The Pre-Commerce Blog

Gatekeepers Require Scarcity

When Wal-Mart turns to blogs as a serious part of its communications strategy, you know there are changes going on in PR, media, and commerce. BuzzMachine, BubbleGeneration, Richard Edelman and others are taking a look at the PR and media angles. It basically comes down to this: * With power comes responsibility - bloggers have gained power and not surprisingly some of them are misusing it or at least not yet fully using it responsibly. * Power is a zero sum game - the power bloggers have gained comes at the expense of journalists and media, some of whom not surprisingly respond by sniping and whining * Marketing/Journalism/PR 2.0 � have neither arrived nor been defined any better than Web 2.0, and really are just the hope that with some new technology, the lessons of experience, and the optimism that a new start brings, we can do things better next time. (But nobody agrees on what �better� means.) I find the implications for commerce more interesting. Jarvis discusses the idea that gatekeepers are changing or disappearing in terms of corporate information, celebrity, and politics. But gatekeepers only exist where there is scarcity. Product information and reviews used to be scarce, and companies and the media (magazines usually) were the gatekeepers. Boy are those days gone. Now �unofficial� product information abounds, in many cases far before the company acknowledges or releases a product. Once a product is available, anyone can write reviews or share opinions, perspective, and analysis. And subject only to the relevance of search results or the coincidence of finding the link, anyone trying to learn about a product will have equal (or sometimes superior) access all of this information. Clearly the marketer is no longer in control. This means that marketers now have to do two things they didn�t have to do before. First, you need to provide complete and high quality �official� information and work hard to distribute it. Picture-price-paragraph isn't going to sell anything to anybody. Secondly, you should assist and enable the �unofficial� providers because there is nothing you can do to edit or stop them. Like it or not, they�re going to have a huge, perhaps decisive, impact on your success. Wal-Mart clearly recognized this and so they hired a high-end PR firm to impact the process for them. Regardless of the intentions or ethics of either side of the equation, if these people don�t think they can shout-down or ad-drown out the masses, you better believe that you don�t have any chance either. And that is true whether you�re trying to hire lots of people without providing health care, or sell high-tops to kids that skateboard.

Links

* A conference panel I'd actually like to attend: Cluetrain+7

...the very forward-looking Henry Copeland had long since lined up Chris Locke and myself to participate in a panel on Cluetrain+7 in the Interactive track of the show.

* A simple manifesto against writer's block (via Doc)

to me writers block happens when you are afraid to say the things that you want to say. it happens when you self edit yourself before you start writing or while you are writing. it happens when youre trying to be a perfectionist. when youre trying to write to one hard-to-reach person instead of to a willing and wide audience. and it happens when youre confused as to who your audience is.

* Some posts on last week's Search Engine Strategies show in NYC. Session Coverage from Search Engine RoundTable. Technorati's Tag Collection. Traffick. * Truth Marketing vs Sociopathy (featuring Miller Brewing Company)

Here's my question: what exactly has driven marketers like us to stalk our prospects or harass our customers?

* Yet another Web 2.0 Directory. But a big one.

Would You Prefer Worst Practices?

How can you argue against 'best practices'? One way is to claim that they're really not the best, as Christopher Locke does successfully in his book Gonzo Marketing. Another is to claim that best practices aren't good enough, and you'd rather figure out your own way. That seems to be the point of a best practices post I found this morning, on a blog otherwise filled with posts with which I quite agree.

Certainly there are consultants and business writers who use the phrase 'best practices' as a cure-all. But it also means doing the basics right, and taking advantage of what's been learned by all those who already did what you're trying to do. The alternatives are 'worst practices' or 'a better way'. Fair enough, and Sig is clearly advocating the latter. But why not use best practices (assuming they really are the best, or even 'good enough' as some commenters suggest) and then innovate on top of them?

Geoffry Moore pointed out in one of his books that there is a difference between the innovations that set you apart and the basics that make your business run (he called them core and context, respectively). So best practices in many (probably most) cases actually enable innovation, because the alternative is wasting time reinventing the past.

The concept of best practices is on my mind in part because it's part of a phrase I often use to describe what most web sites are missing when it comes to online marketing. The vast majority of web sites haven't properly implemented even the basics of search engine optimization, run pay-per-click campaigns that lack even simple organization, and display landing and other web pages that could be entries into the 'conversion rate hall of shame'. In these cases, a simple set of best practices can have remarkable results (tm) :-). (That's my oft-repeaded phrase.) If only because I've seen the alternative.