Mack Changes Stats: A Visit to the Viral Garden
Mack Collier, social media curator extraordinaire, changed the stats this week on which he bases his Viral Garden Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs from my blogging nemesis Technorati to Feedburner, specifically Feedburner subscribers. (Thanks to Toby for the heads up!) For me, this switch produced several ironies….(not in order of importance)
Irony #1
I referred to Technorati as my nemesis because from the time that I began my blog in May 2005 until the moment (unrecorded) that I stopped looking or caring I have had issues with Technorati in the way that they indexed, ranked and provided inadequate tech support.
Feedburner, on the other hand, has been nothing but helpful even in trying to solve issues with Technorati.
This past April I noticed that my Feedburner subscribers seemed to have dropped precipitously….as in they were “0″, none. I immediately panicked and clicked on “help” only to find that since they had been acquired by Google, “help” was now at Google and a bit less accessible than my panicked state required.
Dick Costolo, founder of Feedburner (who had been so responsive in trying to solve earlier Technorati issues), is a Facebook friend so I messaged him there. He quickly provided the email addresses at Google that could address my problem. It turned out to be a feed re-direction issue and although some subscribers were lost, the issue has been resolved.
Irony #2
Just a few days ago I had my trustee developer Chris Talkington change my Word Press theme and upgrade to WordPress 2.6.1. He added the Feedburner subscriber widget…..the one that Mack used to base his Top 25 on for the past week. Thank you, Chris….how fortuitous for me.
Gavin Heaton, in response to Mack’s change, asked great questions about the public display of stats…and his commenters responded on this topic as well as the merits of lists in general.
I wholeheartedly agree with Gavin’s statement that, “I think the only way to build links, for the long term anyway, is to create quality content and engage with your community of readers.” Presumably, one’s content is initially “found” by a reader because it has achieved enough Google juice to be visible on a topic search or because of a link from another blog. Ideally this is the result of “quality content” and/or engaging with a community of readers through either your blog or through other social venues, Twitter, Facebook etc.
Therefore, I suppose, the display of stats is not necessary to build readership….on the other hand, truly, most people don’t really like to be the first one to arrive at a party or go into a restaurant where there are no other diners. So maybe there is some comfort in a display of subscriber stats that says the content here is good enough that others want to know when there is more.
I would like to believe that people read my blog/subscribe to my blog because they like the content…..and this leads to irony #3.
Irony #3
There hasn’t been much content, good or bad, on my blog for quite some time. For the first part of “some time” it was mostly about My Unforgettable Mom….and then after she passed away in May it just became about, well…. everything. Even wondering just what it was that I should start back writing about.
So, THIS weekend, knowing that my kids were both going to be away I had decided would be a good time to put all my excuses aside, fire up the procrastinator’s clock and write. But again, what to write?
Thanks to Mack, Toby, and Chris at least for today that is solved.
This Truth Is Not Inconvenient: Girlfriend, Use Your Purse, Your Peers, & Your Posts To Co-create A Happier Sustainable, World
Mary Hunt, author of In Women We Trust and Ecolutionary Selling and blogger at In Women We Trust and Smart Solutions for Sustainable Business has written the definitive piece on how we can really (REALLY) change the world just by directing the power women already have towards a “happier, sustainable world.”
#1 “the majority of the US Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is made up of consumer goods and over 80% of them are purchased or influenced by women.”
#2 Women form groups; group of influencers: Big Green Purse author Diane MacEachern launched a one million women site.
EcoMom Alliance is organizing and educating the 82 million mothers in the US into a change agents.
The EcoMom Challenge: “making small changes in the way we shop, eat, drive and even clean, we can help stop global warming. ”
#3 Women are online, voicing their opinions, positive and negatice, on blogs, social network and online groups all over the web. In fact, according to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Survey on Content Creation, girls and young women are the most prolific online content creators.
So make your way over to In Women We Trust and see what Mary has to say about Changing Products, Changing Services and Changing the World and download Purse, Peers, Posts and the Power to Move Markets purses_peers_posts_and_the_power_to_move_green_markets_32508.pdf and send it to your girlfriends!
And catch Mary at Blogher Business in NYC next week along with other awesome women to trust, Toby Bloomberg, Yvonne DiVita, Susan Getgood, Connie Reece and many others.
How I Got SMaRT
And if you want to get SMaRT* too, please take a look:
Last week I wrote that I was re-committing to blogging. This week I am sustaining the effort, pun intended.
