What’s Hip Hapnin?

Web 2.0 directory

This is a very cool listing of web 2.0 properties and what they are used for.

complete web 2.0 directory

I consider myself pretty plugged in and I probably only knew about 10% of these companies. There are a couple things that I think are really interesting about this.

1. It is amazing there are so many people doing such incredible things. This truly is the long tail and have I said yet today that I love technology?

2. It is equally amazing that they are all waiting for google to buy them.

If your project isn’t on the list go to this link to submit it.

Submit your project/website to the web 2.0 directory

Update: Apparently Scribd a web 2.0 company that is on this list can’t figure out their embed codes. this doc totally screwed up the formatting on my blog and it is doubling up on the document. I am going to spend about 10 seconds trying to figure it out before you end up with just a link to the directory.

This was my response to a recent profnet on viral marketing for small companies.  I thought it was worth sharing.

The larger your potential audience the harder it is to make something become viral.  The problem is that we all have the same base interests but our higher level interests are weird and varied.  Everyone watches when somebody starts to take their clothes off, but only a few people are interested in bird watching or canoe making.  So as a small business if you are marketing to everyone in America between 20 – 30 and you want to stand out then you are in big trouble.  There are millions of people competing for the attention of the audience and they are all using tactics focused on the base interests of the masses.  But if you narrow that audience to a tiny niche that is made up of your very best customers creating something just for them making something viral becomes very easy.   I like to focus my clients not on building an audience but on building a congregation.  An audience tunes in occasionally but has no loyalty.  A congregation is much smaller but more passionate.  A congregation will evangelize you to their sphere of influence.  A congregation will forgive some of your mistakes.  So if I am a small company with a niche product and I want to create something viral my first step is to build a congregation.  The second step is to give that congregation what they want.  Once you have done this making something spread virally through this congregation and the people they influence will be easy.  It is much better to have a few hundred people who are crazy about your products than a few thousand people who are familiar with them.

I found this page a minute ago while looking for images of canoe’s. “The Strippers Guide to Canoe Building” I thought it was a perfect title.

I thought this picture was just too amazing not to post - brilliant marketing

“Our target market is men who will die someday”

Hi, Josh Carr.

Scobleizer (Scobleizer) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Scobleizer’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer

Jason Calacanis (JasonCalacanis) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Jason Calacanis’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/JasonCalacanis

Jesse Stay (JesseStay) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Jesse Stay’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/JesseStay
Dave Bascom (seocom) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Dave Bascom’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/seocom

Mr. Popular (MrPopular) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Mr. Popular’s profile here:

  http://twitter.com/MrPopular

I don’t usually get this much action in a month.  It is like the prom and my date is REALLY drunk.  Now the pressure is on to post something insightful.

We recently moved from Divinci Draper (great central location) to Divinci Cottonwood (nicer larger office).  We were all talking about what made our new office space better.  Melissa made the observation that when you are a girl you know you are in a nice building when your heals click as you walk in.  This struck me as profound for some reason.  It is a simple thing but really ads to the “brand” of the building.

• Have you noticed that laminate floors look the same but don’t sound as nice as real wood?
• Have you noticed that nice cars have a different sound when you close the door than my Mazda?
• Jen pointed out today that she doesn’t like to work at starbucks because they make it too noisy.  I bet that noise is part of the brand.
• Your Ipod makes a nice comforting click when you do something.
• Leather sounds “rich” when you sit on it
• Did you know Harley Davidson trademarks the sounds of it’s bikes?

Sounds are an important part of the user experience.  It seems like I knew this once before but I just realized it again.

Ok so after reading this post on social analytics I decided to see what I have been recording on myself.

Don’t bother me on Wednesday nights at 10pm because that is when I am catching up on my blogs.

Blog Traffic - my ego wishes these numbers were higher

I am not very popular on Twitter…I probably don’t say anything worth reading.

This is from Linked In and is pretty surprising.

Well that was some interesting trivia but probably a total waste of time.

I was just registering on the HP website (trying to buy a printer) and this is the password requirement.

“Your new password must be a minimum of 6 characters and composed of at least 3 of the following alphanumeric combinations: lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and/or special characters (@#$&*, etc). “

How could that possibly be necessary and what does it even mean? What are they doing on that HP website that is so secure they are going to force me to use a password I will forget?  The only thing they have accomplished with this requirement is to create a need for customer service department.  So people can call in and have their password reset.  Either that or they will just go away.

Another example:

Earlier today I was in the middle of  West Valley/No Where Utah and I was desperate for some food.  Then I found a Taco Bell/KFC and I noticed a lot of things you already know about but this time, for some reason, I was thinking about UI.  They had done many things right.

They have a package with a very large napkin, wet whipe, salt and peper and a spork.  Only one thing to grab and you are on your way…after all it is supposed to be fast food right?

The spork by itself is a great user experience and it probably saves a ton of money.  I wish they had silverware sets at bed bath and beyond with sporks in them.

They also had the sauces color coded.  Yellow = mild, Orange = Medium, Red = Hot.  You don’t have to read anything to get that immediately.  But if you did happen to read them they have clever messages on them they took something boring and made it slightly less that way.

They took my name instead of assigning me a number.  My name is easy to remember, a number is impersonal and I have to study a tiny cryptic piece of paper to find it.

You may not like the burritos but they did a good job with the usability.

