Brian Sweeting

PayPal has changed their fee structure to allow easier micropayments. For payments less than $2, the fees with be “at a rate of 5 percent plus 5 cents per transaction” compared with “1.9 to 2.9 percent, plus 30 cents per transaction” on their regular transactions.

Shaun Inman is going to unveil Mint this week. Mint is a web stats tool, which is the sucessor to his earlier (and free) ShortStat. It is interesting to see this trend of people building products and then using their markets (a.k.a. blog readers) to market the product to. This is exactly what Jim Coudal was talking about in his recent ALA article. Instead of building a product and then looking for a market, Shaun built up a market of blog readers, many of whom are ShortStat users, and now he has a love-group to hock Mint to. Pricing hasn’t been announced for Mint, but I highly doubt it will be free.

Shaun is also using something else that I’ve found very interesting lately. The idea of Blog2Blog marketing. What do I mean by this? Well, it seems that the bloggerati allstars feed off of each other. Shaun has tapped into the “markets” of other high profile bloggers to build buzz for Mint. As of this writing, Mike Davidson, Jeff Croft, Keegan Jones, Matt Thomas, Jon Hicks, Jason Santa Maria, and Rob Weychart have all posted on the “My favorite feature of Mint is…” meme. All of these people have been beta testers of Mint and now they are preaching its greatness to their readers. This has been going on a lot lately. Let’s look at a couple of other recent examples of Blog2Blog marketing.

37Signals

The Signals built a huge amount of buzz for Ta-Da List, Backpack, and sometime in the future Writeboard. They started out doing a series of four previews of the features of this mystery application on their SvN Blog. One that really got people going, was when they posted a screenshot that was large enough to give people some clues as to what this application was, but too small to give away any detail. For the final preview they pulled a Willy Wonka and gave out golden tickets to random people who had signed up to be notified upon Backpack’s launch. By the time Backpack had launched, they had built so much buzz that they had 10,000 accounts created in the first 24 hours of launch. Cost of this word-of-mouth advertising? Free.

BlinkSale

BlinkSale is web application targeted at small creative firms that allows them to send out invoices. I started noticing things popping up in my news aggregator about BlinkSale several weeks before they launched. The people behind BlinkSale used P2P Marketing by inviting some well-read bloggers to preview their application. Those people in-turn blogged about how great BlinkSale was. Then the buzz trickled down the blog food chain. By the time BlinkSale launched it had a huge amount of hype built up, and had a long list of testimonials to boot. The cost of this word of mouth advertising? Free.

Conclusion

I hope you see a trend here. Never before have companies been able to use word-of-mouth advertising so efficiently since the rise of blogging. Now just because this type of advertising is free, it isn’t necessarily easy. You have to put in the time. It takes time to build a community by giving them something they find useful, whether it’s a great product or sage advice. Word-of-mouth advertising is the hardest to come by, because it requires passionate customers. By blogging about your product/service which you are passionate about, you will win passionate customers.

If you know of other examples of Blog2Blog marketing, please post a comment about it.

I found this chart about New School Marketing compared to Old School Marketing on the Creating Passionate Users weblog. It was a graphic and I converted it to text (with a few edits) so it can be more easily incorporated into other things.

* Alex Wipperfurth, author of Brand Hijack, defines the co-created hijack as, “…the act of inviting subcultures to co-create a brand’s ideology, use, persona, and pave the road for adoption by the mainstream.”
** Real is relative to the desires and perceptions of the user.

Along with the A List Apart redesign, comes a terrific article from Jim Coudal about becoming your own client. It’s about creative services firms taking control of their destiny by adding product development to their business.

So there’s this table with three chairs around it. It’s a very old table. These same people have been sitting here forever. The guy who created a product sits in one spot. Across from him is the guy who buys the product. And then there’s that other chair.

We’ve sat there frequently. Basically, the first guy pays us to find the second guy and convince him to buy what the first guy is selling. It’s a pretty important function, maybe the most important. Without it, there’s just one guy sitting at a table and nothing happens.

…

It occurred to us about two and a half years ago that there was only one way to take complete control of our own destiny as creatives. We needed to sit at all the chairs at that old table.

