Contrary Valley

The Latest in Viral Marketing

From the Presto Vivace blog.  Catch the worm.

Congrats Anita!

From Creative Weblogging:

Barbara Payne has a laudatio on Anita Campbell, blogger from the first minute at Creative Weblogging.

Well-deserved affirmation for a leader in the online information business. Congratulations Anita on being a great role model and a help to business people everywhere.

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Blogging Site Gets $6 Million in Funding

Gather.com rounds up a whole lot of venture capital for their blogging media enterprise. Read about it in MarketWatch.

Blogs talking about this: Jack Krupansky on Blogging; Rob Hof in BusinessWeek Online's The Tech Beat.

Thanks, Google

It's hard not to like Google. This morning I was searching via bloglines for blogs mentioning Martin Luther King Jr. Wasn't finding much, and what was there was outdated. No offense to bloglines. So I went to the Google landing page to find that the editors honored MLK by creating a special logo for the day, with a preset search term.  Nice.

7 Steps to Becoming a Thought Leader

A new blog by a company named Blue Flavored has a great post about Thought Leadership and how to get started as a thought leader. Their seven points (summarized here) are a nice,  concise guide for beginners, as well as a refresher for those who have already identified being a thought leader as a goal.  (Yeah, I know, thought leader may have already been condemned to buzzword hell.)

1. Start a Blog
2. Start Small
3. Create a Publishing Calendar
4. Know Your Audience
5. Turn on Comments
6. Write Guidelines
7. Stand By Your Principles

That's What I'm Talkin' About

When you are popular voice in the blogsphere like Seth Godin, you inevitably attract critics eager to cut you down. His recent post about the origins of the term "Windy City" attracted one such critic. This critic only proves a point of my previous post, "Are Women Smarter?" I think his harsh little rant made him (the critic) look bad.  And Godin's mea culpa made Godin look good.  And it was noticeable that in his mea culpa post, Godin didn't include a link to his critic's site, rather, to the site that contained the facts.

It takes a big man (or woman) to admit you are wrong. Any little man can try to make himself look better by denigrating someone else.  I like Seth Godin a little more today.

Fix Your Site's Broken Windows

If you've read "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell, or "Broken Windows Broken Business" by Michael Levine, you've heard about the "broken windows" theory of social behavior. John Moore of Brand Autopsy riffs on both in a recent post (and saves readers' time by summarizing the latter book in about one paragraph.) Moore cites Gladwell's book about this theory:

Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.

According to Moore, "Levine's premise is that a broken window in business happens when someone isn't paying attention to details" and that "broken windows are telltale signs to customers that a business doesn't care, that it is poorly managed, and or it has become 

Are Women Smarter?

"Let us put men and women together, see which one is smarter,
Some say men, but I say no, women got the men like a puppet show." (Lyrics by Norman Span, covered by The Grateful Dead.)

True or not? Are women bloggers smarter, better, kinder, gentler?  Nosing around the blogosphere (and common sense) tells me that generalizing about men versus women bloggers isn't so helpful. Except maybe in one respect.  I haven't yet come across a nasty, personal attack penned by a woman.  There really is a way to express your opinion without crushing the other person, without resorting to ad hominem attacks.

Stay Out of Trouble When You Blog

Presto Vivace Blog, the voice of the Presto Vivace PR firm, has reprinted (with permission) a very helpful article about intellectual property issues, by a technology attorney by the name of Mark Grossman. 

One of his main points is that "[i]t’s absolutely clear that the law will hold you legally responsible for defamatory online statements. Statements made online can and will get you sued."

RSS Smackdown

I do appreciate Seth Godin's giving us amateurs another lesson in how to do RSS feeds. His instructions are pretty damn clear.  But I have to admit, the whole process is still a little daunting.  I do have a few feeds coming through on my Yahoo homepage, but I once tried to use, feedburner I think it was, and it was not very user friendly to me.  I don't have a technical background but I learn real fast.  I'm sure with more time and patience I will have it down cold.  But I know that a lot of people are just not going to put the effort into it. It is an effort.  For instance my Dad. He is a retired advertising entrepreneur with a lot of expertise in things like fly casting and fine wines.  How cool would it be if he and Hugh McCleod could have a conversation?  Or my friend Christine who moved here from Cameroon. She knows computers but I think it would be really hard to explain how to do RSS feeds.

So I issue a challenge to all you expert communicators/technophiles/change agents:  find a way to make this RSS technology accessible to a more diverse demographic.  Imagine the conversations we could have.