New “twist” to blog marketing

There’s a cheeky new spin on marketing via blogs — and it’s not blog friendly. I received a trackback from a comment that was attached to my Feb. 13 posting: “Network communication to the max.”

When I reviewed the comment, I discovered that it was a advertisement for someone else selling ringtones. As far as I’m concerned, that takes a lot of guts — piggybacking on another’s blog to schlep your social products. Especially when the advertisement isn’t even on topic.

Well, insofar as this is about communications, I guess they’ve stayed within a loose connection. Ringtones are all about communicating after all; if you don’t hear your cell phone ring, you can’t answer it. And, although I didn’t follow their link to determine what genre their ringtones fall into, I guess the cultural mode is that ringtones are contemporary, often themes from movies (my son’s phone plays the “Matrix” theme) or popular television shows.

The trackback, fortunately, offers me the option of removing the comment. In this instance, I left the comment because I decided to compose this blog entry. If it happens again — and I suspect it’ll be a trend, at least for a while — the comment will get my boot. [Ed. note: After the 11th or 12th time I got trackbacks for somebody's "answer" to my message -- stupid, spam, obscene, or whatever else -- now I just delete 'em all en bloc.]

Why do I think it will become a trend? For the same reason that I get 60-75 email messages every day from people selling me … nothing, garbage, stocks that don’t exist, sex potions, Nigerian banking opportunities … ringtones. I don’t use ringtones. My neighbor’s ”Led Zeppelin” ring annoys me (don’t get me wrong, I have LedZeppelin on my iPhone but only in the music).

 Maybe that’s the whole idea. As a society, we have sublimated the individual to the point where individuals are pushing back. “Notice me” seems to be the [unspoken] watch phrase of the 2000’s. The courts are filled with people shouting … in socially unacceptable non-verbal ways … “notice me; even if only for a moment, and only to punish me.”

I chose WordPress as my forum to get attention. I’m just like everyone else — I want to be noticed. But I can’t, under any circumstances, force myself to intrude on someone else’s space in order to ingratiate myself or satisfy my craving.

Our home telephone is cordless. Lately, it’s started picking up a lot of garble from other units nearby. It’s not unusually to channel hop the whole frequency spectrum and never find a clear signal. A week ago, a women barged into my conversation with my mother, in a perfectly audible voice, and chastised me for “monopolizing her phone time.”

So it should come as no surprise that my blog, and maybe yours soon, have become forums for others to seek notice. And for this, I have no spam filter.

I called the trend cheeky. When I advised him of the trend, my friend Jerry responded by calling it ”cheesy.” Yup!

New title – Convergence

My boss made a timely comment: “I suggest you keep writing good articles for a specific audience.” I will do that — here the focus will be on communications and computers, the convergence between technology and the way we connect with one another, now and in the future.

To make that more obvious, I changed the title of the entire blog to Convergence. Wikipedia defines convergence as “In the absence of a more specific context, convergence denotes the approach toward a definite value, as time goes on; or to a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state.”

I see this blog AS the context, as the definite point, whether time passes or not (and it always does). I would hope that my approaches, values, opinions, could spark threads of discussion that lead to a common view, a fixed point where we share equilibrium. At least for now.

I’ve had people tell me they think my website (http://www.heavenr.com) is too unfocused — or actually, focused on too many topics. I want to avoid that here, so everything I post will be aimed at convergence … or one of the previously-stated converging interests. Thus it falls into the mathematical definition of convergence: “to claim the existence of a limit.”

Since this blog purports to be about computers, the computer definition of convergence is “a means of modelling [sic] the tendency for genetic characteristics of populations to stabilize over time.” At least that’s what Wikipedia says about evolutionary computing — and that’s exactly what I want this to be about. Not stability, per se, but about the tendency for characteristics to stabilize, or converge. Or evolve.

And Wikipedia (gotta love it) says convergence in a social or language sense is “the blending of two languages that are perceived as having equal social status” — in this case the languages of communications and computing. As far as I’m concerned, they are certainly equal; I can’t do one without the other.

By the way, I include in the term communications both mass and personal. Mass because I want the message to have a long … perhaps limitless … reach to all parts of the Internet and the globe, and personal because at the point where and when my fingers touch the keyboard, it’s just me talking to myself. If this works, if someone (you maybe?) reads and listens, and maybe responds, I’ll call it a success. On the other hand, if I simply succeed in relieving myself of things I want to say (or my socially-acceptable demons), I’ll be happy. I’ve banged my gong, tooted my horn, put on my funny hat, and called attention to myself as well as I know how.

My former boss (Life is Beautiful) also said “I am not aware of any quick and easy way to get attention … It took two years for me to get 5,000-10,000 pageviews/day. The average pageview/day in the first year was less than 1,000.” Pageviews, another convergence term (generally assuming one page equals one reader, except at my house where people point at the screen and say with excitement “hey, look at this”). Man, this blogging thing is rich, fertile ground.

A new vision

I’m exploring this whole blogging concept as a way to increase the breadth of communication. I have a website that does well for a “vanity” site (heavenr.com). It gets a moderate amount of attention and has been the perfect showcase for the ideas I wanted to convey. Over the years, it has generated comments and messages from all over the world.

But the upkeep is intense. It needs constant attention, to make sure dates in articles are current, that new information is added, and that links don’t decay and articles don’t go out of date. Between a full time job and all the other activities I’m involved in, there sometimes isn’t enough time left over for my website. When I let it languish, the search engines don’t see the changes they seem to want, and the site drops in ranking and popularity.

As I read more about blogging and the benefits it offers, even to conventional websites like mine, it makes me want to try my hand. Even losing this article the first time around must not deter me from needing to know if I can make it work for myself.

My former boss has his own blog (Life is Beautiful). I subscribe completely to his vision of “pervasive applications” where the end user, not the device or program, owns the applications or content he or she buys or creates. If I take a picture, I want to show it, edit it, wrap other content around it anywhere I go, not at home hunched over my laptop and Photoshop. I want my mother to see it as I do, not from a CD-ROM disk. I want my sister to see it from Phoenix, but I can’t count on her having the plug-in I used. I want my co-workers to see it when we’re gathered in the break room and all we have is a cell phone and a set-top box. Brilliant vision!

I saw a similar vision, but what I saw was limited to the convergence of communications and computing. I’ve been a writer since I first discovered typewriters in the seventh grade and never looked back. When I discovered that I could add pictures and  … and … sound, even … using the computer, it enhanced my storytelling ambitions. I wrote about it recently in an article I call “A New Paradigm”
(Integrating effective communications).

Using the best tools I knew at the time, HTML and CSS, I put it together for instant dissemination — to anyone who happened to find it. That’s the drawback. How do I spread the word for people to find it? Blogging, I suspect and hope, is that tool. It may even be the tool to replace the website when I feel pressured by my muse to write such an article in the future.

There are other reasons for testing the concept of a personal blog, beyond simply learning how. As a marketing communications professional, I want to know how to spread the word faster — or to a larger audience. Blogging, so they say, generates community faster than any other messaging medium.

Whatever I happen to learn from this exercise — or from the responses of others — will make me a better communicator. It will open my writing/storytelling up to a new community. It will … potentially … bring fruits I never dreamed, including personal and professional growth, self-enhancement, and the opportunity to make new friends.

Maybe I did dream them. I just haven’t found the right tool, the right means for expression. Maybe this — blogging – is it.