How to Change the World

It's Not Easy Being Me

Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do--for example, host 250 women bloggers at your house. This is a photo from the Kirsty ("Digg for chicks") and Alltop ("aggregation without aggravation") pre-BlogHer party. If you click here, you can see many more including White Trash Mom lifting her leg, Jenny the Bloggess drinking two-fistedly, the world largest wok to make paella, AllMediocre stealing dirt from my son, how Silicon Valley moms pack to drive across the country, a new chesttop-publishing advertising model, and the baby that Johnson & Johnson didn't want to see at its mommy-blogger seminar.

Alltop Badge Contest Winners

Voters have selected the five winnners of the Alltop badge contest. Each winner will receive a iPod Touch. The winners are:

1. Jesse Pons
2. Glenn Sakamoto
3. Kristen Chase
4. Ben Goheen
5. Cayley Vos

You can see the winning entries here. My thanks to everyone who entered and who voted.

How to Change Someone's Mind

There's nothing I like to study more than techniques of persuasion, and I want to persuade you to check out a website called ChangingMinds.org. You can think of it as Robert Cialdini, my hero when it comes to persuasion, on steroids. Here is a direct link to theories of persuasion but do spend time on other theories such as power, friendships, and emotion.

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Haven't taken this course, but I bet it's useful: Managing Without Authority Alok Jain: Thanks for the tip!.

The Wall Street Journal Lesson

A sign of PR cluelessness is writing to a reporter after an article appears because you think that it should have mentioned your product or company. There are two problems with this theory: first, the reporter isn't going to revise the original piece; and second, she's not going to write another article covering the same topic in the near future.

Thus, the most likely outcome is that the reporter thinks that you don't understand how journalism works. However, you never know because a clueless move of this sort worked for me recently. In the middle of June, Wendy Bounds wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal blog called "15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading." She mentioned my blog, but it would have been great if she had mentioned Startups.alltop.com and Venturecapital.alltop.com too.

So I emailed her--hoping that, best case, sometime in the far future she'd mention Alltop or these two specific sites. Knock me over with a feather, she then wrote "Anti-Social Aggregator? 'Alltop' Lists Any Story, Not Just Popular Ones." I can hardly believe my good fortune, and I learned several lessons:

1. Digital media is different--duh!. Blogging and other digital media are much more nimble than paper-based publications. A second story on Alltop was unlikely in the old world unless there was "big news" about the site. With blogging, you can link various tidbits of coverage published at different times and create a cohesive resource for readers. It's not easy to do this with print.

2. Richer is better. If my email was about yet-another entrepreneurial blog that should have been in the first story, Wendy would not have written written about it. However, the follow-on story about Alltop made the first story richer and better for her readers because it aggregates similar content.

3. Solving a problem is good too. Unbeknownst to me, Alltop solved a problem for Wendy: she couldn't find a good list of entrepreneurial blogs using Google while writing the story. Alltop was the answer for her problem, and she thought many other people must encounter the same problem.

To tell you the truth, there are two more lessons that I learned--or, more accurately, relearned. First, "if you don't ask, you don't get." Second, "sometimes it's better to be lucky than smart." My recommendation is that if you're dealing with a similar situation (digital media, your product or service truly supplements the original story, and you really solve a problem), then take the shot.

Friendfeed Starter Pack: Frienderati.alltop

I recently signed up for Friendfeed, and I had a hard time figuring out who to follow. Christine Lu told me that this is a common problem, and we came up with idea of aggregating the top Friendfeeds to help people get started. Check it out: Frienderati.alltop.com. You can use this as a starting point to figure out who to follow on Frienderati or to quickly scan what the Frienderati are discussing.

Free Power

Neuromarketing has another great blog post. This time the subject is the power of "free." Click here to read it. Apparently, a free offer has power that is far beyond what you'd think. There are many marketing and advertising implications, so go read the posting.

NowPublic Buys Truemors

NowPublic bought Truemors yesterday, and I became chairman of NowPublic's board of advisors. You can read more details here. These are exciting times! Thank you everyone for contributing your stories to Truemors and for visiting our site.

The Appeal of "New" is Hardwired

Dr. Bianca Wittman of University College London found that making novel choices activates the ventral striatum of the brain. This area is associated with rewarding behavior. Thus, labeling a product as "new" may increase its sales because of this brain wiring. Also, familiar brands also cause higher levels of brain activation, so the perfect pitch may be a new product from an established brand. Hmm, "Apple iPhone," maybe? Read more about the study here at the Neuroscience Marketing blog. Incidentally, this is a great blog that you should read frequently--I just added it as a NEW feed to my NEW site Marketing.alltop.

The Cleverest Calendar Ever

I love ideas like this: bubble-wrap calendars. You pop each day when it's done. A company from Brooklyn sells them for $50--$50 for bubble wrap! I love the margins as much as the idea. Put this one in the "why didn't I think of that?" category.

Everything You Need to Know About Online Advertising--Advice from 1923

My buddy David Szetela writes a new column for SearchEngineWatch called "Profitable PPC." In his first column, "PPC Advertising: Art or Science?," he mentions a book called Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins. The book was first published in 1923--long before TV or online advertising. Hopkins is the inventor of test marketing, coupon sampling, and copy research.

Hopkins's book is only fifty-seven pages long, but it's filled with simple, clear, and classic advice about topics such as salesmanship, headlines, storytelling, pricing, content, samples, distribution, testing, and naming. His thoughts apply to online marketing and sales and is well worth your reading it. You can get it by clicking here.