Marketing Hipster

If you have not been introduced to Maki yet, it is time you do so. He writes some of the most in depth and well written articles on anything and everything regarding social media. He has another incredibly well done post on the in’s and out’s of Reddit. If done correctly, Reddit can be a valuable resource for driving traffic to your site and Maki lays out just how to do it. Check it out.

UPDATE: Friday 10:50 AM. I am sorry folks, but the petition site I chose is having all kinds of technical problems so I have switched it to a new site. If you have already signed up for the petition can you do me a favor and click the link again below and sign the new petition? I am sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you!

In response to my earlier post, that Circuit City has announced that they are laying off 3,900 of their best employees just to hire less experienced ones, I have created an online petition to try to get Circuit City’s attention before they go through with this. I want to ask everyone if they would not mind to go and sign the online petition. We will be sending it to Philip J. Schoonover, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Circuit City.

I am also posting below an image with a link to the petition site. Any of my fellow bloggers that would like to take the image and post it on their own site, please absolutely feel free to do so. If you do not know how to upload images to your own site, I am supplying the code that all you need to do is copy and paste it and drop it on your blog. I appreciate your help very much. It is time that companies realize that they cannot get away with things like this and expect us to continue to give them our money.

I know my graphics abilities are limited so if anyone wants to create a better image, please feel free. For anyone who just wants the code please just copy and paste below:

<a href=”http://www.petitiononline.com/CircuitC/petition.html”><img src=”http://www.marketinghipster.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/circuit_city_petition.gif” border=”0″></a>

First off, I want to thank all the new folks who have come by specifically for the MyBlogLog 101 posts parts 1 and 2. Most of the new traffic has come from two specific places, Andy Beard was nice enough to post a link from his blog to here about my posts and that is where Eric Marcoullier, one of the founders of MBL learned of my post and was gracious enough to post it to The MyBlogLog blog.

Based on all the comments I received here as well as the great deal of messages I received on MBL, I wanted to add one more thought or two to my first two posts. One of the most common messages I received from people was they were having problems getting any attention on MBL and were either getting discouraged and/or frustrated with why it was not working for them. I thought I would share a thought I had on this.

My recommendation is try not to think so big right out of the gate. As Eric said very well in his post,

“Relationships are built on personal connection, on the fine-grained details, the shared experiences that unveil themselves over time.”

I could not agree with him more. I think during my first 30 days on MBL I found a half a dozen other blogs that I enjoyed the bloggers’ writings and began commenting on them. That turned into discussions between our blogs, followed by emails and now these people have earned my respect and hopefully I have earned theirs. And even though I have yet to meet any of these people in person, which I absolutely want to do, I would not hesitate to call any of these people my friends which for me personally is much more important than how much traffic my blog is getting.

The other part of this equation is to get respect you need to work just as hard as the people who you are trying to get the attention from. If you are not putting out a quality product on your blog, no matter how much you are reaching out to folks you are not going to get that far. Though you should not look at this as a bad thing. One of the things I enjoy most is that my fellow bloggers push me to be better than I am. When I read a great post from Andy Beard, Sean Howard, Mike Sansone, Matt Havercamp, Robyn McMaster, Dave C, Bob Glaza among a number of other folks that rocks my world, I want to come back with a post of my own that’s as good or even better. That is what makes the blogosphere so damn exciting for me and why I believe we are living in a time that is going to change everything in the future.

I guess that is why I am writing this at 3:15 am when I have to get up in three hours for work. Thanks again for everyone’s comments, thoughts and opinions. They are as always greatly appreciated and I will be more than happy to answer any other questions and listen to any opinions people have.

Technorati Tags: MyBlogLog, Andy Beard, Eric Marcoullier, MBL

One of the great things about the time we are living in is the immediate dissemination of information available to us all. For example, today, Circuit City announced that they were laying off 3,400 of their highest paid workers and replacing them with lower paid and less experienced workers. And if this was not enough, they are offering to those laid off workers an opportunity to re-apply for their same jobs at of course a lower pay rate.

