January 31, 2006

kill all beta males

7 Comments

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On my radar today:
1. More “Web 2.0″ filler from SFGate.
2. Stowe Boyd fisks Rick Segal, kinda sorta.
[RELATED:] A very salient point from Sco­ble:

Another cri­ti­cism I saw of my post yes­ter­day? That ideas aren

7 Responses to “kill all beta males”

  1. Hemaworstje says:
    January 31, 2006 at 10:16 am

    nice nice , cute , don’t stop , if even one see’s it , y’r job is done.

  2. gia says:
    January 31, 2006 at 4:34 pm

    You shall be seeing me at LIFT, Hugh… :) Doncha worry.

  3. One By One Media says:
    January 31, 2006 at 4:57 pm

    Blog­ging Transmogrified

    Follo­wing a sta­te­ment, Hugh Mac­Leod today asks the ques­tion:
    The point of what we’re doing is not get­ting peo­ple to leave com­ments on a cer­tain URL. The point of what we’re doing is selling wine.
     
    Which makes me ask the ques­tion: When doe…

  4. john says:
    January 31, 2006 at 9:41 pm

    I made the com­ment on the Stormhoek blog having lis­te­ned to the pod­cast in which Jason I think wisely said that sales had dou­bled since they star­ted blog­ging rather than assign direct cau­sa­lity. I was inte­res­ted to inves­ti­gate where the con­ver­sa­tions that rip­ple out were occu­rring because they clearly weren’t hap­pe­ning on the offi­cial authen­tic blog. Ini­tially I thought that didn’t mat­ter — after all, to bas­tar­dise a phrase, there’s no such thing as a bad con­ver­sa­tion!
    But then I won­de­red, if the con­ver­sa­tion see­mingly doesn’t occur on the ori­gi­nal blog at all — does that blog need to exist? In other words, is it solely a case of gene­ra­ting word of mouth in the blo­gosphere and beyond? Are the con­ver­sa­tions about Stormhoek wine or are they about the role of blog­ging in Stormhoek mar­ke­ting? Does that mat­ter and, if it does, are there ways to effect a change without impin­ging on the authen­ti­city of the conversations?

  5. hugh macleod says:
    February 1, 2006 at 5:53 am

    John, I think you’re mis­sing the point. This isn’t about the just about Stormhoek.com, or even the inter­net.
    And as John­nie Moore likes to say, it’s more about chan­ging one­self, not the cus­to­mer.
    Blog­ging as a mar­ke­ting tool is easier when you think of it as a che­mi­cal catalyst, not as a ham­mer and nail.
    It seems to me what a lot of peo­ple are hoping for from the whole blogging-as-marketing thing is a tes­ted method that is (A) easy to imple­ment, (B) easy to repli­cate and © easy to sell to their boss.
    Sadly, the Stormhoek story is not that.
    Secondly, to say a con­ver­sa­tion about Stormhoek mar­ke­ting is less “authen­tic” than a con­ver­sa­tion about Stormhoek pro­duct is a false dis­tinc­tion. They both are part of the same process.

  6. john says:
    February 1, 2006 at 11:25 am

    I agree with you  — when I tal­ked about authen­ti­city I was thin­king not so much of the Stormhoek situa­tion.
    I guess I was thin­king out loud as to whether other peo­ple see­king the cookie-cutter blog­ging solu­tion you refer to might think — we don’t need our own blog (after all stormhoek are doing fine but no con­ver­sa­tion occurs on their blog) why don’t we just drop our own pro­po­ganda into the blo­gosphere and start con­ver­sa­tions there? That to my mind would be unques­tio­nably inauthen­tic but neverth­less it runs the risk of enhan­cing the “cha­troom non­sense” point of view.
    P.S. Kudos for saying ‘good luck” to those wan­ting an off the shelf solu­tion, but aren’t you just a little bit tempted?

  7. cynthia says:
    February 1, 2006 at 5:10 pm

    funny, i just watched the exce­llent docu­men­tary about enron (“enron: the smar­test guys in the room”) and my exact thought when it was over was “kill all alpha males.”