Blog Business Summit Highlights

I met Janet Johnson last week at the ALI conference on blogging and podcasting in San Francisco. She led the preconference workshop, and you can see my posts on her presentation (and some of her posts from the last week)here.

At the time, Janet was a little sheepish about the state of her blog because she had recently left Marqui, was waiting to get the design done on her new blog and hadn’t posted much yet.

That’s no longer an issue.

Janet’s reports this week from the Blog Business Summit, particularly the tips from Maryam and Robert Scoble and the post on Brands as Symbols of Social Aspirations, are give a good window into the proceedings for those of us unable to attend.

Thanks for the highlights, Janet!

Getting Real: Toxic Meetings

The 37Signals gang has now made its magnum opus (or whatever the minimalist programming equivalent would be) available on-line for free on the web. If you want to take it with you, you have the $29 hardcopy option or $19 for a PDF.

The basic thesis of Getting Real is that for software, fewer features executed well beats the jack-of-all-trades approach. But as the authors say, their working philosophy has applications even when you’re not building an application:

Note: While this book’s emphasis is on building a web app, a lot of these ideas are applicable to non-software activities too. The suggestions about small teams, rapid prototyping, expecting iterations, and many others presented here can serve as a guide whether you’re starting a business, writing a book, designing a web site, recording an album, or doing a variety of other endeavors. Once you start Getting Real in one area of your life, you’ll see how these concepts can apply to a wide range of activities.

Here’s a sampling of this broadly applicable wisdom, from the essay entitled Meetings are Toxic:

Don’t have meetings

Do you really need a meeting? Meetings usually arise when a concept isn’t clear enough. Instead of resorting to a meeting, try to simplify the concept so you can discuss it quickly via email or im or Campfire. The goal is to avoid meetings. Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead.

There’s nothing more toxic to productivity than a meeting. Here’s a few reasons why:

They break your work day into small, incoherent pieces that disrupt your natural workflow
They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things (like a piece of code or some interface design)
They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute
They often contain at least one moron that inevitably gets his turn to waste everyone’s time with nonsense
They drift off-subject easier than a Chicago cab in heavy snow
They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about
They require thorough preparation that people rarely do anyway
For those times when you absolutely must have a meeting (this should be a rare event), stick to these simple rules:

Set a 30 minute timer. When it rings, meeting’s over. Period.
Invite as few people as possible.
Never have a meeting without a clear agenda.

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Bob Dylan and Media Convergence

Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune (registration required) has an article on Bob Dylan’s concert tour and his appeal to youth. It highlights the powerful team of new media and traditional media:

At 65, Dylan is drawing a broad audience partly because of his iconic status and historical importance, but also because he has been exploring new media — via a weekly show on XM satellite radio and a commercial for iTunes. He’s also opened up about his life, with a best-selling memoir, “Chronicles Vol. 1,” and the PBS documentary “No Direction Home,” while granting interviews to the likes of “60 Minutes” and Newsweek magazine.

Combine that kind of exposure with a surprising willingness to demystify himself and it’s no surprise that his new CD, “Modern Times,” released in late August, became his first No. 1 album in 30 years.

And iTunes made a difference: about 10 percent of the opening-week sales came from digital downloads — twice the industry average, according to Billboard.

“He has newfound respect,” said Lee Abrams, XM radio’s chief creative officer. “Five years ago, he was lumped in with stars of the ’60s. Now, he’s gone from being a classic-rock artist to somebody beyond definition — like the Beatles.”

The traditional media are unsurpassed at creating broad awareness. The new media enable users to get exactly what they want immediately. Instant gratification. Put them together, and they’re a powerful combination.

And, in keeping with Debbie Weil’s advice about using lists in blogs, here’s the Star Tribune’s 7 reasons kids still dig Dylan.

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Demographics Don’t Matter

Of course, for traditional media, demographics are extremely important. If you want to reach a particular kind of audience through TV ads, for example, you need to pick programs that are watched by a sufficiently large group of your audience of likely consumers (probably not advertising Flomax on the Cartoon Network, for instance.)

New media, particularly podcasts, blogs and vlogs, are different entirely. Here’s why:

Search. With over 80 percent of internet users using search engines (scores of millions of users, if not more than 100 million) to find what they need on the web, if your content is out there and searchable, many of your potential customers will find it, wherever you are housing the video or audio files.

In other words, it doesn’t matter if a particular niche within the web is mostly inhabited by people outside your target demographic. For example, if YouTube’s audience is mostly younger, and your target audience is mostly older, that doesn’t stop your audience from finding your content…particularly if you have included it within your own web site or blog.

You can take advantage of the free service to add your video clip to the 100 million or more in the YouTube inventory. The teenagers won’t be looking for it and won’t find it. But by embedding it in your web site or blog and tagging appropriately, people who are looking for your kind of product or service can find it. And since you paid nothing (beyond the time to upload the clip) to add it, your cost per thousand impressions is….? And how does that compare to the TV ad?

The audience may not be large enough to carry your business, and you may still need to use traditional media, too. But if you’re paying for TV, why would you not take advantage of distribution that is essentially free? Especially since those people who have searched for a term that leads them to your content are likely your best potential customers?

New Media Growth. With 67 million iPods sold to date (and likely another 20-25 million hard-drive based mp3 players of all other brands), the audience is getting sufficiently large that it can’t be just the teenagers anymore. And of course the files can be played or viewed on computers as well, which makes for an even broader audience.

For media that are walled off from the broader internet (e.g. cell phones and cable VOD), my first point above is less relevant. You still need to consider the audience for that channel and whether it is large enough and has enough of “your” kind of people to be viable.

I discussed the underlying concept of the Economics of Abundance and linked to some other relevant articles here.

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