In my own browsing of the archives of DaveNet, I came across this fascinating post by Esther Dyson from December 1, 1994 which introduces an idea we may now call pay-per-comment. One could also argue that the post actually anticipates pay-per-click years before GoTo (which become Overture and was the example that was used to create Google Adwords) by introducing the notion that if you pay to be read/heard it filters content, creates value, and increases the odds of relevance.

From her 12/1/94 post:

It's very simple. We all keep on getting the newsletter for free -- but it costs us, say, $10 to write back. Most of us are pretty short of time, but we're always ready to say something when other important people are listening. Sometimes, we're even humble enough to want to test our ideas against other smart (or at least knowledgeable) thinkers.

It's the way the world is heading, Dave. There's too much noise out there anyway. The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted. The job of the future is pr guy, not journalist. I'm too busy reading, so why should I pay for more things to read? Anything anyone didn't pay to send to me... I'm not going to read.

Yes, in a world full of content and advertising and pr, I still want to know what your friends and mine are thinking, but I want only what they think is so good that they'll pay to have me read it -- because they honestly believe it will raise their stature in my eyes.

It's an interesting idea even today. If leaving a blog comment cost something - say $1 - wouldn't that filter the comments in a useful way? And eliminate comment spam to boot? Assuming that the blog owner still retained full editorial control - so you had to pay and be deemed reasonable and relevant to get posted. I think I would read comments more thoroughly and probably write them more frequently and conscientiously.

Top blogs could charge more, any blogger could give the money to charity, there lots of details to work out. But it's a darn interesting idea. Thanks Esther (12+ years later).

Update: Just noticed Bryan Eisenberg has a discussion of comments. Wonder how this idea would rate.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

As narcissistic as the blogosphere is, you'd think they'd be making a big deal about its birthday. Since April 1, 1997 the great Dave Winer has been writing Scripting News.

You could do a lot worse with your time than reading the archives at ScriptingNews or even better yet of DaveNet.

I'm not sure when I first heard of Dave (although I was a big fan of ThinkTank many years ago), but my introduction to blogging quickly brought me to him and RadioUserLand was the first tool I used. I watched as he (and others) created and popularized RSS and then Podcasting. Success has a thousand fathers, and online those fathers get to argue (just like in the Anna Nichole Smith case) but Dave seems to show up as grandfather amazingly frequently. So at least from this little corner of the blogosphere, thanks Dave.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 4:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s a hot day. The sun is beating down and you’re sweating through your clothes. Not far from you are small round coffee tables with glistening chrome water pitchers and these strangely shaped glass containers, each about the size of a grapefruit.

You look in the pitchers and see what clearly looks to be clear, cold, water. Nearby you see a young man who looks just as warm as you, but looking at his face you see an obvious look of relief and in his hand you notice one of those weird glass containers. He took a drink!

As the hours pass you see more and more people, mostly young but not all, boldly grabbing these glass containers, filling them with the liquid from the pitchers, and drinking. They don’t all get the same exhilarated look of relief, but certainly none of them seem the worse for their efforts.

"If only," you think, "someone would take this liquid to a laboratory, verify for me that it is in fact water and tell me exactly how much I should drink. Then I’d know what to do."

This little story is my way of making fun of anyone who needs to pay Forrester $379 for a 15 page report to tell them that blogging is a good idea.

Of course, I realize that nobody is going to pay Forrester $379 to tell them that blogging is a good idea. They’re going to pay Forrester $379 so their bosses and colleagues will believe them when they say that blogging is a good idea.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Five years or so into the 'Blogolution' and the vast majority of marketers still ignore this amazing opportunity. Like many aspects of online marketing blogging is a simple but completely foreign concept that is easy to do badly but with a relatively small amount of effort and insight can pay amazing dividends.

I was reminded of this point tonight by this Forbes column by BoingBoing author Cory Doctorow who describes the great ROI he's seen on giving away his books. The point he makes is that by giving away his books he engaged tens of thousands of people who would have otherwise never heard of them, resulting in a net increase in sales. Undoubtedly there are other beneficial indirect effects - such as on his personal fame which leads to opportunities, etc.

Hugh MacLeod, now appearing in 3 blog posts straight, takes this and churns out another of his fabulous insights into blogging:

"Blogs are a great way of making things happen indirectly"

Two of his previous insights, which I'm paraphrasing out of laziness, are:

"The most interesting conversation wins"

"Blogging breaks down the layer that separates the conversation inside a company and the conversation happening outside in a market"

We spend a lot of time suggesting blogs as an important component in any online marketing arsonal, but frankly have yet to create that magic powerpoint presentation that can convert a non-believer in any reasonable amount of time. We need to, and no doubt these points will anchor our message.