Pretty much what Circuit City has done is taken the employees who have been their the longest, who have worked to be knowledgeable about their products and services, who have tried to be the best sales people they can and have been kicked to the curb and replaced with people who will not be able to do the job as well as them. Though that is not important to Circuit City, what is important is they will be paid less.

I could put on a three piece suit and pretend I am Lou Dobbs and argue about the decline of the middle class, but I am not going to do that. My question is what is Circuit City’s management saying to its consumers, its customers, us? My read is they are saying that we really are not too concerned about giving you our customers the best customer experience when you come into our stores or order our products online. Our only concern is to our shareholders and to make MORE MONEY!

What bothers me even more is it does not seem to bother Circuit City’s management that news like this would cause their customers to stop going to their stores and buying their products… Do they think that we NEED Circuit City so much that we cannot live without them? They can give us the bottom of the barrel service and we will keep coming back?

I can’t speak for everyone, but Circuit City, you have just lost a good customer with me because it will be a cold day in hell when I shop with you again. You have to realize that there are consequences to your actions and I am hoping that through stories like mine and throughout the blogosphere we see in the coming months a significant drop in your revenues and you realize that just like each one of us, you are held accountable for your actions.

Update:  I have started a petition to hopefully get Circuit City management’s attention.  If you would like to let your voice be heard, please click here and sign your name to an online petition.  Many thanks.

Technorati Tags: Circuit City, laying off

The blogosphere has been on fire for the last couple of days regarding the abhorrent behavior towards Kathy Sierra. I don’t think I need to post any links, but if you have been living in a box for the last 48 hours, here’s a link to a Technorati search that shows it all. As expected the entire blogging community has rallied around Kathy and this is something that should of never ever happened.

I wanted to discuss a different issue related to this whole fiasco. Kathy’s original post which started this all said that she was going to stop blogging and soon afterwards Robert Scoble decided to take the week off from blogging because he was so “ill” over this. This brought up a few questions with me that I wanted to raise, but before I could Piers Fawkes over at PSFK Trends wrote an article discussing several of the same points that had been circulating in my head.

I couldn’t possibly understand what Kathy is going through right now and my heart and prayers go out to her. If she wants to step away for a while, it makes all the sense in the world. If this happened to me or a loved one, I don’t think my head would in be any position to sit down and write. Though when Scoble announced that he was taking the week off, I wondered, by stepping away from the keyboard, by not writing, don’t the bad guys win? Do you set a dangerous precedent for the next time this happens? And it will absolutely happen again.

Why this hit home for me was that I was in downtown New York City on September 11th when the World Trade Center fell. I lost a number of good friends in that tragedy and it was by far the most horrific day of my life. One of the things that I remember most of that day was walking down a street after the center had collapsed and looking around at all the people walking by. They all had this same expression of utter shock and awe on their faces. They were confused, they were lost, they all were asking the same question I was, “So what do I do now?”

I concluded on that day that the only way to stop a bully is by standing up and showing that no matter how much you scare me, no matter what you do to me, I will not stop what I am doing because if I do that, you win and I cannot allow that for myself and even more importantly for the next person this will happen to.

Technorati Tags: Kathy Sierra

This morning I walked into a fury of articles and information regarding Kathy Sierra’s distressing post about her getting death threats and resigning from the blogosphere. At first, I really had a hard time believing this was real and initially thought it might be some kind of an early April fools joke, but it definitely seems to be on the level.

Overall, Kathy is pointing fingers at Chris Locke aka Rageboy. He has a post speaking specifically to this here. There are posts flying left and right including Scoble taking a break from posting because of this? Other stories can be found here and here.

Technorati Tags: death threats

John Moore over at Brand Autopsy put together a bracket of the top 64 marketing blogs and put us head to head for a little March Madness of our own. Unbelievably enough, Marketing Hipster was actually invited to the big dance..

We were seeded as a #16 seed which meant we went up against a #1 seed in Creating Passionate Users. I have been a reader and fan of Kathy and Dan for a long time and even though the Hipsters are scrappy and we had cinderella dreams in our hearts, I doubt it was even close..

