Comments on: Rubel’s Twitter List Trumps Godin’s Bestsellers

By: Kurt

Kurt — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:00:15 +0000

One other quick comment (as if…)

Again, thinking about Jeffrey’s comment about the self-congratulatory nature of the “marketing community,” I realized that’s another reason I wasn’t that crazy about the “Three Little Pigs/Blogs” story that everyone was so enamoured with a few days ago.

While self-examination is critical and mature, self-absorption is counterproductive and naive.

By: Kurt

Kurt — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:46:55 +0000

EXCELLENT article, Robert. DEAD ON. And LOVE Jeffrey’s statements about marketing’s “occupational hazard” of overestimating our own importance to our audience. Now THAT is a book idea (though I’m not sure who would want to read it– further evidence of the uncomfortable truth in the statement…).

Also excellent points by Jim. As a founding team member of MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com, one of the web’s early HIGH TRAFFIC (fastest growing site of 1999) and yet supposedly STICKIEST sites (top five in terms of frequency, length of stay and other such metrics), I can attest that advertising and engagement are almost universally inversely-related.

And even more sobering is that while “engagement” may consist of multiple “micro conversions,” that doesn’t in any way guarantee the “final” conversion, where people take out their wallets and choose to buy your product/service rather than bread and milk. Whether you fumble mid-field or 1 yard from your opponent’s goal line, you still lose the ball and don’t put up any points.

Again, having been on the roster of “Team CMGI” during those bubble years, saw it first hand and have INCREDIBLE war stories…hey, maybe I should write a book! Any of you marketers out there want to read it?

By: Jim Novo

Jim Novo — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:48:31 +0000

Wait until all these social media sites find out their ad space is worth virtually nothing in terms of generating awareness or clicks – what will they do then? Would you be a-Twitter about paying $14.95 a month just to know what a random group of people is “doing right now”?

Honestly…

At the same time, we have people running away from measuring the “value” of all this social activity – you know, human behavior is complex and can’t really be measured. The value of Twitter is in “engagement” and of course we can’t measure that…so I guess we’ll just count hits?

Personally, I’m pretty sure the more enagaged someone is the LESS effective the advertising will be…think about it. So that means advertising on social media sites will be the lowest return activity since advertising on GeoCities.

Wait a minute…wasn’t GeoCities essentially social media?

By: Lite

Lite — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:19:29 +0000

I have really enjoyed your top 30 blog list. I love lists too, create one every now and then on my blog.