It strikes me that the very bottom line is this: Does your company have anything to say? Is there a market, a product, a company that has so few thoughts, so little news, such an absence of perspective that press releases, brochures, a bi-annual website revision, and the CEO's quarterly powerpoints really captures it all?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The economy is not yet based on conversations or experiences. So what are we to make of it when Dell lowers earning guidance, takes a hit on Wall St. and some of the leading proponents of ‘life-after-marketing’ take credit?

First the facts. Dell lowered Q2 revenue guidance from $14.4 Billion to $14 Billion. Dell saw 11.6 percent growth in this quarter, remaining the largest mfg of PC’s in the world. DELL stock has lost about 33% of its value thus far in 2006.

Is it even remotely possible to attribute $400 million in unrealized expectation to Dell Hell? If so, how do you explain nearly 12% growth? Isn’t it far more likely that the customer service issues are just one tiny factor in a massively complex situation? Do we need to pretend we’ve toppled Dell with a couple of blog posts just to build confidence that we’re on the right track in the blogosphere?

I firmly believe that companies are best served by engaging in open conversations with their markets. And that we’re seeing the beginnings of a fundamental power-shift based on the ease with which consumers can share experiences and opinions, and discover the experiences and opinions of others. But it’s the beginning of the beginning, and most of the consumers in the world and most of the business results in the world are as yet completely unaffected.

BL Ochman, who I swear I really admire and usually agree with, implies that both the problem and the solution are found in conversations and experiences. In particular, she suggests that the recent stock decline is indicative of the company’s customer service results. But a look at a 10-year chart shows DELL share price going straight up, except for the bubble-burst and the past 12-months. Of course, nobody believes that Dell’s customer service quality was steadily improving and the suddenly crashed last summer.

For explanations as to the recent problems, Wall St. offers a few other possibilities:

… 85 percent of its business comes from commercial entities, and those organizations buy PCs in upgrade cycles, said Charles Smulders, an analyst with Gartner. The last cycle started around 2002, three or so years after companies started buying PCs ahead of the perceived Y2K problems. It's now coming to an end, and business customers aren't expected to upgrade again until they've done extensive testing of Microsoft's Windows Vista… Dell also suffers from a dependency on desktops and U.S. sales, Smulders said. Desktop PCs account for 36 percent of Dell's overall revenue… (but) commercial desktop shipments are expected to decline by 4.5 percent this year… {via News.com]

Scoble attributes Dell’s slide to the fact that his son got a new power supply at the Apple Genius Bar over at the mall, and Dell obviously couldn't replicate that. But in his comments he relates another story: “I had a Dell go out at work once and they just sent a whole new one. It took a business day.”

Away from this debate, Nick Carr uses the Dell numbers to explore a more interesting thesis; that the direct model offers cost efficiencies in production and sales but inefficiencies in support. This may be true in terms of real hardware support issues, but what if Dell tapped its user base for a support wiki and amazing ‘shared experience search engine’? I gotta believe a lot of what makes Dell users unhappy are things that other Dell users know how to solve. If the company centrally delivered the infrastructure to support it, user-generated content may be able to turn around a lot of this mess fairly quickly.

Since I seem to be defending Dell a lot recently, I’ll disclose that I own a Dell laptop, build my own home PC’s with parts from NewEgg, and we’ve bought a dozen Dell PCs and laptops at Commerce360 recently. I’ve had one customer service issue, with a new T620 that died a week after birth, and it was replaced rather promptly (I even talked them out of a component upgrade in the process). I haven’t owned any Dell stock in at least 5 years.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

It's sadly not surprising, to anyone that blogs, that Microsoft Research is reporting that 93% of all blog comments are spam. WebMetricsGuru breaks down a very interesting report on what the spammers are doing and how Microsoft thinks they can help stop them.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My earlier comments on Dell's jump into the blogosphere and the reaction it got from some of the blogerati got quoted (with a slight mis-spelling in the attribution) over at MarketingProfs, by B.L. Ochman of the WhatsNextBlog. As a fan of both the publication and the writer, I'm pleased. Although "Wrongo!" wasn't exactly the reaction I was looking for :-)

Her reaction to the passage of mine she quoted, suggests that she thinks I agree that the Dell episode should convince non-blogging companies that the water isn't yet safe. That was not my intent and if my writing wasn't clear then let me expand on it here; I was trying to suggest it would be unfortunate if this episode slowed the acceptance of blogs, although I feared that it would. My point was one that has now been made all over the net, that giving Dell a little credit for trying and slack while they get up to speed, might have been a better approach.

