing individuals to broadcast their opinions to a group.


4. But chatrooms are instantaneous, and are not permanently stored, so most don't find that extremely effective. That's when you have blogs, where their opinions and discourses are permanently stored on databases, and remained indexable and thus searchable by search engines.


5. Blogs require authorship, and most don't have the time to do that, and that's where comments came in. Friendster was originally very viral, but Friendster calls them testimonial, and testimonial sounds very serious and so it never really kicks off.


6. Comments, like IMs, are intentionally casual, so people write more often. What makes Flickr popular is that users can submit whatever they want to on the Web (a subjective perspective), and people can write whatever they want. Its database is hosted by Yahoo, and so it becomes very searchable. In fact, you will find your Flickr comments get onto Google index within 4-5 days (I subscribe to my own Google Alerts so I know that)


7. Facebook is addictive, possibly because it allows you to install multiple applications based on interest, which is the link that link people together originally anyhow, and connect them together (see SML Pro Blog: Innovation = Synergy of Existing Ideas). In other words, Facebook creates multiple points of entry for communication. If Flickr would allow users to easily comment on other people's tags, date, EXIF info, etc, it might make it an even more interesting product. The notes feature is definitely a pro.

Mashing up your life

An easy way to mash everything up would be even more powerful. I am working on a project to mash every single social network that I have a presence in. This project, code name SML Lifelog, is a venue to provide multiple points of linking possibility to create a summation of all the social networks where I have a presence (See SML Network), and foster the ability to comment on a single topic spanning multiple networks.

Hopefully, when the product get onto beta in 2011, it will be more addictive than any networks you find today :)

From closed to open

If Web 1.0 is about information authoring, then Web 2.0 is about information sharing (1).

This change is evidential when we look at the climate of information representation: from FAQs to forum discussion, from personal homepages to personal blogging, from closed-development to open-source movement, from categorizing to tagging, from trees to wikis.

In other words, from closed to open.

Being open is a good thing. A prime example is opensource development. You initiate an idea and concept, and a whole world of developers is available to improve and improvise on it (2). IBM reaps the benefits of open-developing their Eclipse platform as a successor to their VisualAge family of products.

In the world of knowledge, Wikipedia became statistically evaluated to be as accurate as Encyclopedia Brittanica, eclipsing Brittanica’s once dominant sovereign in the world of knowledge (3).

In the world of business, corporations open up their communication channels and invite the whole world for discourse. Blogs like the Google Blog, Adobe blog and Microsoft’s Channel 9 created two-way communication channels, and thus benefits, with the users. Web users learn the insider tips on different companies’ products and services, and the companies in turn gain tremendous amount of user feedback on their betaware with very little upfront investment.

Interactive agencies see blogging as a free PR device to influence the industry. Organic has Three Minds, Frog Design has the Frog Blog. I find myself reading these quite a bit to learn where the industry is going and how different companies are utilizing upcoming technology to do amazing things.

In turn, I noted that while I took note of Razorfish in the early days (~1997) via the RSub–the Razorfish lab that sells company merchandise and all kinds of ‘experimental’ ideas that their employees create–it appears that the same business model of social marketing has now transformed to corporate blogging.

References / Citations

1. Inspired via discourse with Tom Nicholson.
2. Via discourse with Adam S. Kirschner.
3. CNet | Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica by Daniel Terdiman, 2005-12-15

Blogging, a realization

I just realize today, that instead of bothering people with monologue IM, I should blog instead. It's really the same thing. Here are the differences:

1. Instead of typing paragraphs after paragraphs on an IM window, I type paragraphs after paragraphs into an editable area.
   
   
2. Blogging enables the ability to not have to shut someone up with a wall of text that is normally unreadable inside the size of an IM window.
   
   
3. I can edit what I said previously, correct my spelling mistakes, and I don't get the instant gratification of the occasional uh-huh that my 'target' was able to insert in between my 80wpm-typing.
   
   
4. With blogging, I cannot be certain a single person would read these words. Ultimately, however, I guess I don't really care -- like maybe I don't really care that someone is actually reading my IMs... hmm...

So, in under two minutes, I managed to type a ton of stuff without someone thinking that I am just purely crazy. That's good. That's therapy.