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Join the Conversation Book Review

March 9, 2008 By 1 Comment

jtc_book.jpgI realize that I am a tad bit “late” on my review of the book “Join the Conversation” by Joseph Jaffe, but as the saying goes – better late than never. OK, I really hate cliche sayings, but I can’t seem to think of a better one right now.

After Reading Joseph Jaffe’s first book, “Life after the 30 Second Spot” and subsequently subscribing to his blog at www.jaffejuice.com, I jumped on the chance to review his latest book “Join the Conversation” under a system called UNMTPNM, or “Use New Marketing to Prove New Marketing.” In the experiment, Jaffe sent out review copies of his book to several bloggers in turn for a review… and also a promise to pay the book forward when they were done.

Like his first book, Jaffe writes a lot like I think… with parentheticals and sometimes off-the wall references. In addition, many of the references are “in your face” such as when he talks about getting a “rod shoved up” a certain part of the anatomy. All in good fun of course.

The main question I had throughout the book is for whom it was written. It contains numerous examples of ways corporations have “missed the conversation” and in turn had public relations nightmares. An example being a man who built his entire living room furniture out of FedEx boxes, and was consequently sued by FedEx instead of supported. If I were take a guess, I would say the book is directed towards advertising/marketing/promotions CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, rather than new media people such as myself.

I was particular interested in the case studies since I had sort of a “join the conversation” moment myself 2 years ago with Adam Curry of PodShow. I had a problem – I wanted an iPod. I had a second problem – I didn’t want to pay the $300 for the video iPod. Now most people would have just sucked it up and saved up to buy something they wanted, but through a series of events, a web site called troyneedsanipod.com was born. When Adam Curry heard of it through a podcast comment to his show, The Daily Source Code, he immediately saw the opportunity to plug GoDaddy’s domain registration company, and launched a contest of his own “Who needs an iPod more than Troy?” The catch – you head to register a domain name through GoDaddy. The promotion was a success. (Plus I got an iPod!)

Jaffe’s book is full of the opposite kind of story – the companies who missed the boat. The points he brings up help the reader learn to recognize opportunities to leverage new media into good PR, based on oftentimes negative reviews or customer comments.

The book’s chapters stand alone nicely, so it is easy to pick up, read a chapter, and then pick it up again in a couple of days. One of the things that I think could have used a little more consideration is starting a conversation. Too many of the examples mentioned were reactionary stories. ie: Joe Blow posts a blog post and Youtube video about company X and company X does (or in most case doesn’t) respond. In this case the consumer/user (sorry Joseph) initiates the communication. But there has to be example of corporate initiated conversation out there, someplace. (besides the make your own commercials)

One place I felt myself slump at was when he talks about the 6 C’s. Long ago, when the Internet started, my friend and mentor Jim Moloshok of Warner Bros. Online would talk to me about Content, Community and Commerce. This was ingrained in my so much that I even just started a blog called contentcommunitycommerce.com .

Oh great, there goes all of my credibility, Jaffe says it is no longer completely accurate. Is my blog done before it even began? I don’t think so. No matter how many more C’s you add on, Content, Community and Commerce will continue to be the “ring leaders” in successful web sites and media.

Would I recommend this book? Definitely. There are a lot of great ideas on how to take a potentially bad situation and turn it around. I intend to “pay it forward” to a member of the Des Moines Bloganostra at the next meeting.

[TAGS]joseph jaffe, join the conversation, book review, Troy Rutter, Jaffe Juice,bloganostra[/TAGS]

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Has Peter Denied You on LinkedIn?

March 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The Bible (and Tim Rice) tell us that Peter denied Jesus three times. But if you are denied three times on LinkedIn, you may not get flogged, but your account will get flagged … you will need to enter in a person’s email address in order to send them a Connection Invite.

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This happens if you send out invites and people click on the “Don’t Know” button instead of ignoring or accepting your LinkedIn attempt. Unfortunately, as it proved to be for me, this is mainly due to lazy people who don’t want to just ignore the request (not everybody may want to connect with you … for whatever reason) but LinkedIn only sees that people claim not to know you, and one of their big marketing pushes is that LinkedIn is only for people who actually know each other.

So can you tell who denied knowing you? Yes!

  1. Log into your LinkedIn profile and click on Contacts on the left hand side. (Note to LinkedIn management, for web usability, this really should be “Connections” to keep things standard, not “Contacts”)
  2. After your contacts/connections are displayed, look near the right hand top margin for “X outstanding Sent Invitations” Click on the words “Sent Invitations.”
  3. You can now page through all of the invitations you have sent, and look for “Doesn’t Know” in the status column.
  4. Call up your colleague and ask why they said they didn’t know you!

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Click Thumbnail For Larger Version

If your account is flagged as too many people saying they don’t know you, LinkedIn says you can email them at cs@linkedin.com, explain to them that you know the rules and aren’t spamming users, and they will reportedly remove the restriction. Which is good, since many of us use LinkedIn to find people we may have lost track of, and knowing their current email address is part of the goal, not the pre-requisite.

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It REALLY Is About The Content

March 4, 2008 By 2 Comments

After all of the advances in Internet technology, and the sheer number of useful and creative web sites that have been developed since then, one single thing continues to drive visitors to sites, and in turn make money for some, lose it for others who don’t understand it – content.

What is this mysterious word they call content? Like many things, content means different things to different people. But one thing is for certain: Those who know how to produce it, benefit from it. Those that do not are harmed by not having it.

Content.

Your own content, other people’s content, computer generated content, user generated content, it’s different but yet all the same. Someone, somewhere, has to create it. And someone, somewhere has to put it together and present it to the rest of us.

Back when Yahoo started its rise to power on the Internet, it’s content was generated through one of the very first “web spiders” that would go out, collect information, which would then be categorized, and presented in the Yahoo directory. The content was collected and presented, but technically the creators weren’t writing the content themselves, their robot was collecting the data. Then came user submissions. Suddenly you have millions of people all submitting – not content – but merely links to content, in essence generating UN-content which was then turned into content.

I am about to save you a lot of money. If you look at ClickBank, or search the Internet on how to make money online, you will eventually be enticed to buy a $197 package that has “detailed case studies” and today’s hottest thing – online videos for you to watch.

They all come down to the same basic principles:

#1 – Find a product to market

#2 – Write content

There you have it. Now fork over the $197. I have read countless numbers of eBooks on how to quit your day job, retire early, get rich on the Internet, and even Tim Ferris’s book on the Four Hour Work Week… it all, unfortunately, comes down to finding a product/service and writing content.

NOT sales content. REAL content.

One good, 300 word post a day on a blog, or one article a day on a regular web site can be good content. But you have to keep it up. If you knew that a 300 word article a day would someday be worth $1000-$2000/day… wouldn’t you do it?

With real content comes real community. With real community comes user-generated content, which should complement, not replace, your own original content otherwise your community will get bored.

If you want to attract a community, you have to keep generating content. Otherwise they can, and will, find another web site whose owners WILL write that 300 word article a day.

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