Cockeyed Optimist

You may not have noticed that I have recently updated my two continuing works, the fantasy story “Kit and the Beeman”, and my tragic life story.

So, please catch up - there will be a test later! (only kidding - but on second thoughts, that might not be a bad idea - I could give prizes for the best results. So keep alert, you might get lucky!)

The Australian newspaper for July 27 has an article very relevant to blogging, in its Business section, under the Entrepreneurs heading.

Written by Ed Charles, the piece starts:

THE hype over blogs focuses on gossip and radical politics. What many people miss is the power of the blog as a marketing tool for small business and an alternative to e-newsletters.

Blogs offer superior features to static websites, sometimes cost nothing and are easy to use. They also increase a company’s chances of being found in web searches, saving money on search engine optimisation.

Anne Bartlett-Bragg, of the Faculty of Education at the University of Technology, Sydney, runs a mentoring program for young women entrepreneurs and is immersing them in social media.

She has been blogging since 2000 and is writing a PhD thesis on the power of weblogs. She says many web design companies don’t have the right philosophical approach to blogs, because they are technologically led rather than understanding the power of harnessing social media.

“I call them weblogs as a way of trying to move away from the Paris Hiltons,” she says of the gossip blog. Bartlett-Bragg says blogs are an ideal substitute for the e-newsletters that most of the women in her program send out. “It takes time but so do e-newsletters,” she says. “How many hours do you spend writing an e-newsletter? If it takes you four hours, split that over a month and that’s one hour a week writing something for your blog.”

Charles goes to give more detail; you can read it yourself on line here.

In case this article is transitory, I will repeat the list of blogs that he gives as good examples:

BUSINESS BLOGS

• workingsolo.com.au
• blog.completepotential.com
• trevorcook.typepad.com
• www.benjaminchristie.com
• www.nobledentist.com.au/blog/index.php
• www.frankteam.com.au/blog
• blog.nowhiring.com.au
• www.barrett.com.au/blogs/suebarrett
• lukegoodwin.blogspot.co

Thanks, Ed Charles!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a brief review of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.

I have read all the way through this book more thoroughly now and found that he covers topics that make very interesting reading for any serious blogger, like me, who is interested in what can be used as a tipping point to bring on a virtual epidemic, so as to drastically increase sales or to promote an idea.

One of the epidemics he mentions was the sudden increase of popularity of Hush Puppy shoes, a product that had become boring and had been relegated to very uncool status. He has many other engaging examples of sudden broad changes that are not easy to explain.

His thesis is that the phenomena that trigger such changes depend on several factors:

• Special people: who he calls ‘connectors’, ‘mavens’ and ’salesmen’;
• The ’stickiness factor’; and
• The power of context.

Now anyone who is blogging seriously is well on the way to becoming a Connector. This is someone who is a good communicator, but, more importantly, one who knows lots of people and talks to them freely, so that ideas can spread. So, in our case as bloggers, this is to do with links and favourites.

So, what is a Maven, in Gladwell’s terms? He quotes the following definition told him by Linda Price, a professor of marketing:

“A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests. They like to be helpers in the marketplace. They distribute coupons. They take you shopping. They go shopping for you ….”

What this tells us is that a successful blogger should aim to be a Maven, too, as well as a Connector. You should be posting about topics that you are really enthusiastic about, so you can pass them on to others.

The third type of special person involved in a tipping point is the Salesman. Gladwell’s definition is a little different from the normal one; let me quote him:

“Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people — Salesmen — with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.”

So these are the three types of skill that are needed, so the successful blogger must either emulate each of them, or else (more likely) find people like that who are willing to work alongside her or him.

But special people are only part of the picture; Gladwell then goes on to talk about stickiness. What is this about? Well, it’s not enough simply to get the message across, with your connectors, mavens and salesmen. What you need is something to make that message stick.

