What Will the Web See When You Die?
A few weeks ago, High Society, a ski/snowboard company I’ve worked with over the years suffered a hard loss: we lost one of our team riders to a cliff drop that went tragically wrong.
Out of respect for his family, I will not be mentioning his real name here because I don’t want this post to appear in the search results for his name. For the sake of the article I’m referring to him by the name ‘Tim’.
During the resulting media coverage I noticed a trend that caught my attention.
The day after his death, the opening sentence of an article from the Rocky Mountain News read:
“Aspen native and snowboarder [Tim} liked spinners, bonks and card tricks, according to one of his sponsors’ Web sites.”
That website was ours. And that line ‘spinners, bonks, and card tricks’ was taken off of his profile page, which was the first page you’d find after Googling his name.
But here’s the thing. There was a lot more to Tim than ‘spinners and bonks’. He was a well respected rider and someone who had accomplished great things in his short life. But you would not know this from the article.
It struck me that journalists are turning more and more to the web and social networks to dig up information about people for their stories. It’s obvious that the author simply Google’d Tim’s name and took out the first bit of information he could find, no matter how trivial.
If you recall the Elliot Spitzer scandal, you may remember the same thing happened in that instance as well. When the identity of Spitzer’s lady friend was discovered, media organizations were quoting her Myspace page and printing photos straight out of her profile.
Now, is that really fair? Or more importantly, is that really journalism? It seems that more journalists, in the effort to be the first to the press, are skipping the interviews of friends and families and turning more to finding out what they can on the web.
The reason I ask if it’s fair: How many of you would like to have your legacy defined by what’s in your Facebook profile?
Take a look at the image on the right. It’s an excerpt from my Facebook profile. Like most of my friends profiles, it’s not exactly on the serious side.
I would hate to think that if I passed away tomorrow that the world would know me by:
“Minneapolis resident and programmer, Nate Weiner liked Rickrolling himself…”
And Tim’s profile on the High Society website? It wasn’t serious. It didn’t mention the things that really defined him. None of the items that were listed there did his legacy any justice.
But why should it? Should we be worried that if we put up a joke that others will take that as our character definition? Or should we expect journalists to be more conscious of the type of content they are sourcing from?
If this is going to be the way it is, should we avoid joking around and keep our content strict?
I would certainly hope not, but it begs the question, if people were to write about you today and used to the web to research you, what would they find? And more importantly, would you want others to read it?
How NOT to Promote Your Site
In my first post on the Idea Shower I promised to post not only my successes, but my failures as well. This is the story of one of those failures. I came across this post by Eric Reynolds on Problogger. It suggested using a Press Release to bring attention to your blog. After reading this I poked around and found stories of people getting thousands of views and numbers of interviews with media outlets by submitting press releases with the service PRweb. This was the same week I was releasing Tail Report, so I thought I’d give it a go. When I was ready to submit my release, I was hung up by the first page in the submission process; I had seen a screen like this before. But it was many years ago.
Let the Great Experiment Begin!
To submit a release you need to first select your ‘visibility package’. Each step up costs more money and gives you more features like ‘SEO Wizard’ and ‘PR Tag Clouds’. $200 will get you ‘Yahoo Site Match 3x’ which is ‘expedited placement in the search engines at three times the $80 level’). I knew this looked familiar! I went with the ‘Standard Visibility’ package for $80 and submitted my release to post on Tuesday March 11th, 2008.Release Day
My alarm rings. I am confused. Why did my alarm wake me up and not the non-stop ringing of the phone with news reporters trying to get an exclusive? Surely something isn’t right. I hop onto PRweb’s site and start looking for my press release. With the Standard package I assume I won’t make it onto their home page so I drill down into one of the categories I submitted my release to: Technology: Internet Okay not on the front page there, so I start scrolling down and am confronted with the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen:
My Traffic Stats
By logging in and viewing the traffic stats that PRweb gives me, I might feel like the press release wasn’t all that bad. According to the stats the press release was read 447 times this past week. Not terrible.
