Archive for January, 2009

I met up with Newsgal Extraordinaire A at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Panera Bread for brunch today.  She was delayed so I booted up my laptop and availed myself of Panera’s free wifi. After tweeting a bit, I headed on over to this very website and was greeted with this screen:

“Forbidden Category ‘Other’”?  Well, it’s nice of them to include the link for appeal.  So I followed it.

According to the fine folks at SonicWall, limeduck.com is “Category 4: Pornography”!  Good grief!  I didn’t think I’d ever committed more than Category 3.  Well, I submitted a request to be reclassified, and we’ll see what comes of that.  I have to wonder how this happened in the first place.  I’m sure the firewall guys use all matter of automated “intelligence” to rate the multitude of sites out there, and they must get it wrong now and again.  Self-indulgent, long-winded, willfully obscure, sure, but when has anything gone on here that could trick a robot into seeing porno?  (Sure, I’ve used the word “porn” plenty of times, but how many real porn sites have that much text?)  Maybe it’s somebody’s idea of a practical joke, going around classifying blogs as indecent.

Frankly I’m a little surprised Panera would even bother to implement a content filter like this where the default on unknown sites seems to be blockage.  It’s got to be costing them some money and it’s prone to errors like this one.  I hate to throw the brioche out with the firewall, but until this gets fixed, Panera Bread is dead to this dirty duck.

Not that long ago I laughed at comparisons of Facebook and LinkedIn because I didn’t see much point in using Facebook.  Now I laugh because the tools are so different, most comparisons seem silly.  Facebook is still the place where people live their online lives, and LinkedIn is still the place where people seek business advice, business partners, jobs and employees.  I was poking around LinkedIn the other day, and I saw another sign that they almost get it.  Almost.

Back in October, LinkedIn launched applications that you can add to your profile.  Sounds a bit like Facebook, doesn’t it?  Or like the iPhone or Firefox, to name a couple of common products that let people write plugins or applications for their platforms.  It seemed not so much a misguided attempt to be more like Facebook but rather, a sensible way to serve customers better while engaging the developer community to innovate in ways yet unknown.

A quick look at the LinkedIn featured applications page today shows a dozen apps from some well-known sites and services that seem reasonably useful to the LinkedIn population: WordPress and Six Apart blog apps, Huddle Workspaces,Box.net files, Amazon reading list, LinkedIn polls, Google and SlideShare presentations, TripIt and LinkedIn Company Buzz.  And there’s a link to “browse more applications” that shows the same 12 apps.  Is that all?  I guess for now, it is.

Sure, it’s perfectly reasonable to prime the pump with some sure-thing apps from major sites, but what about the vaunted long tail of odd little niche things that might or might not catch fire?  I clicked around to find out how apps are created and added to the site, and was disappointed to see this:

Get Started with the Platform

LinkedIn allows developers to build applications that run on LinkedIn user’s home and profile pages. Applications currently available can be seen and installed from the Application Directory. LinkedIn applications are developed using the OpenSocial development model.

How to develop for the Platform

The LinkedIn application platform is not publicly available for all developers. We evaluate requests to develop for the LinkedIn platform from partners who have clearly compelling value to our users and who can rigorously follow our privacy policies. We are looking for applications that provide clear business utility to LinkedIn users. LinkedIn is not a place for sheep throwing. There is equal opportunity to build applications that apply to all LinkedIn users as there is to develop applications that apply to just a targeted portion of the user base. If you think you qualify and have a compelling user value proposition, let us know using the form below.

I agree, LinkedIn is not where I go to join my friends’ Zombie Armies (although I bet we can all name some companies that might fit that description), but as with the iPhone fart machine, isn’t the fitness of the app really up to the community of users?  Those are extreme examples, to be sure.  You don’t have to feature these weird and edgy apps, but if you don’t let it out there, you’ll never know if it improves or degrades your product.

Do you think it bothers Facebook that somebody wrote a LinkedIn app for Facebook?  Maybe somebody should write a Facebook app for LinkedIn.  Facebook’s app directory has only 23 apps categorized as “business” which is just four more than are tagged “fart.”