Link Baiting is when you put something on your site for the sole purpose of getting somebody to link to your webpage. The idea is that if all of these other sites think you are good enough to link to then google should too. If google loves you then everything else in your life should naturally fall into place. You will lose weight, get a girlfriend, dominate at WOW, move out of your moms basement and regrow your hair.

So admittedly my blog sucks and so does most of my traffic. You may be asking yourself…”self: why would I listen to this guy when his daily visits are embarrassing and his pagerank pathetic?” I must admit that is an appropriate question.

In the spirit of open source here are unattributed ideas I have stolen from all over the web (If you think I stole one of them from you your probably right):

1. Write some crap and then hit the “stumble” button. This is the easy button equivalent of website traffic. You are garuanteed to get at least a couple hundred page views. Many of you are reading this now because I hit that button. Do me a favor and hit it again…Thanks!
2. Insult Nerds and things that they love. I love my MacBook but if I say something about it sucks and that Jobs looks stupid in his mock turtleneck i am guaranteed to get some action. (virtual action - not attention from girls)
3. Get a better design - this blog is a free template and it’s boring. But until I start to get a paycheck from it I am not going to spend a dime. But it is kindof a chicken and egg thing…If you are interested in a paycheck then spend the dime.
4. Social Networks - Everyone knows this one but let me just say that Digg has always failed me. I really need to say more things that nerds love. I can usually get some nice traffic from other sources like Reddit
5. Write better stuff - I suck at this one
6. Actually do something amazing - if you build it they will come - this is hard to do but worth doing. Why is it #6?
7. Top ten list are for sissy’s - 101 lists are the new top ten. But be careful because soon the 1001 list will be the new 101 list. You better get started now.
8. Turn your content inside out - On the old web people were really concerned about getting people to the website. It was all about “exclusive” content for subscribers. Those days are done only the WSJ does that anymore. Share your content, let your subscribers consume HOW, WHERE OR WHEN THEY MAY! Make it a website BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE. You can do this with RSS and a bunch of other crap.
9. Build some backlinks - Squidoo, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, Google Groups, DMOZ, del.icio.us, there are about a billion other sites where you can also get a link.
10. Link trading - I have a suggestion, only do this with websites that you would want a link from even if search engines didn’t exist. Why? Search is getting smarter all the time and soon they will see right through directories and link trading sites if they don’t already so don’t wast your time.
11. Give something away - I don’t know come up with something…(tip: it should be something you don’t have to pay for and that can easily scale - no duh) Free Templates are popular with geeks, Doesn’t have to be a Drupal or Wordpress template either. You could give away an Excel spreadsheet template that you use in your consulting
12. Email your friends and beg for links
13. Beg for links in your post (that is a hint once again i am actually asking you to link to me)

If anybody has better ideas than this please leave a comment.

For full disclosure I am going to say right up front that I am a mormon so I may be biased. I almost didn’t post about these because I don’t want everyone to think this is a missionary blog. I am not sure how I would categorize this blog but I think most of the posts are about geek marketing. I am posting this because the LDS church has taken a big departure from the normal “family, isn’t it about time?” campaign to this truth restored campaign.

This is an example of great content. You will never get a win on the web until you give people amazing content. They selected real people who had recently joined the church. They give unscripted (but not unedited) comments

instead of actors, those appearing in the ads are all recent converts to the Church talking unrehearsed about their own personal experiences. “It was important that we do this in an appropriate fashion, in a way that did not cause contention or tear down anybody else’s faith. These are converts’ stories about what led them to the restored Church of Jesus Christ.”

The reason I point out that the clips have been edited is that people rarely produce sound bytes on their own. So we may be looking at the highlights of a 30 minute conversation. What is the lesson? Edit your content I wouldn’t have shared or watched the 30 minute version. Unlike user generated content this has been controlled just enough to have high production quality and high believability. Probably not cheap to put together but good content rarely is.

So what did they do wrong? Well what is the point in producing amazing content if you can’t share it? They are still trying to control the message (Marketing 1.0) and that is a mistake. The website should allow you to embed, download, share and email the clips. Where is the RSS feed so I know when new content is added? It seems like this was a traditional media campaign and web was somewhat of an afterthought.Instead of waiting for these to be broadcast in your market you can watch all of the new video’s hereJust in case you are wondering what the title is about it is a quote from a southpark episode

So advertising platforms are generally pretty static - web, print, outdoor, radio, TV, etc.  There are a lot of variations within those groups.  Maybe we should call those variations “tactics”, an example of tactics on the web is you can have a banner ad, a context ad, or a text ad. Three different tactics but all are just forms of web advertising.  So this is probably a branch of the outdoor advertising tree.  Outdoor advertising has been around since the beginning.  If I remember correctly from my history of advertising class the first outdoor advertising was practiced by the ancient Mesopotamians they would put a muddy hand print on the door post of the hut.  This meant somebody inside wanted you to come in and give them a high five.  (this was also the invention of the high five) So although these guys didn’t invent outdoor advertising you have to appreciate the creativity it took to turn dirt into a medium…again.

 
What is this?  Well they call it Street Advertising this company is based in the UK they create a stencil for you and then powerwash it onto a dirty sidewalk, wall, or street. 

I thought it was a very cool idea.  I don’t see it taking of in SLC where I live because just like the image, the city actually is squeaky clean. 

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