A few months ago Mary Hunt, noted authority on marketing to women and author of In Women We Trust and a blog with the same name, asked Toby Bloomberg and me to join her in launching a new blog, Smart Solutions for Sustainable Businesses and help enlist the power of social media to amplify the blog’s message: Standards is smart; no standards is not smart…..
“The marketplace is moving from “Green” to “Sustainable” to “Prove it” - this is a greenwash-free world where Product Life Cycle Assessments and Third Party Audits are the norm. Smart Solutions is about who is doing the best job, what standards do investors care about and what will consumers trust?
Everything will be openly discussed in this blog. We’ve reached out to market developers, operational experts, business leaders and consumer advocates - all working to create a sustainable planet as well as a sustainable new, global economy.”
Please take a moment to visit Smart Solutions for Sustainable Business . Mary Hunt is the editor and the contributing editors, Denny Darragh , Ginny Dyson , Mike Italiano , Diane MacEachern, Doug Pierce, Coral Rose , Leanne Tobias are discussing the relevant issues, sustainable mortgage based securities, sustainable marketing, sustainability in the corporate culture at new standards of excellence.
To say Mary is passionate about this would be an understatement…..check out her site, Ecolutionary Selling e-book on Ecolutionary Selling.
Also you can catch her speaking at Blogher Busines 08 , NYC in April. Toby will be presenting at Blogher Business also as will Yvonne Divita, Susie Gardner (check out her new book!) and lots of other really smart women.
Mary’s passion is contagious and thanks to her expertise (and patience) I have gone from, “Well yes I care about green” to understanding what it is I need to care about and importantly how to tell green from greenwash.
So, Toby and I will be adding our marketing focused voices to the Sustainable Products Blog soon.
C’mon over and join the conversation!
*The Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS) is a non-profit public charity of leading environmental groups, governments, and companies working to achieve 90% sustainable products market penetration and stop irreversible climate change, by 2015.
In response to the need for quantifiable and verifiable Sustainable Standards, MTS developed SMaRT (Sustainable Materials Rating Technology). The standard is based on product Life Cycle Assessment across the product’s entire supply chain. Once documentation is gathered, Third Party Auditors review it for accuracy before certification is issued. For more on MTS go here.
HP:Your Customers Think You Are Hiding {The Atlantis and Apollo Motherboard Issue}
As Toby noted in her post Social Media Means Nothing If Your Internal Processes are Broken, HP has over 50 blogs. Quite a commitment to social media one would think. So what would be the value of social media to a company like HP? Visibility perhaps?
When we present to our clients or prospective clients about the value of social media we emphasize among other things the value of listening to customers, building relationships based upon transparency, and learning what is important to customers.
Shel Israel has a great interview with Michael Dell, who was able to snatch victory from the jaws of social media defeat, commonly known as Dell Hell. However, there has to be a real commitment to listening and building honest relationships with customers. Michael Dell’s answer to ” Question #5: How has blogging changed Dell’s culture?
It has reinforced how important it is to listen to our customers. And when we see an issue in real time we have only one choice and that is to solve our customer’s issue and quickly too.
At HP, the value of a customer relationship and the value of social media seem to be as unimportant as product quality….of course valuing customers and providing a high quality product typically go hand in hand.
Social media would really not be of value if a company did not value their customers and produce a high quality product. Unless the company believed that blogging about value and quality and positive customer experience is the same as having those attributes.
I recently wrote about my son Sam’s laptop that at this writing is still MIA. His school work is suffering since the whole reason for buying the HP to begin with was so that he could have his own laptop to take to school.
I have found that we are not alone with the known issue, the Atlantis and Apollo motherboard failure, (it seems to be known to everyone except the “case manager” whose name and direct phone number I did not even bother to write down after he told me that it was not a known issue).
“Why is HP Hiding the Atlantis and Apollo Motherboard Issue?” is being asked at the Notebook Review Forum. Avoiding a recall? Or are they just hiding?
Companies in a crisis seem to forget or maybe just don’t get 2 important facts about the wired world: #1 that they can no longer hide from their customers (or hide product problems) and that listening to customers and solving their issues is not really a choice. Just ask Michael Dell.
Or Sam Richmond. He’s pretty mortified to be on his mother’s blog but his mother just wanted to make the point that a real kid is going to school on Tuesday February 19th with out his laptop, DAY 65 without a working laptop.
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