Saturday 6 September 2008

Get to the bleedin' obvious

Just arrived in my inbox and thought the insight was so amazing that I had to post it (having made just one or two small edits...).

Email from: Get to the bleedin’ obvious: Marketing-to-Marketing (MarketingDuffers) [mailto:ThinkingFromTheYear2000@marketingduffers.spamsender.com]

Subject line: More thoughts about blogs that sound good on the surface but are actually completely useless in practice

Is this the end of the beginning of the end of blogs that aren't as good as they should be? We've swallowed some tips from a company even more famous than us for stating the bleedin’ obvious. What do they think makes for a good B2B blog?

Don’t write a crap blog. “I try to write a blog that isn’t totally blatently wrong, boring, repetitive or boring.”

A blog isn’t a press release. “I also learnt last week that a camel isn’t the same as a bathtub. Groovy.”

Don't think about the audience. “Sounds counter-intuitive, doesn't it? But why think about the audience when you're really only writing for people like you.”

The bleed!n obv!ous: it’s good to write something good.

Next week: What to do when hoardes of people unsubscribe, or die, from your pointless email blasts

What is it about marketing (and online B2B marketing in particular) that leads people to dress inane drivel up as thought leadership?

Easy steps to making money from web 2.0


Have to love this post by Ted Dziuba at the register. Of all the hype around web 2.0, cloud computing, SaaS etc, he shows where the real money is to be made: not by the next application, but by supporting its development (Amazon's EC2 or Google's App Engine).

"I do have to give both Google and Amazon some credit, though. Both noticed that the only ones to make any real money off of the California gold rush were the outfitters who sold mining equipment."

...and then there are the steam ship companies, whose posters really sell the dream - maybe they are more like the journalists and commentators who promote the Cloud Computing vision, because (as a concept at least) it is easy to understand.

Don't know who the 200 Jack Asses would be in the analogy though...