Marketing bloggers care more than advertising bloggers?

I thought this was interesting: As everyone knows, I've been doing the Top 25 Marketing blogs list here for 3 weeks, but I've also been doing a Top 25 Advertising blogs list for BMA during those same 3 weeks.

Last night TVG had a visitor that found this blog by doing a Google search for 'Top 25 marketing blogs'. Of course that simply blew my mind, so I decided to Google 'Top 25 blogs'. Here's the results, as you can see, the first Top 25 marketing blogs list I did last month is the #4 result.

But the list I did of advertising blogs for BMA was no where to be found. I stopped looking when I reached page 15 of the search results and still hadn't seen it.(Did see several links to the Top 25 Marketing Blogs list from other blogs, thanks guys!).

Again, when I decided to do the lists, they were really just a fun thing for me to do every week. I was hoping a couple of the bloggers that I linked to would check TVG and BMA out from the list, but really they were done for my benefit. Of course I had no idea they would be so popular here. But the fact that they are popular here, but almost go unnoticed at BMA, a blog that currently gets 10X the traffic TVG does, is perplexing. So far the 3 Top 25 lists I have done for BMA have garnered a combined 4 comments (2 from me), while here the 3 Top 25 lists have so far gotten a combined 27 comments.

Very odd. Anyone have a possible explanation?

And then there were 3...

If you'll check the sidebar, you'll see I've added a new section 'Other Places You Can Find Me'. I've added BMA, my MySpace page, and my newest home, MarketingProfs: Daily Fix. I'm pretty sure that everyone here is familiar with the MarketingProfs website, well recently they added a blog. The contributor list reads like a who's who of top marketers and business minds. Ann Handley, Seth Godin, Eric Kintz, Tom Peters, Harry Joiner, Tig Tillinghast, every one of them are TRUE A-Listers.

So when Ann offered me the chance to join this illustrious group, I accepted immediately before she could change her mind ;) You can view my first post here.

To say I am honored somehow doesn't cover it.

Thanks again to Ann for this opportunity. Please add Daily Fix to your daily reads, if you haven't already!

Alexa, the Top 25, and what the hell's the deal anyway?

This is what happens when you assume. A big reason why I wanted to do the Top 25 ranking for Marketing blogs here (and Advertising blogs at BMA), is because I assumed that most bloggers were familiar with Alexa, and their traffic rankings according to Alexa.

Seems that's not the case.

So for anyone that I have tee-totally confused with this Top 25 rankings, let me back up and give a poor-man's primer on how Alexa determines your traffic-ranking.

First, Alexa uses your 'actual traffic', as well as your page views in some secret formula to determine your traffic ranking. This is different, and IMO more accurate, than link aggregators such as Technorati, because it does attempt to measure actual traffic. All Technorati does is count links, and anyone can pass around links.

Now for the 'bad' news. Alexa only tracks the traffic of your blog's visitors that have the 'Alexa toolbar' installed, and this toolbar only works currently with Internet Explorer. So if someone visits your blog and doesn't have the toolbar, then they aren't counted. Likewise, if you add the toolbar, every visit you make to every blog/website is now counted.

Disclaimer: I do have the Alexa Toolbar installed on IE, but I use Firefox for my browsing. I do use the toolbar when I want to see what a blog's Alexa rankings are, because it instantly gives you that ranking when you visit the site. The Firefox extension I have that gives the Alexa ranking sometimes lags.

So in the end, Alexa isn't perfect, but I do think it's more reliable than Technorati. If there's something else you don't understand about Alexa, leave a comment here.

Another MySpace confessional

Jordan and Chris coming forward to admit their MySpace pages has given me the courage to do the same. Actually I created a page a couple of months ago, but never really did anything with it till this weekend.

I was busy tinkering with it, and remembering the Women of Rock: MySpace Smackdown! post I did, I decided to send friend requests to The Donnas, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis, Jewel, Avril, and Tori Amos to see how quickly they would respond.

