Derek Scruggs

Great idea:

Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book.

An acquaintance of mine, a direct marketing guru, once told me that he writes the sales letter before he ever creates the product. Only after he’s explained exactly what you’ll get and why you need it does he set about creating the product. (And sometimes, if the sales letter isn’t compelling enough, he just abandons the product altogether, saving him a lot of time and effort.)

This is a pretty neat idea.

CBS Corporation has rolled out the ”CBS Mobile Zone,” a wireless high-speed network enabling New Yorkers with Wi-Fi-enabled devices to access the Internet for free. That means snappy Web browsing, making voice over Internet (VOI) calls, watching Web video, and listening to Internet Radio for free, all thru out midtown NYC.

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Seth’s next book is called All Marketers are Liars. I haven’t read it yet (though I did download the free chapter ), but the name alone is testimony to his brilliance as a marketer. Who wouldn’t want to read that? I’m sure this will be another best seller. Like all great brands, he just keeps hitting ‘em out of the park.

I’ve long admired Marketing Sherpa’s dedication to bringing good information to marketers, particularly corporate marketers, who generally don’t have access to the leading edge stuff promulgated by hyper-focused niche entrepreneurs.

And since I’m a big fan of split testing, I especially like to see products that help you figure out how, what and when to test. So I was glad to see them launch the Landing Page Handbook [aff.]. It’s got a ton of information (185 pages) and covers everything from copy to design to multimedia to eye-tracking heatmaps.

Responding to Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons’ post of the same title as this one:

I don’t have a problem with the commercial, but it seems to me you’re wasting your breath trying to explain it. It was – what? – 30 seconds long? Like a joke, you either get it or you don’t. Trying to explain it to people who didn’t get it/like it will just lead them to dig in their heels further.

Marketing is about posititioning. The best ads don’t appeal to everybody. The best ones appeal very much to a specific segment and often piss off the rest. Even the cool Apple iPod ads don’t appeal to my mom & dad. A lot of advertisers think they have to appeal to everyone, which makes them either 1) boring and watered down or 2) “popular,” but not moving the sales meter.

Remember those popular Taco Bell chiuaua commercials? They had no impact on sales. Franchisees complained and, after a while, corporate parent Yum Brands finally got it and started focusing more on advertising what they actually sell, not winning Cleo awards.

It’s only an hour or so since the Super Bowl finished and I’m reading the coverage on ESPN’s web site. I came accross this interesting interactive piece on ESPN’s web site. They knew a lot of fans would be frustrated about the Eagle’s poor clock management in the waning moments, so they set up a form for fans to post their comments. Smart move.

Got an email today from Rok Hrastnik letting me know that sales of  Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS are going well.

That’s not surprising. I’m impressed with how well he’s promoted it. In addition to getting a lot of contributors to talk about it on their blogs, he also has added value to the book by offering customers-only updates. For contributors like me, he’s given us this nifty little bug to put on our blogs:

Rok Hrastnik has written an incredibly comprehensive e-book about RSS for marketing, and I’m not just saying that because I’m in it. Check it out. (aff.)

Wow. There’s a burning discussion going on about whether GoDaddy is being wise or stupid to run an ad in this year’s Super Bowl.

As a marketer, I’m not a big fan of Super Bowl ads per se. Most of them are pretty lame, but there have been some big success stories. Someone on the board pointed out Monster’s ad from a few years ago. Of course, the Macintosh was launched in the 1984 Super Bowl. And several years ago Garden Burger launched themselves to the next level with ads on the final Seinfeld episode (which can be thought of as the Super Bowl for Women).

But the best part of this whole kerfluffle is the emergence of Bob Parsons, CEO of GoDaddy, as a commenter. He had some cogent points and, hey, it’s pretty cool to see the CEO of a $100 million company jump into the fray. And it turns out he has a blog.

This is an interesting experiment, but something tells me that in about, oh, 10 days, this kind of thing will be considered spam. (By way of Pheedo, which I just discovered about 10 minutes ago.)

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A New Meme That Raises Your Blog’s Google Rankings!
By Nova on Weblogs

This posting is a new, improved, second-generation meme experiment that is designed to spread faster and more broadly than the first meme experiment.

This new meme is simply better because it’s more beneficial to you to participate. Why? Because by participating in this meme, you may be able to raise the Google rank and visibility of your blog. In other words, this meme rewards your blog for hosting it.

Disclaimer

This is purely an experiment and is just for fun. We are really just curious to see what will happen. Furthermore, we have no commercial intentions. We don’t mean to annoy anyone. However, if you don’t have much curiosity, or at least a sense of humor, you might find this experiment to be upsetting. In that case, I suggest a good strong cup of coffee every morning. If after that you are still unhappy, you must not read any further! On the other hand, if you are interested in exploring new frontiers, keep reading and we look forward to your participation in this experiment. It’s totally voluntary. What’s the “meme” being spread here? Well, actually there are many memes that this posting represents. And your weblog URL will be one of them, if you participate.

How It Works.

