Karl at Experience Curve recently left a detailed commentary and overview of Amazon's service that allows you to buy and download DRM-free MP3s.Then Karl went a step further and downloaded the program necessary to download MP3s, and walked his readers through the buying process.
UPDATE: I just bought my first album via Amazon MP3 and i’m pleased to say even on a Mac it was pretty painless and more importantly nothing unexpected happened. I bought the album using 1 click ordering. It gave me a screen telling me I needed to download the Amazon Downloader
Karl even included screenshots showing Amazon prompting him to download the MP3 downloader, and then a screenshot showing him downloading an Amy Winehouse album via the service.
Posts such as this are frequent on blogs, and truly demonstrate the power of blogs and other forms of social media as a way for customers to share information and their opinions about products and services that they use. As such, they present enormous opportunities for companies that are smart enough to reach out to bloggers. But it's hard to sell many companies on why the 'reaching out' part is so important, if they can't measure the impact that bloggers can have.
But if you look at Karl's blog, notice that in the top right-hand corner, you see a Feedburner widget that displays the number of daily feed readers he has. For yesterday, Experience Curve had 2,007 feed readers. And that's just feed readers, and doesn't include physical traffic to the blog, or email subscribers.Since Karl had mentioned downloading an Amy Winehouse album with Amazon's AmazonMp3 service, that got me to wondering how Experience Curve's traffic compared to AmyWinehouse.com. The picture below from Alexa tells the story:
The graph is a bit small, but it shows that according to Alexa, Experience Curve's traffic is roughly double the traffic to AmyWinehouse.com
One of the biggest reasons why companies claim to be weary of blogs and other forms of social media is that they feel it's difficult to accurately measure the size of the audience. Even that excuse is losing steam, as more and more blogs are adding widgets such as the one from Feedburner that displays your blog's readership number.
If you found a blogger evangelizing your company, and noticed that blogger has a larger audience than your website, would you reach out to that blogger? Could you afford not to?
If I were Amazon, I would thanking Karl for the post, and offering to set up a time to discuss with Karl the online seller's plans for AmazonMP3 moving forward.
And if I were with Universal or Amy Winehouse's management, I'd be talking to Karl about getting some advice on how to build an online audience, since it appears that Karl is doing a better job of this at his blog, than Amy is at her website.
Bonus Link: A good discussion about 'getting' social media over at Da Fix.
Tags:The Viral Garden, Social Media, Karl Long, Amazon, Amy Winehouse
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5 comments:
Mack,
If his daily readership is 2000 readers, does that really translate to 60,000 over a month in readership?
This question may reflect my ignorance of the readership number.
I would think he has 2000 readers. The fact that the same 2000 read his blog every day doesn't mean he reaches 60,000 people.
Rahul
"I would think he has 2000 readers. The fact that the same 2000 read his blog every day doesn't mean he reaches 60,000 people."
In Karl's case I don't think it's the same 2,000 readers, since I remember a few weeks ago that number was around 1700 for his blog. So there are SOME new readers every day. But you're right, there's probably not 60,000 unique feed readers a month, I'll edit the post to take that part out and just mention the 2,000 daily readers.
The other aspect of this is of course that you have decided to write about it, and essentially doubling or tripling my influence. If anyone picks up your story as interesting and writes about that, again, more influence.
sorry, tcritic is me, Karl :-)
"The other aspect of this is of course that you have decided to write about it, and essentially doubling or tripling my influence. If anyone picks up your story as interesting and writes about that, again, more influence."
BINGO!
This is what so many companies don't understand about the blogosphere. They think 'well why should I care about what ONE blogger writes?' It's NOT one blogger! One blogger puts his ideas out there and then they are available to the WORLD. What if a blogger with 5 daily readers posts something, and it's immediately picked up by Boing Boing?
People are just as viral as ideas are. There's no barrier to the spreading of ideas in the blogosphere.
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