Alpha Mind Blog

I’m not sure I have the nerve to disagree with Seth Godin, but…

Nathan asks Seth how to get a marketing job with no marketing background. Seth says, in essence, forget the job, just market.

Even if you’re 12 years old, start a store on eBay. You’ll learn just about everything you need to learn about digital marketing by building an electronic storefront, doing permission-based email campaigns, writing a blog, etc.

Is this brilliant advice? Or only advice for the brilliant? In other words, has Seth forgotten that not everybody is Seth?

There are many kinds of marketers, but the ones who succeed at all fall into two classes. There are the capable marketers, and there are the brilliant marketers. The latter are precisely the ones Seth is speaking to. These are the entrepreneurial ones, who have no need for the comfort of a big company, who just market because they love it, and who take to it like fish to water.

They are also the ones who tend toward Seth’s brand of brilliance, who figure out the world around them by native ability, not by having it explained to them. They do, as Seth implies everybody can, learn far faster by unaided experience than by classes or apprenticeships. They will, as Seth promises, have folks beating down doors to hire them.

There is a vast need, though, for capable marketers. They aren’t out in the long skinny tail of the bell curve. They learn by being taught. They they aren’t necessarily consumed by the hankering to market. They need a job while they learn to market, and so they find marketing jobs, as Nathan was hoping to do.

And they have one advantage even over Seth: they can empathize with the non-brilliant, who make up the vast bulk of most markets.

Notice that Seth prefaces the advice to start an eBay store with “Even if you’re 12 years old.” Better to have said, “If you’re lucky enough to be 12 years old.” Because a twelve-year-old is far better placed to follow Seth’s advice than a twenty-something or beyond. At twelve years old, you don’t have school loans to pay, a spouse to please, kids underfoot or on the way. Some folks need a job, and if they want to market, it should be a marketing job.

So, aren’t I disagreeing with Seth?

Not really. Because for someone who has the potential to be one of the brilliant marketers, Seth’s path is the quicker way to demonstrate it. And of course, if you’re passionate and single-minded, you should get a marketing job and start your own business.

I know where Lee Hopkins is, but where is Technorati?

Yes, it’s time for a little whining. Or ranting. Or whatever.

In Unfash (I’ll be using this nickname for my e-book Unfashionably Late from now on. If we all live with a word as ugly as “blog”, surely we can handle “Unfash”.), I said

…here’s how famous I’m becoming:

After twenty-two posts in 4 weeks, nobody has linked to me. The feed for my main blog, “The Alpha Mind,” has two subscribers other than the four which are just me trying out different aggregators. And it appears my blog has been read by no more than twelve persons other than me.

Now, after wiping this egg from my face, I have to confess that the only fact in that quote that was true on the day I wrote it was that I only had two subscribers. (And I’m being awfully trusting of FeedBurner when I say even this.)

First I’ll deal with my small readership, so I can then get to the serious business of kicking Technorati around the block.

I had made a mistake in my .htaccess file, and I wasn’t seeing statistics for blog.alphamind.biz, where this blog lives. I was only seeing statistics (please don’t ask me to explain) for those parts of the alphamind.biz domain which contained no content of importance. I don’t even know why there were twelve discrete calls for pages there, but those calls weren’t for my blog.

When I fixed the .htaccess problem, I found that in fact there had been over thirty readers of my blog the week I wrote the above. Still not a large number, but more than I’d stated.

Now, as to links to me…

The very day I published the e-book, I found that one of my favorite blogs had linked to mine a few days earlier. I clicked the link, which took me to the appropriate page on Alpha Mind. I then clicked my shortcut button “Technorati This in a New Window”, and up came Technorati telling me there were no links to that page.

I haven’t counted the number of times the same thing has happened since then, but it’s been at least “several”. The link at the top of this post is to a post by Lee Hopkins that links to my blog. Again, I follow Lee’s link, and then confirm that Technorati doesn’t know Lee (or anybody else) is linking to my post.

Technorati, please listen, and I’ll talk real loud so you can hear:

I followed a link to the page you’re telling me nobody links to! And the link that I followed is five (5) days old! Are you awake?!

While Technorati checks its alarm clock (in my dreams), I am wondering what the cyber equivalent of sniffing one’s own armpits is, so I can do that.

What is going on? Why does Technorati not find pages that link to me?

By the way, Technorati indexes my own blog posts pretty quickly—I’ve never had to wait five days to find my own material on Technorati. It just never finds anybody who links to me.

(sniff.) I’m bummed.

Google, please listen, and I’ll talk real loud so you can hear:

Technorati is not getting the job done! You guys know from links and crawlers and everything Technorati is trying to do and failing. Will you kindly take over? Please?

Okay. I dry my eyes and get on with life. And assure anyone reading this that you’re not the only one at my party. Honest. Some people are even linking to me, and one day you’ll know about it.

Oh, and Lee… Have you checked your deodorant lately?

Grant McCracken is Gaga over Geico, and tells us why. I’ll add something:

There’s a serious problem with using “real customers, not celebrities” to speak for a product, and it’s more acute in audio than in print, and worse yet in video. Problem? These people are boring. Boooooooring.