Just copy this full text of this meme and follow the instructions below to fill out your blog’s answers to the survey and add your blog’s URL to the “PATH LIST” at the bottom of this post. The path list is the history of all the blogs that the meme traveled through to reach you. The last URL before yours in the path list should be the URL for the blog you discovered this meme on. By adding your URL after it, your blog URL becomes part of the path for the meme. Everyone who gets the meme downstream from you will then include your URL on their blog. And by doing that, they are in effect linking to your blog from their blog, which in turn raises your blog’s Google rank. By posting this meme to your blog you help raise the rankings of every blog in the path before yours, and every blog that later posts as a result of your blog then helps to raise your Google ranking. Kinda cool, huh?

By hosting a copy of this meme on your blog you are part of a worldwide network experiment to see how a blog posting spreads across social networks, geography and time. The dataset from this experiment is public, open and decentralized — every blog that participates hosts their own data about their own blog.

Anyone can then get the whole dataset by just searching Google for this unique string: 98818912959q This code is the “global unique identifier,” or GUID for this Meme — it marks every web page that participates in this Meme so that it can later be found with all the others.

To see how this meme is growing at any time, or to join the discussion about this experiment, visit the Root Posting for this meme at http://www.mindingtheplanet.net to see trackbacks and comments there.

A Collaborative, Distributed, Emergent Blogroll

This Meme is effectively a collaborative, distributed, emergent blogroll. It is no different really than any blogroll (any list of other blogs you add to your blog) — it just forms in a different way. Instead of you adding all the links to it, your social network adds them and then you add yours at the end and send it on to others in your social network. There’s no top-down control or guidance of the process. Every blog that participates is equal. Nobody knows what the result of this experiment will be.

Can Your Blog Out-Rank the A-List Blogs?

This Meme, if it works as we hypothesize it might, could help a lot of lesser known blogs get better rankings than even the “A-List” blogs. In other words, it’s kind of like unionizing to beat the big guys. There is strength in numbers, after all. Let’s see if this works! If it does work, we should find lots of lesser-known blogs that participate in this experiment appearing in the “top lists” of the major blog indexes. Who knows, maybe we can even take over the top lists? You can see that this works by just looking at the results of the first meme experiment which launched the Minding The Planet weblog to the number 5 slot of the Daypop Top 40 blog posting index in just two days! Who knows, maybe it will be your blog up there next?

Why Are We Doing This?

OK, so why are we doing this? The short answer is, “Because we can!!!” But seriously, we’re also doing this because it is an interesting way to generate a dataset that we and others may study to analyze how ideas move across social relationships on the Web, and how communities can emerge and self-organize. It’s fun and it’s research, and anyway, it’s harmless and it helps bloggers get better visibility, so we figured we’d just try it and just see what happens! We hope you’ll join us!

Interested in participating? Follow the instructions, below…

INSTRUCTIONS

Step 1 First, to add your blog to this experiment, copy the whole meme (the full text, including the introductory information above and these instructions and the path list at the end) to your blog.

Step 2: Fill in your answers to these REQUIRED SURVEY FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: Pheedo – http://www.pheedo.info/

(2) I found this meme on date (day/month/year):1/09/04

(3) I found this meme at time (24 hour time): 14:32:00

(4) I found it via “Newsreader Software” or “Browsing the Web” or “Searching the Web” or “An E-Mail Message”: Newsreader Software (NewsGator)

(5) I posted this Meme at my URL: http://www.askderekscruggs.com/my-meme-post.html

(6) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 01/09/04

(7) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 14:39:00

(8) My posting location is (city, state, country): Boulder, Colorado, USA

Step 3: You may also fill in these OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(9) My blog is hosted by: Typepad, soon to be WordPress

(10) My age is: 36

(11) My gender is: Male

(12) My occupation is: Internet Entrepreneur

(13) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: NewsGator, My Yahoo

(14) I use the following software to post to my blog: Typepad

(15) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 01/02/01 (off & on)

(16) My web browser is: Maxthon, formerly MyIE2

(17) My operating system is: Windows XP

Step 4: Don’t forget to add your URL after the last URL in the PATH LIST below:

The Path List below shows the sequence of blogs that this meme traveled through to reach your blog. Add your blog’s homepage URL to the end of this list, if you want your blog’s Google rankings to be raised as others get the meme from your blog. Also note that if in your blog you post this meme in two parts — an excerpt and an extended entry — make sure to tell your readers to copy the whole meme into their blog, including the Path List. Also Note: If anyone has put anything inappropriate in the list — like porn or advertising for example — then feel free to delete it from the list. Unless you like porn and/or advertising! Then, at the end of the list, add a text link and a hotlink to your URL)

THE PATH LIST: HOW THIS MEME GOT TO YOUR BLOG

1. http://www.mindingtheplanet.net Minding The Planet
2. http://www.pheedo.info Pheedo
3. http://ww.escalan.com/blog Escablog
4. (your URL goes here; also, please add a new line after this one, for the next person.)