by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 2, 2006
PRWeek.com editor Keith O’Brien doesn’t like the idea of an embedded blogger on the Dixie Chicks tour.
I really disagree with his blasé response. Is having a blogger embedded on a tour really so different from having a blogger speaking candidly about the daily workings of a business? Businesses survive by staying engaged with their customers, and bands survive by staying engaged with their fan base.
I personally find Junichi Semitsu’s take on the tour interesting, engaging, and hilarious. It’s also revolutionary, because even though tour blogs are “de rigueur”, Semitsu’s blog is the first to give a fan’s eye view of the proceedings.
It’s true that Semitsu hasn’t yet addressed the fact that the Chicks’ ticket sales are down dramatically from their last tour. He also hasn’t discussed the likely reason for the drooping sales: singer Natalie Maines’ post-Iraq war protest that got the country trio sandboxed on a number of radio stations.
That said, I still think that the embedded blogger model yields the most authentic look at life on the road since it comes from someone who wouldn’t otherwise be affiliated with the tour. But it’s possible that I’m biased towards the idea, since I sometimes daydream about being the embedded blogger on the Christina Aguilera tour.
Incidentally, I’ll be at the Dixie Chicks concert at the Tacoma Dome on November 11 with my sister. The tickets were her eighth birthday present and this will be her first concert.
We’ll be talking more about treading the line between authenticity and showing your company/band’s best side at the next Blog Business Summit conference in October.
Via CrispyNews.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 2, 2006
Those beautiful words made our entire week over here! It’s so great to hear people who were really happy about the last conference talking us up. Be sure to check out our upcoming conference to see if we can change your life as well.
Know More Media is an incredibly cool organization that provides relevant, helpful information to business people in a blog format. We feel truly privileged to have been a part of its inception.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 1, 2006
When I first posted about how Music Today was working with bloggers to sell Christina Aguilera’s new CD, Back to Basics (iTunes), I knew that their initiative was sub-par. It’s cool that they’re reaching out - but they’re not making nearly enough use of all the technologies that have emerged since Stripped (iTunes) came on the scene in late 2002. (Incidentally, Stripped was the last physical media CD that I ever purchased.)
Then Mack Collier came along, commented on my post and smacked me over the head with what I think should become the immediate best practice for engaging bloggers when promoting a CD.
In brief, the artist’s label would send 100 CDs (pre-release, of course) to 100 bloggers culled from a fan mailing list. The bloggers would get the opportunity to listen to the CD before it was available in stores. If the artist took the time to personally autograph the 100 CDs, the theory is that there would be 100 glowing reviews floating around in the blogosphere by the time the CD hit stores.
Obviously, sending out a sample of anything to a carefully chosen group of bloggers is a good way to promote a product. Of course, those sorts of plans can backfire if not planned and executed perfectly, as we saw with the recent Guerilla Marketing and PR fiasco. The advantage with the record label scenario is that the bloggers in question have already been established as fans. What’s more, they already have a business relationship with the label, so there’s no way that the communication could be unexpected or treated as spam. The whole situation is really a gimme.
There are a million possible spinoffs of this, including an initiative involving the iTunes store. For some record labels, that scenario would be preferable because the DNR technology installed in the sound files would prevent widespread piracy of the songs before their official release date.
Update: Of course, we’ll be discussing blogger engagement strategies like this one at our next conference.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 1, 2006
I started thinking about RSS accessibility after I had a really negative encounter with the RSS feed from USA Today’s Today in the Sky blog. Basically, they make you click through three sites just to get to the feed. What’s even more annoying is that you can’t access the feed directly from an RSS-enabled browser like Safari or Firefox. It made me wonder how many would-be readers were so put off by the RSS hunt that they browsed on without subscribing to the feed.
RSS is still catching on. Even outside the context of my job, I find myself explaining “Really Simple Syndication” to at least three or four people each week. Jakob Neilsen’s response to this was to encourage new, more accessible terminology. If we rename RSS as “news feeds,” he reasoned, perhaps more people will catch on to what they’re for and how to use them.
But for a usability guru, Nielsen sure misses a critical point. In order to make use of RSS feeds, people need to be able to find them easily! Accessible terminology will get us nowhere without accessible placement.
That’s why I made the “Feeds” listing more prominent in our sidebar. I’m also going to issue a challenge to our readers: take a good look at your blog from the user’s standpoint and figure out a way to make your RSS feed easier to find. Then reach out to three blogs that you read and recommend that they do the same.
Let’s pay it forward, people!
Update: We’ll be talking about this and many other design issues at our upcoming conference.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 1, 2006
Remember the Baby Got Blog! tee-shirts that Maryam and I were wearing during BlogHer?
The demand for them was so overwhelming that we’ve put the design up for sale on Zazzle!
Check out Flickr for a photo of Maryam and I modeling our Baby got Blog tees at BlogHer. Maryam is helping us to develop the speakers and sessions for our upcoming conference.
The tee-shirt design is by Dylan Meconis of “Bite Me” and “Family Man” WebComic fame. Future designs by Dylan are forthcoming as our collection of tees continues to expand.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on August 1, 2006
Remember the Baby Got Blog! tee-shirts that Maryam and I were wearing during BlogHer?
The demand for them was so overwhelming that we’ve put the design up for sale on Zazzle!
Check out Flickr for a photo of Maryam and I modeling our Baby got Blog tees at BlogHer. Maryam is helping us to develop the speakers and sessions for our upcoming conference.
The tee-shirt design is by Dylan Meconis of “Bite Me” and “Family Man” WebComic fame. Future designs by Dylan are forthcoming as our collection of tees continues to expand.