Ochman is deeply in the camp that wants (or wanted) Dell to somehow jump smoothly onto the cluetrain from a standing start. She's upset that they apparently sought what I'm sure they assumed was professional assistance in their efforts to start a blog. And she advises that what Dell should be doing is:

...inviting customers to tell them what they really love and hate about the company. Ask customers how to move forward. Your customers are incredibly smart, and remarkably creative. Trust them! They can create a far better marketing message than you can. Let them do it.

In the week or so since Dell started blogging I think they've handled themselves, and the initial firestorm, nearly perfectly. They've expanded the range of posts, directly engaged their critics, and included an entry titled 'Real People are Here and We're Listening' (which was incidentally written 2 days before BL posted her 'advice').

The Dell matter has been beat-to-death (giving them the chance to learn that blogging tradition quickly), so there's no need to dive further into the counter-points. I'm glad to have played a part in the conversation. Time will tell, but now I'm betting on a case study that continues the ascent of the business blog.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There was a time not long ago, when if a $60B company that happened to be the (or one of the) largest PC manufacturers in the world started blogging, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Rubel, and Robert Scoble would have had to excuse themselves to go get fresh linens. But when Dell started blogging yesterday, our boys wasted no time in throwing tomatoes and heaping on the criticism.

Let me first say for the record that I’m a huge fan of Jarvis, respect the effort and enthusiasm of Rubel, and am not the biggest Scoble fan in the world but do think he’s made a positive contribution to the evolution of blogging. That said, I think the three of them, at least initially, all acted poorly on this issue.

The history, for those who don’t know, is that Jarvis wrote about his own personal problems with Dell in a series of posts which are rightly legendary for showing how individual users now have power in the marketing conversation of even the largest brands. Jarvis is a great writer, lucid, and deeply understands the important shift blogging is causing in the communication dynamics - and in large part used what he called ‘Dell Hell’ to teach everyone how it works.

Dell publicly ignored the issue while Jarvis’ posts made it to Business Week, top spots in Google and gained meaningful visibility all over the place. Part of the education Jarvis had provided, however, was invitations and recommendations for Dell to join the conversation.

This week they did. And in 24-48 hours the three largest proselytizers of business blogging had summarily dismissed Dell’s efforts as being ‘a blog in content management system name only’, as ‘failing to get the blog going the way that they could have’ and admonishing them to ‘Listen. Listen. Listen’ (ie don’t talk).

The problem of course, which these three know better than anyone, is that blogging is new, takes time, is risky, and the complexity of Dell’s world (which does extend past the issues of their critics) cannot be covered or explained in a day. As many later voices have chimed in, including it appears Scoble and Rubel (Jarvis refuted the calls for mercy), Dell should be commended for jumping in and given time (and encouragement) to find the right tone and balance in the conversation.

There are hundreds of thousands of companies who don't yet understand why they would want to blog. The fear of 'attacks by mobs of lunatics' is probably the largest inhibitor of blogging growth beyond sheer ignorance. Dell is widely known to be in a tough spot in terms of consumer issues, and as such their brave entry into the blogosphere will be publicized and analyzed widely. It's too bad that the actions of these three important bloggers will, in this case, help re-affirm to many that not blogging is the right thing to do.

Update: Of course The Head Lemur did a better job saying what I meant.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

If you're not a hardcore blogger and/or technology industry insider, you may not know about Mini-Microsoft, a MSFT employee who has maintained anonymity while becoming a highly visible critic of the internal workings of largest company in tech-dom. The Seattle Times has a profile and summary of Mini, which does a nice job of summarizing his impact:

I ask him what he considers his biggest success. His answer: increased transparency, a sense that Microsoft management now has to be more open with its workers. Funny it took someone going underground to achieve that.

The idea that Mini has changed Microsoft isn't just delusions of grandeur. None other than MSFT uber-blogger Robert Scoble recently wrote: "Can one person change a huge company? Mini did. And we don't even know his name."

But this isn't a post about Microsoft. It's about your company. What would you have to change if you couldn't keep certain secrets locked behind the firewall or hiding behind the executive washroom door? Are there flaws in your products or services, issues with your employees, untruthes in your marketing materials, dangerous limits in your capacity or capabilities?

Every business is full of these things, not because anyone is evil but because there are only so many hours in the day. The urgent overwhelms the important and days turn into months and then years. Over time those most impacted by whatever shortcoming we're talking about just get used to it or accept it. The reality is, most customers or employees didn't used to have many effective tools for complaining or lobbying to change a whole range of things. But that now has changed. Now any one of your current or ex-employees or customers or competitors or just about anyone else who can become 'Mini You' in an instant.

So spend a few minutes thinking about Mini-Microsoft, and how you might prioritize things differently if you were either honest with yourself or someone chose to force your hand. This might not be the most pleasant way to come to grips with the new world order (where customers are in charge and transparency is the rule) but like Microsoft it could help you to make some smart and important changes to your business.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)