Capulet Communications

This comes as no surprise to anyone who's lived through the last fifty years, but humans in the modern world love lists. If it's not American Bandstand, it's Letterman's top ten schtick. 

Bloggers of all stripes understand the power of the list, and exploit them all the time. I was reminded of this courtesy of popurls. Check out what the list of top items for del.icio.us--seven of the ten are lists:

James Mirtle points to this story in the Washington Times about the Washington Capitals' aggressive blogger relations program. The team has struggled on the ice, and that's been reflected in poor attendance over the past few years. In the face of diminishing coverage from the mainstream media, they've been inviting bloggers into the press box:

"I was watching the traditional coverage, both broadcast and print, and was remarkably underwhelmed," Keeley said of his decision to begin blogging last year. "The first thing I wrote was a general sense of being frustrated — well, really more than frustrated. Really angry. I started from this premise that Washington is not a sports town, but there's nothing innate that says it can't be. But the old media don't do anything to change that perception. In fact, they perpetuate, in my opinion. So we started this blog, the idea that if you're interested in hockey and want more coverage, come here."

Capitals owner and AOL magnate Ted Leonsis is really drinking the Koolaid. He's got his own blog, and posted a thoughtful response to the article yesterday:

Also, I do question some of the mainstream media and its programming choices and how it creates self-fulfilling prophecies in how it allocates its dwindling resources on some matters and ignores others. I also wonder - if you are programming one traditional way and you are shrinking, then why don't you try something different? What do you have to lose as an enterprise if what you are doing today isn't working? Embrace change. The NHL has and so have the Washington Capitals. Change is good.

Few CEOs blog, and fewer still would include an emoticon in their post. I'll forgive him that idiosyncrasy, but I can't forgive him for not accurately citing the Great One's most famous quote (or, possibly, the Great One's dad).

For the last few years, local (local to Vancouver, that is) PR guru (and, tangentially, our client) James Hoggan has been publishing weekly PR tips in the Vancouver Sun. They're pretty elementary , but still useful reminders of what to do and what not to do in the thorny world of public relations.

As it turns out, they've got over two years worth of tips on their website. Here are a couple of samples:

If You Can’t Fix it, Don’t Ask About it - A critical step in any consultation comes in conceiving the questions that you put to your audience. If you start asking for feedback on issues that you can’t – or won’t – change, you are setting them up for disappointment and yourself up for a heap of grief. So, define the parameters carefully and whatever questions you ultimately ask, be prepared to treat the answers seriously.

Public Speaking: The Risks and Rewards of Winging It - Most people have been impressed at some point in their lives by a speaker who could be scintillating off the cuff, who just seemed to grab one great idea after the other out of the air. So it’s tempting, as a presenter, to want to emulate that style. And in rare cases it could be the right thing to do if you have easy command of the material and if the risks of an error are negligible. But if the stakes are high – and you’re not completely confident – work up a prepared text. Even if you memorize it and only refer to it for prompts, the discipline may save you from making a serious mistake.

That's a big schwack of tidbits. Some are less useful than others (do we really need tips on 'a winning wardrobe'?) but the majority are worth reading. Especially, as Glenn Kelman recently recommended, if you want to do your PR DIY-style.

Over at Read/Write Web, Emre Sokullu has written an interesting piece about the different paces at which Web apps should aspire to hit the Web 2.0 homerun:

Aha, you think, the cheapest and shortest path is  viral marketing - via blogs and social news sites. So you turn to your favorite sites like digg, del.icio.us, TechCrunch and (of course) Read/WriteWeb. Somehow your email to Michael Arrington or Richard MacManus gets noticed above the hundreds of others, so your site gets featured and then other blog coverage follows! Yippee, this is the fame you were waiting for! But a few days later....absolute silence.

Emre's advice for most Web startups is to focus on niches and then broaden your user base.

In my experience, web traffic is spikey. When you plot healthy web traffic on a graph, you should get big spikes, occasional troughs and steady, upward growth. If you're lucky enough to get Dugg, and drive that huge chunk of incoming traffic, then probably some subset of those Digg users will hang around. Those folks represent an upward blip in your daily, regular traffic.

The real trick, of course, is in converting those spikes into customers. If you've built your site with the right calls to action (whether that be buy, download, contribute, subscribe and so forth) in the right spots, you can take full advantage when Digg comes a knocking.

Tags: web-20, marketing, traffic, visitors, digg

As our clients know, we're pretty sceptical about online advertising. Contextual keyword ad programs like Google AdWords work great, but we generally discourage most other programs.

Seth Godin announced Squidoo's new variation on the online a--the SquidOffer:

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it's an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don't pay for the clicks.

We've signed Capulet up to give it a try (it looks like the program actually goes live on Monday). We assembled a page of our best web marketing articles and then wrote a (hopefully) clever, informal ad for it. We'll see how it goes.

Tags: web marketing, online advertising, cpc, squidoo, AdWords, Web-20