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We made it really easy to use Feedburner to get analytics about who's reading your feed. Just burn your Posterous RSS feed and add the new Feedburner feed address to your site and you're off.
Grab the address from Feedburner:
You're probably sick of me talking about Posterous, but it's been about a year since I have been this excited by a new platform and its potential to change how we publish. I don't know what the future is for the company (and no, they aren't a client), but I love its simplicity, its hub and spoke model and its collaborative features. But don't just take my word for it. Check out how others are innovating.
Marketers, if you're not doing social technology applications now, you're officially behind.
Need I say more? Read the full article for yourself at http://blogs.forrester.com/groundswell/2009/08/social-technology-growth-marches-on-in-2009-led-by-social-network-sites.html#
Yesterday I bought - like every week - the German weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" and payed as a matter of course 3,60 Euro for it. That's per month 15,40 Euro and it's more or less the last printed news source I buy regulary to catch up with what is happening in the 'real' world.
It's a real pleasure to read it and I celebrate this weekly ritual. A good coffee, this newspaper, sufficient time, a comfortable location and here we go. The amount of information I get from this weekly newspaper equals roughly the amount of information I consume per day on the web.
The difference between both is not the journalistic quality or the value - it's the price! The information on the web is for free and I would never pay real money for it. But! I would pay with attention if I could use it as a currency.
And in my eyes there is a way to do that! This blog post tries to explain my idea on how it could work, to pay with 'just' attention on the web.
So what is attention on the web and how could you use that as a currency?
A lot of people measure attention with "time spent" on a site, which is in my eyes pretty outdated in times of having multiple tabs/windows open in your browser at the same time during the whole day.
According this outdated definition I would spent my attention on Facebook the whole day, cause I have it open at least somewhere all the time - but my attention is elsewhere for sure ;)
Therefore you can't measure attention based on how much time I spent on a site, but engagement is here key (once again)! Only when somebody is really engaged with something, he is focused and has all ('most' #multitasking) of his attention on one 'object' for that moment.
Brands want this kind of attention and engagement form their customers to build sustainable relationshsips, to get not only their messages heard in all that noise, but even more to get involved in the conversation about themself, which their customers have with each other nevertheless. Therefore real engagement is the best case scenario for every brand on the web.
It's not the overlooked (CPM-based payed) display-ad on a website, it's not the ignored customer survey, it's not the not-installed Facebook app you might have build, it's not the never visited community you have build for your customers.
I have been involved in quite a few projects myself in the past, which had the goal to get customers engaged with brands and it's for sure one of the most difficult tasks you can face at all.
Attention and engagement is expensive, because it costs time and concentration. Maybe even the biggest fan of your brand, will evaluate if it's really worth to participate in this 20 page customer survey to improve your products ;)
So let's go a step back and look at what we have:
1. Consumers: we would like to have high quality content on the web, but we don't wanna pay for it with cash. What we can offer is our attention. Our own attention and the possibility to point the attention of our friends into a specific direction, by sharing, recommending, having conversations with them etc.
2. Content Producers aka Rupert: they would love to get paid for the content they produce online. Advertising is nice, but they wanna have cash from those who get the content as well. With the attention 'we' can give them, they can't really do anything usefull. (except supporting their ad prices maybe)
3. Brands: they would love to get more of our real attention and would like us to get engaged with them. If we would give them, what we have to offer the content producer, they would be more than happy.
Well I am not a master of business adminstration, but don't you see there a nice trading opportunity, too?
There are two key questions:
Some of you might blame me already, for even thinking about paying for attention, but stay cool and relaxed for a few more minutes.
Because: I am not intending to pay a) in cash and b) directly the consumers :)
If you have a situation where someone want's to sell something he owns, but on the other hand the one from who he wants to buy something, doesn't want to have his stuff, but then again a third party would be interest in getting his good, you need a "Value equivalent". That's pretty much the reason in a very short version, why money was invented in the first place ;)
But if real cash is somethig what is more or less complicated to handle on the web (greetings to paypal at this point) and especially if cash would be inappropiate and undermine some things, we maybe need something different.