Malcolm Gladwell uses the children’s tv programs ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Blue’s Clues’, plus a series of tv commercial advertisements, to make this next point. The examples he gives seem trite, even unconvincing, but the point is, they worked!

First, Sesame Street only started to really catch on when the producers began to have scenes where the Muppets appeared in the same scenes as human actors, and interacted with them; previously they had been kept separate. With Blue’s Clues, which was aimed at a very young audience, the sticky factor was one that tv executives took a lot of persuading to allow — the show was repeated with exactly the same form and content every weekday; and this is what made the kids keep on watching — counterintuitive, yes?

And the other example was the advertising for the Columbia Record Club. This arose out of the account being switched from direct marketer Lester Wunderman, to the huge McCann Erickson agency. Wunderman challenged them to a shoot-out, and, to cut a long story short, won in a landslide. His device was deceptively simple — viewers of the tv ads were told to look out, in the print ads in TV Guide and Parade, for a ‘Gold Box’. If they found it, they could write in for a free record of their choice. This ‘Gold Box’ was what made the campaign ’sticky’.

The last of the three elements is context. One scenario that Gladwell uses to illustrate this is the incidence of crime in New York City. Before about 1990, New York had one of the highest rates of crime in history; over 2,000 murders and 600,000 serious felonies every year. On the subways and in certain neighbourhoods there was utter chaos; it was completely unsafe to be there. But in the early 90s something happened; the murder rates plummeted by two-thirds; and serious crimes fell to half what they had been at the beginning of the decade (on the subway it dropped by 75%). Something had happened to cause this reverse epidemic, but what?

There were many elements in the environment of New York City, especially on the subway, that perpetuated a sense among the inhabitants that nothing mattered, so why should they make the effort. One of these was graffiti; the subway was completely covered with them, including all the cars. A new subway director, David Gunn, was brought in to supervise the renovation of a completely run-down system, and to much criticism he decided that graffiti removal was a priority. He was told not to worry about graffiti, that there were many more important problems, but he persisted. And, ultimately it was recognized as one of the factors that had changed people’s attitudes, and therefore their behaviour.

So that this was one of the many contextual elements that brought about the tipping point for New York City. Gladwell goes on to relate many stories that demonstrate his thesis; he tells a fascinating tale, and if you want to read it, it is likely that you will find it as compelling as I did; go ahead!

Here it is again: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

If you like this book, you might also be interested in another of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, that I reviewed in June, here.

This post is not for gee-whiz web designers, and it’s not for anyone who is satisfied with using someone else’s hand-me-down web design; it’s for people like me who do a little bit of HTML writing and have put together a couple of modest web sites (have a look at my effort for the Haiku site paper wasp, or the one I did for an educational consultancy Academic Directions (still under construction).

I might say, the CSS caused me all sorts of trouble for that one, especially trying to get it look the same for Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer! In the end, I’m ashamed to admit, I had to resort to the dreaded tables in order to get the fern picture in the right place.

Now, I’m going to have another go, with Hilco van der Meer’s help.

So, like me, have you ever wanted to use CSS and got increasingly frustrated as you tried to follow someone’s ‘Easy step-by-step guide to Style Sheets’? Or have you had problems just editing your WordPress theme’s Style Sheet?

As I said above, I certainly have, so that’s why I was very happy to come across a really comprehensive package on CSS that actually does what it promises.

Check out Hilco van der Meer’s “How To Master CSS” Course, and you’ll be as impressed as I was.

Chapter Six is now up - please read and enjoy.

I have just added an article about Ellery Queen to the series on ‘The Heirs of Sherlock Holmes.’

After that, the next one I’m planning will be about Nero Wolfe, the irascible orchid-loving creation of Rex Stout.

I am open to suggestions for future items in this series; to be consistent these sleuths should be recognizably cut from the same cloth as those I’ve already done. It’s not that I don’t like your gritty chain-smoking private eyes as well as the more scholarly cerebral types, but they inhabit a somewhat different genre.