The Hipsters got knocked out in the first round. As I mentioned in John’s post, it was an honor just to be invited to the big dance. John even created a PDF with the entire bracket, you get download it here if you would like.

We’ll be back next year I will tell you that. The Hipsters are no one hit wonder.

Technorati Tags: marketing blogs

I thought this video was very well done. I give you the Evolution of a Beard…

I joined up with StumbleUpon quite a while ago, but really never got into it. Recently, I noticed an increasing amount of traffic coming from StumbleUpon so I decided to log back in and have another look. I think of StumbleUpon as one of those incredibly simple, but effective applications which is why I believe it is growing like it is. It integrates true communities with getting recommendations from like minded individuals. I have over the last couple of days been using SU in Firefox and I have been amazed at the great deal of quality web sites that I have been introduced to.

I am very interested in seeing how SU sees its future and what they might be working on next. My recommendation to blog owners, you want to see your traffic jump? Jump onto SU today. Oh and if you do join SU, come on by and be my friend…

Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon

I was thinking of starting a new series of articles called What Would You Change? I thought what might be interesting is each post choose a specific company and we could discuss what we would change if we were leading these companies. Who knows maybe one of the companies will actually take some of our advice. I am not holding my breath on that though.

So why don’t we start with the RIAA. This is the much maligned group of record companies who have seen their profits drop faster than Enron stock. They have tried everything up to and including suing companies, universities and individuals who were caught stealing licensed music. They just won the “Worst Company of America” award as voted on The Consumerist.

We might as well start at the bottom and work our way up so what would you change if you headed up the RIAA?

I would do the following:

1. Stop all lawsuits now.. For every person I sue, there are hundreds if not thousands who still are stealing music in ways that the RIAA cannot catch. If someone wants something, they are going to do it whether it is against the law or not. Might I remind everyone of this country’s fabulous unsuccessful war on drugs.

2. Realize that even though technology has considerably changed our business model, I still have a product people want. Good music will always be needed, but we need to devise new ways on how we can deliver that music because the day of going to buy CD’s in a store are over.

The focus needs to be to offer something that people will see the value in paying for instead of stealing. Let’s start with these ideas:

1. Each record company open up their entire library to be able to buy online whether that is through iTunes or their own web site.
2. Offer a higher sound quality through our online stores. If the CD is recorded in 192 kbps, double it online. The best sound quality possible is one click away through our online store.
3. Offer outtakes, videos, etc. when buying online, something they cannot get in the stores and cannot get by stealing. The reason why they cannot get it through stealing is we integrate these extras with our web site. A user will have to register and that person only will be able to get these add-ons. Very similar to how iTunes works.
4. Integrate the music with other offerings as well. For instance, buying directly from the publisher gives a buyer VIP access to the artists blog. They can chat live with the artists, get information before anyone else, etc. etc.
5. Partner up with social sites like MySpace where we can offer online concerts, live web chats, etc. Get our fans involved on their terms not ours!

3. Begin the healing process and all the bad blood that exists between us and our customers by truly reaching out to them. Start giving them a voice on what they like, what they don’t like and we will respond to their suggestions through communication and actions.

4. Take our lumps, admit we might of been a bit drastic by suing most of North America and that we are looking for ways to meet our customers wants and needs.

5. Begin educating users about how stealing music impacts a lot of American jobs and not just the artists. Many people feel that the artists make millions so it does not hurt them. Whether that is true or not is up to debate. What isn’t is a lot of workers behind the scenes that are losing their jobs because the record industry can’t afford to pay them.

6. Finally, a drastic initial statement is needed to show how serious we are. Have every CEO of the major labels reduce their salary to one dollar for a period of time to show how dedicated they are in finding a solution and not just being apart of the problem.

So what do you think? Any good ideas in there or are they crap? It’s your turn… You have just been promoted the CEO, the big cheese, the head honcho of the RIAA. What do you do? Put your thoughts and suggestions in the comments. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: What Would You Change, Worst Company of America, RIAA