Of course the brand wouldn't pay the consumers directly, so that they can pay the content producers. But what if the brandds would pay for the content people would like to consume and if they give them just and "value equivalent".
It might surprise you, that this already exists on the web
... and so far is not something totally new, with which I have come up with ;)
Companies like http://offerpal.com or the German startup http://sponsorpay.com already give consumer an "value equivalent" for paying attention to brands, and those brands then pay content producers in cash.
But the usecase is a bit different at the moment. The "value equivalent" is a "virtual currency" and the content producers are usually game developers, who have virtual currencies build in their games already.
Browser games - some of them run as apps on Facebook i.e. - have discovered virtual currencies for quite some time, as one pillar of their monetization model additional to their ad revenue. But couldn't content publishers in general adopt this monetization model?
Of course right now consumers who trade their attention for a virtual currency have to decide, for which game or virtual world they want to get it, and companies like offerpal and sponsorpay have to work directly with every single content publisher together! But what if there would be a more independt virtual currency on the web?
A currency with which I could pay for an article on nytimes.com, as well for virtual goods in my browser game, as well for a song on iTunes or for an App for my iPhone. Nowadays we have so much virtual goods, for we which we pay already (music, iphone apps) or which we should pay in the eyes of the creators on the one hand side, and on the other hand, we also have something to offer in this virtual environment.
Attention, Engagement, Time, Conversation, Recommendations and so on. The virtual goods market is already giant, and I am not talking Second Life here ;) The web is getting packed with virtual currencies - even on Twitter you see the first attempts - and in my eyes it's pretty obvious that a virtual currency is key to the problems content publishers are facing.
The probability that consumers open their wallets and pay real cash for content is in my eyes pretty low. But the probaility, that consumers will trade their online attention, for something, with what they can access valuable content online, is quite prolly. And from that they can be a cashflow generated in the background, which will pay in the end the content publisher bills.
Sure - to make this happen there are quite a few issues to solve first ;) Not only the creation of a kind of independent virtual currency is an issue, but even more the question of which qualitty the attention will be, brands can buy 'for money'.
Such monetary incentives are always critical and may influence the motivation to share attention and engage with brands to much, but I am sure, that if we think a bit more in this direction, there might be a model which will work for everybody.
So now it's your turn: what are your ideas and thoughts on that?
They created a “chalk blog” in Chicago’s busy Pioneer Court using 40 eight-foot boards spread throughout the courtyard. They posed some of the provocative questions that spark debate on ChicagoNow blogs every day, such as “What would you do to improve the CTA?” and “What will the Olympics do for this city?” The chalk blog drew thousands of visitors with just as many opinions, giving them the opportunity to experience ChicagoNow offline. One of the most important strategic considerations was that people who read blogs don’t just care about the posts from the bloggers – they also care about what other readers have to say in the comments. This was their way of capturing that.
You know how fast-food menu items always look amazingly juicy and delicious in advertising and marketing materials?
Whether you are moving to MP3s or simply tired of them, there are tons of ways you can reuse your old CDs
Collection of modern coat hangers and unusual clothes hanger designs from all over the world.
This 2 hour talk is basically the essential primer/guide to product management. I have never seen a single deck/resource be nearly as comprehensive. This is so incredibly essential, I think anyone who is even remotely connected to building products should sit down and at least flip through the slides, if not watch the whole thing.
It took me 10 years of working on product of all kinds (web, desktop, mobile, consumer, enterprise) in all kinds of roles (engineer, designer, PM) to come to understand the concepts explained in this deck in 2 hours.
This is my favorite slide out of this whole thing. There's a lot more to designing products than the visual aspect. There's much more, and it's all connected.
Dave McClure's fbFund is bringing together some seriously valuable startup knowhow and resources.
Since I'm at a Business Intelligence (and visual thinking) conference in Seattle, it seemed appropriate to review the Zen of Kermit on visual thinking. You can find the link to the original version from the 1950s when Kermit played the role of the student rather than master (and before his name was Kermit).
http://snipurl.com/nrnsu