Check out the ad Grant is writing about. This woman is pleasant, even good-looking, but dull as dishwater. She hasn’t been trained to have any “presence” on camera, and she can’t raise a trace of emotion in me.

Solution: as Gerald Weinberg wrote, “If you can’t fix it, feature it.” Put her next to Little Richard, and two things happen.

1. As psychologists put it, he “bears her affect” for her, expressing the emotion (at least the excitement) she’s not good at expressing. This engages me in a way she couldn’t on her own.
2. She sits with perfect aplomb in the presence of a man howling like a lunatic. By the contrast with Little Richard, her plainness becomes ever more apparent, and the sense that she’s incapable of guile is driven home.

The setting is wonderfully clever at heightening the second effect. To all appearances, she has just fed Little Richard a wholesome home-cooked meal (vice-versa is unthinkable, and we tend not to think in terms of a studio set.) This makes her even more the “regular gal” she is. The very qualities in her that could have made us decide this is a good time for a bathroom break have now increased our regard for her. Although we stayed for Richard’s antics, after it’s over we’re glad we stayed for her. Richard kept us there so that her very plainness could win us over.

BTW, I’m glad to be posting about McCracken’s blog. It’s superb. After reading it for quite some time, I’ve added it to my blogroll. I hope my readers will subscribe and check it out regularly.

“I wonder what Robert (Scoble) would think of his name being used as a unit of currency…” (Shel Holtz on the For Immediate Release podcast, 3/1/07.)

Fear not. Now that Quaker Heritage Day is behind me, Robert will know. He may need to finish up at SXSW first.

Thanks to Neville and Shel for not one but two plugs for Unfashionably Late, in which the economic unit “the scoble” is introduced.

After some time away from it, I can now go back to Unfashionably Late and see just what is in there.

The summary:

Is blogging a waste of time? This can only be answered if you know what return on time you want to get. Simplifying greatly, I suggest that in the blogosphere, the coin of the realm is the link. But since not all links are equally valuable, I introduce a unit of link quality, the “scoble”, defined as the average value of a link to your blog from Scobelizer. (A link from a newbie might be worth 0.001 scobles, and a link from Huffinton perhaps 4.2 scobles.)

I suggest some reasons why the economics of blogging may be deteriorating. Put in my economics-of-blogging terms, it may be that, as the blogosphere grows, it takes more hours to earn a scoble than in the past. Possible reasons:

1. It costs more time to get a top blogger’s attention. Why? Top bloggers are very busy being top bloggers.
2. It costs more to enter the game at all. Just to be perceived as a good blogger, one needs to shore up one’s position in sixteen skills.
3. It costs more because there’s a lot being written, but of decreasing quality, so that one spends more time finding the conversations that are worth entering.
4. It gets more stressful as the sphere gets crasser, cruder, and uglier as it matures.
5. The cost of entering the game is not just skills, but learning. And learning blogging gets more complex as time goes on. I cite online lists (which aren’t even complete) of 16 blogging software offerings, 63 aggregators, and 19 podcatchers the newbie can try out. Then one has to learn about tagging, blog searching, and other tools. Then one has to learn a mess of concepts, manners and mores, gossip and argot. Blogging has come to cost a lot of overhead in addition to just reading blogs and writing posts.
6. If one seeks links from non-top bloggers, there are too many bloggers out there who have no clue, and you can waste a lot of time on these.

Next, I suggest that in some respects, the new and small blogosphere of 2002 (when I first blogged) was a healthier environment and can be partially reproduced. I begin with the blogging education that Robert French is giving his communications students at Auburn U., and suggest several ways of turning that semi-closed environment into a “blog academy” which can train new bloggers without overwhelming them, and can get them some readership at the same time.

Finally, I suggest that a tool is needed, a telescope by which we can identify good bloggers (since there are so many dreadful ones out there.) I suggest the following metrics:

• Reciprocity of linking (does the blogger reciprocate a reasonable percentage of links?)
• Reciprocity of linking to newcomers (Is this blog helping newer bloggers?)
• Serendipity (does this blogger turn up new stuff?)

Technorati or Google could implement these in a weekend. (My money’s on Google to do it.)

There are a few other traits that tend to belong to good bloggers: they use real names, accept comments in which links are permitted, and deploy only enough snarkiness to have a nice edge, not so much that their posts just amount to name-calling.

Finally, I challenge somebody, anybody, to make some of these things happen, and restore some of the beauty of 2002, when I met Radio Userland and fell in love.

That’s Unfashionably Late in a nutshell, sans pretty pictures, amusing anecdotes, and the all-important reminder to breathe. These SparkNotes should help you pass next week’s quiz, but I do hope some of you will sit down and read the book itself.

Had a problem. No stats for my most active site! Bad!

Gazed at the problem for a while. Finally decided to write Dreamhost tech support. First spent half an hour making sure I was doing everything right, had checked documentation, etc.

Sent the message.

Went to the kitchen, sauted a batch of onions for a stew.

Came back to PC, Jason at Dreamhost had solved the problem. The time I spent in the kitchen was less than the time it took me to write the email asking for help.

Jason rocks! Not only that, he rocks fast!