One of the biggest problems in the creative services business is that ultimately your client must be happy. Why is this a problem? Because often what makes clients happy doesn’t always make the vendor happy. If you have clients that “get it” and hire you because you are professional in what you do, then most likely both parties will be happy with the end result of a project. On the other hand, if you have client who doesn’t “get it” and wants to art direct or be the driver on UI design or application development, then that client may get what he wants, but you might not be happy with it.

Why can’t both parties always be happy? Because when you’re small or just starting out, you can’t always be picky about the clients you work with. You’ll work with those who “get it” and many who don’t. In Jim’s article, he talks about how his creative services firm became a products company. By creating their own products, they are their own client. They’ve taken their destiny out of the hands of their clients and put it in their own hands.

I think that every creative services firm should (if they don’t already) develop a product. The business model surrounding a product is far more sustainable than trading time for money, which is basically what the services business is.

AJAX is having a tremendous effect on web developers (and website visitors). There have been excellent examples of it’s use popping up all over the web, along with warnings about best practices of using AJAX. Paul Scrivens points out that while some people are worried about AJAX and it’s effect on things like page views others are embracing it and enhancing the user experience to have an effect on their bottom line.

Jason Calcanis worries that the use of AJAX negatively affects his bottom line (a.k.a. pageviews)

We’ve looked at ten different ideas for AJAZ (sic) in Blogsmith (our blog software) and we’ve decided to keep all the AJAX on the blogger (i.e. publisher) side of the business and “force” the users to deal with page reloads so we can make (or not lose) money.

…

The truth for any blog with comments is that the comment page refreshes are 10-20% of a site’s traffic (maybe more on community sites like Slashdot). Given how close to the bone running a blog business is you really can’t afford to lose anything, let alone double digits. Page views are what it’s all about I’m afraid.

Scrivens argues that thinking…

Provide a better user experience and I believe you will find that your audience grows making up for any “lost” pageviews. If the competition does you one better you will be losing pageviews to them and not to a technology that should only be used to help you (Gmail anyone?).

He points to Digg.com, who recently redesigned their site and implemented some AJAX for “digging” a site. In version one if you “digged” a site you had to wait for a page refresh. However, now with their slick 2.0 redesign when you digg a site you can just keep on going without the worries of a page refresh.

Jason worries that this is taking away from the pageviews of Digg and therefore hurting their bottomline. I would say that this is completely wrong. I think Digg will now have more unique visitors (much more important than pageviews) and more loyal users (much more important to Digg for the long run) because of the great v2.0 improvements. Also because the site has become that much more easier to use, people are more likely to go breeze through more pages than ever before.

Our CTO of 9rules, Colin Devroe, asked Kevin Rose of Digg how many pageviews they receive and it was 1.2 million pageviews daily (yeah, that’s an insane number). Then he asked how many he got for the pre-AJAX 1.0 version and he said about 70% of that. Good thing they didn’t lose too many pageviews…

Enhancing user experience can only have a positive effect on your bottom line. I find myself thinking that all the time when I’m using ODEO, and wishing that Netflix had the same AJAXified UI. When I subscribe to a podcast in ODEO, the page does not reload, I don’t get taken to a page with annoying recommended podcasts…I simply click the subscribe button, I see visual feedback that I’ve subscribed to the podcast and I can go merrily on my way subscribing to other podcasts, or can even start listening to that podcast right there (also without a page reload).

On the other hand, when I search for movies in Netflix, I click the button to add it to my queue, which reloads the page, tells me the movie is now in my queue and then feebly attempts to recommend other movies I may like. Good try, but 99% of the time, I hit the back button to get back to the previous page I was looking at.

Macromedia’s John Dowdell asks the question that every company should ask it’s customers. “What is the most obnoxious thing about [insert company name here]”. Let’s face it, companies do things all the time that seem to make good business sense for the company, but irk their customers. A company who asks this question of it’s customers and takes reasonable steps to do something about the feedback they receive is the kind of company that I want to do business with.

About a week ago, I heard a rumor that Novell attempted to acquire SuSE for $120 million, but that it failed. Apparently either that rumor was a half-truth or some renegotiating was done, but Novell has officially acquired SuSE Linux for the tidy sum of $210 million. This is another excellent step by Novell to position themselves in the Enterprise Linux space. Another piece of good news, IBM is investing $50 million in Novell.