What to Think
Okay, let’s start with the obvious: There are a lot of factors at play when it comes to the success of a press release or story. The title has to be catchy, the content has to be good, and more importantly the subject has to be newsworthy. And it’s completely arguable that my press release and Tail Report simply were not any of those things. Even if this is the case, with what I’ve seen, I’m willing to argue that paying to submit a press release online today is simply a waste of money.Paying to be heard died back with Web 1.0
So What Are We to Do?
Go look at that list of page numbers above one more time. Then go look at the upcoming sections of social news site’s like Digg and Mixx. There is significantly less competition on Digg and Mixx than there is on PRweb. And you don’t have to pay anything to submit there. Have you ever tried submitting your site to StumbleUpon? I’ve found that you can get at least 200-300 visitors in one day simply by stumbling your own site. And again, it’s free. More importantly, who do you know? In preparing this post I spoke to a friend who had great success with a press release last winter. However, he said that the greatest result came from personally emailing the release to local and industry reports that he knew. It was those people who eventually covered him. You will have far more success with a press release by leveraging your connections than launching it blindly into the masses.The Final Outcome
The point I’m making here is simple: Paying to be heard died back with Web 1.0. This is an era where it takes very little effort to be seen. You can send influential bloggers like Michael Arrington or Robert Scoble a message on Twitter and they’ll see it. But if what you have to say is not interesting, they’ll pass right on by. Don’t spend your money on trying to be seen, that’s the easy part. Instead, be creative and be interesting. If you are, people will find you. Focusing on your content and spending your money on things that make your product or site better will ultimately lead to more results than paying $80 to put your product in a pile.Tail Report
- Real-Time Website Survey
- Estimate how much your site has to grow to make $X/month
- Compare how your revenue does against sites with similar traffic
- A Real Picture of ‘The Tail’ See what the Long Tail of Blogging actually looks like.
Overview
Tail Report is the first real survey of web revenue. It gives website owners a look at what type of traffic and ranking it takes to meet their revenue goals while showing them how their current income compares to others in their traffic and demographic groups. Jump down after the video for more informationThe Long Tail of Blogging
The phrase, ‘the Long Tail of Blogging’ has been tossed around for a long time. It describes the shape a graph would make if you charted website revenue versus website popularity. And it means that the top websites make a substantially large majority of the money.
But chances are, you already knew this. Why? Because this concept isn’t new. The phrase has been around for a long time, but can anyone show what the Tail actually looks like?
We have a rough idea, but in actuality, it’s all a guess.
But if we did know what it looked like, then we could start discovering a lot of unanswered questions that still exist today not only about revenue but about blogging itself.
How It Came To Be
Like many, when I started out with advertising on my websites, I was disillusioned into thinking that the money would roll in a little easier. After reading of the financial success of blogs like ProBlogger, Shoe Money, John Chow, and Techcrunch, it’s easy to get excited about the potential your website may possess. But it fades very quickly as you realize it takes a lot of work and a lot of traffic; much more than most people realize. It’s this disillusionment that leads a lot of website owners into squeezing in advertising right out of the gate when they should instead, be focusing on highlighting their content and services. But when do sites, on average, start making amounts of revenue to warrant advertising and how much will you have to grow to reach say, a full time income from your website? I wanted to know more about what it took to reach those levels. It struck me while I was thinking about a salary comparison website. There are plenty of these around, they collect data about your job and experience then spit out how much you should be making and what sort of factors correlate to higher salaries. Why not do the same thing for website revenue?How It Works
Tail Reports function is simple, website owners anonymously complete a 2 minute survey about their traffic and ranking and in return they receive a report that shows how their site’s revenue does against other sites similar in traffic/ranking. In addition, it gives estimates about how much their website needs to grow to meet their profit goals.
More importantly, each completed survey makes Tail Report more accurate. And after combining/averaging the data of thousands of websites, we can finally get a real-time picture of the ‘Long Tail of Blogging’ and start getting our questions answered.
