Thursday, April 16, 2009

Serendipitous alignment: A Twitter Book and "Whuffie Math"

This morning I participated in a fun project Marketing Diva Toby Bloomberg is wrangling: A Twitter book. She is interviewing various social media types about various aspects of the social media space, and asking them to provide their responses in the form of a series of tweets. We interviewees are numbering our tweets and including the hash tag #smgps, and from that she is pulling together the content.
Toby asked me to answer the question: What would make for a good blogger relations program, from the blogger's perspective?

You can find my thread here.

Amongst my tweets, I made the following points I make whenever I speak to any audience of marketers:

  • Blogher_256-low_purple_normal
    ElisaC: Forget “A-List”. Find *your* List…30 bloggers who care abt what you do, who write abt what you do & who don’t mind being pitched! 5 #smgps
    about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

  • Blogher_256-low_purple_normal
    ElisaC: Bloggers make it easier to figure out who they are, yet few marketers bother to invest the time. They’re obsessed with the “A-List” 4 #smgps
    about 9 hours ago from TweetDeck · Reply · View Tweet

I sing this tune all the time. I sing it because back in my consultancy days I heard, pretty much every time, "can you get us covered by Boing Boing? or Dooce?" It's like they visited that completely useless dinosaur, the Technorati Top 100, and decided that was all that mattered.

But it so does not matter.

And then I read a past from BlogBuddy Tara Hunt today, entitled: Whuffie Math.

She is singing my tune with a hilarious story that is also absolutely spot-on, boiling down to this:
So, I could send the book to 20 influential types and probably even get one or two of them to read it. Then blog about it? [snip] So, if I add it up, the sum total of possible blog posts here is 0, which leads to the reach of…0.

However, of those that answered my tweet and asked for a book are actually looking forward to the book. This group is busy, too. Career and lives get in the way, so I probably will see about half of them able to actually get to reading the book in the near future. And, as blog posts fall off from reading, Maybe 5 of them will actually get around to posting something. Say, their collective readers are somewhere around 500 - and that number is really conservative, since most blog posts will see long term hits, even those with a low readership (I will also do my best to drive people to those posts). Adding this column up, I see a sum total of possible ‘eyeballs’ reading about the book being 500.


And from the test earlier, 500 is greater than 0.

Yes. Exactly. Read her whole post. I obviously only excerpted a small, valuable chunk, but there are more valuable chunks to be read. And I agree with them all.


Today our philosophies serendipitously aligned!


// posted by ElisaC @ 5:07 PM
Comments:
Elisa - Thanks for your wonderful "tweet-interview" and joining me on this adventure to write the first business book written and distributed on Twitter.

For your community's enjoyment here's the link to your interview. http://twurl.nl/bzvpe0
# posted by Anonymous Toby : 4/17/2009 7:09 PM
 
Wow! So cool that we were totally on the same page here. I should send your tweets/post to my publisher. Although, truly, they did me a favor by doing this, because I wouldn't have written about it otherwise. ;)
# posted by Anonymous Tara Hunt : 4/18/2009 7:17 AM
 
Thanks Toby, it was fun. And thanks for the link.

Tara, your publishers did motivate you to create probably one of the most effective posts I've seen on the subject, so I guess we should indeed thank them :)

PS-Sorry the post looks so wonky, I've been experimenting with Drafty, and it doesn't handle cutting and pasting form various sources all that well.
# posted by Blogger ElisaC : 4/18/2009 8:08 AM
 
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