So I have two seemingly conflicting bits of advice for LinkedIn: (1) don’t try to be like Facebook, and (2) don’t try too hard to be unlike Facebook when they do something right, such as opening up their API to all kinds of weirdness.  It might feel weird at first, but as long as you’ve written a good API that keeps everybody safe, the community will decide what’s good and what’s bad, and that will be a lot closer than almost getting it right.

If you’ve been following @tangyslice (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?) you may have noticed that he’s back and tangier than ever.  For a while there he was spending many long hours a day comforting a screaming child – and then he had to go home to his new baby.  Anyway, we were talking about public relations recently and I thought I’d share some of it.  You may also remember last summer’s Web 2.0 PR Agency roundup.

The usual role of PR is to generate awareness, which is conventionally the widest end of the funnel that leads to a sale, or as Blake would have it, the first A of A-I-D-A.  Try the audio clip below, but first turn up the volume and clear the room of anybody easily offended by crass language.

Simple enough, right?  People need to be aware that your product exists before they can get interested in it, etc.  So you hire a public relations (or press relations or just PR if you prefer) company or contractor to help make this happen.

Most folks see PR as the beginning of a classic lead generation funnel.  People hear about your company through press coverage, then visit your site or call you up to learn more.  What’s why many marketeers obsess over the “how did you hear about us” question.  (Note that self-reported data on this question are notoriously unreliable)

But does awareness really lead to interest in more than a couple of already predisposed people?  All these web 2.0 and zen marketing and inbound marketing gurus are saying that you can’t make people do anything, you just have to be there when they decide to do it.  They say it’s all about search and findability, or virality and social connectivity.

Tangy and I were thinking that public relations might have a different, but no less important, function: trust-building.  I proposed that lead generation was better handed by outbound or inbound methods, but that once you’ve got a prospect interested, PR can serve a very valuable role in greasing the skids by providing additional, external validation to the prospect during the sales process.

So I say that for many businesses, PR isn’t going to bring in any leads, but having good, consistent coverage will make the leads that you do have more comfortable with moving ahead with a business relationship with you.  What do you think?  Are these two views really conflicting at all?  Are there different kinds of PR tactics or PR agencies for the different goals?

I try to rethink on a daily basis, if not constantly, but like most people, I don’t do the Big Rethinking often enough, maybe mostly around milestone birthdays, new years, yom kippur, presidential turnovers, etc.  Now I’m preparing to move and going through all my stuff, evaluating what to keep and what to discard, donate, sell, gift, regift, recycle, shred, burn, bury, etc.

In December I made a joke about unfollowing all my twitter friends and starting over with the new year.  It was just a joke, but the idea of spring cleaning social networks has stuck with me.  Most people joining social networks don’t know quite what they’re getting into at first and I’m sure that many end up with some ill-chosen, finger-quote, “friends” on their lists but feel uncomfortable ditching them.

Burger King’s mildly controversial and thoroughly amusing (at least to me) whopper sacrifice program seems to have upped the ante on my gag.  Short form: they’ll give you a free whopper if you “sacrifice” (publicly unfriend) ten of your facebook buddies.  (That values a facebook friend at about 37 cents) I don’t know if it’s actually good for BK, but I think it’s great for social media. Heck, any PR that doesn’t link Burger King to e coli is probably good for BK.  It takes some of the hot air out of the social media thing, and gives people another way – and a lame excuse – to unburden themselves of unwanted finger-quote “friends.”  I presume there’s nothing stopping you re-friending people after lunch.

Remember a few years ago there was some chatter about email bankruptcy?  In short, email bankruptcy means that you’ve decided you’ll never be able to deal with the current contents of your inbox, so you delete it all and start again.  That idea seems to have faded out, but I wonder if we aren’t on the verge of a rash of social networking bankruptcy: twitter bankruptcy, linkedin bankruptcy, and most likely, facebook bankruptcy.  Fed up with superpoke requests?  Maybe it’s a nice day to just ditch everybody and start again!

Well, that’s probably not for everyone, maybe not for anyone, but I do have to wonder if the clean slate would allow us to make new and interesting connections that might not even have occurred to us since we’re so busy with the connections we already have.

The long-awaited secret fifth burger at Four Burgers has been revealed, and frak me, it’s a hot dog.

Who would have suspected such a thing?  It’s tasy enough, if a bit on the small side, and all natural like the rest of Four Burgers’ lineup.