The Donnas easily won the Smackdown for best MySpace page, and they were the winners here, they answered my request and added me in less than 30 minutes(the first time I checked was 30 mins after sending the requests, and The Donnas had already added me). Sarah added me 30 mins later, Avril added me after about 6 hours, and Jewel did so after about 9 hours. Alanis has apparently closed her page, making Tori, who I am still waiting on, the default last-place finisher.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing blogs - Week 3

Another week, another update! Alexa co-operated this week and actually updated everyone's rankings, so we'll get a much better sense of how the blogs are moving. The 'LW' in parentheses refers to the blog's ranking in Last Week's Top 25, and in the parentheses after that, the number refers to how many spots up or down the blog moved in Alexa's rankings.

So here's the standings for Week 3, and these will be updated again next Monday.

1 - Seth's Blog - 10,155 (LW - 1)(+863)
2 - Guy Kawasaki - 13,048 (LW - 2)(+1,745)
3 - Creating Passionate Users - 18,445 (LW - 5)(+3,642)
4 - Gaping Void - 18,556 (LW - 3)(-497)
5 - Duct Tape Marketing - 18,657 (LW - 4)(-95)
6 - Marketing Shift - 47,380 (LW - 6)(+6,436)
7 - HorsePigCow - 51,910 (LW - 7)(+2,076)
8 - Church of the Customer - 89,156 (LW - 9)(-1,471)
9 - What's Next - 90,280 (LW - 10)(-22)
10 - Brand Autopsy - 90,603 (LW - 8)(-5,218)
11 - Coolzor - 92,657 (LW - 11)(+15,369)
12 - Emergence Marketing - 113,440 (LW - 12)(+5,333)
13 - Jaffe Juice - 135,894 (LW - 13)(-9,215)
14 - Beyond Madison Avenue - 137,033 (LW - 15)(+10,486)
15 - Marketing Roadmaps - 144,566 (LW - 14)(-7,056)
16 - Diva Marketing - 164,210 (LW - 16)(-11,185)
17 - What's Your Brand Mantra - 186,089 (LW - 19)(-2,210)
18 - Marketing Headhunter - 197,209 (LW - 23)(+77,397)
19 - Jack Yan - 214,275 (LW - 17)(-51,032)
20 - Johnnie Moore's Weblog - 241,504 (LW - 18)(-76,217)
21 - Marketing Begins At Home - 241,680 (LW - 20)(+17,334)
22 - B2Blog - 242,737 (LW-UR)
23 - Pro Hip-Hip - Hip-Hop Marketing - 252,441 (LW- UR)
24 - The Viral Garden - 252,499 (LW - UR)
25 - The Origin of Brands - 284,432 (LW - 24)(-2,382)



The Top 5 continues to enjoy solid separation from the rest of the pack. Kathy Sierra's Creating Passionate Users had a huge week, polevaulting into the Top 3. Marketing Headhunter easily had the biggest gain of the week, jumping 3 spots in the poll, and 77,397 spots in Alexa's rankings. Pro Hip-Hop, B2Blog and The Viral Garden were the week's 3 new entries.

If your blog fell out of the Top 25, don't worry, I will keep tracking it, and if its Alexa ranking rises enough, I will put it back in the rankings. Have a blog you want me to check out for the list? Keep emailing me or leaving comments, I will give all of them a look.

Next update is next Monday!

This is why companies should blog

Recently, BL wrote a post about companies that are 'hiding' their blogs, and one of the companies she mentioned was that HP was 'hiding' the fact that Eric Kintz is blogging. She adds: "My guess is that lawyers or PR departments are a more than a little nervous about this whole new media, "listen to your customers" thing, so they said "Well, ok, we can try it, but don't make the damn blog too easy to find."".

If HP is trying to hide the fact that Eric blogs, apparently Eric never got the memo. In fact, I had no idea that Eric was blogging until he came here and left a comment giving his blog addy. Since then I've seen him commenting on other blogs, including the nice write-up that Toby did recently on HP's blogging efforts.

So if Eric WAS hiding, he would have likely never read about BL's claims that he was 'hiding', but he found her post on the Marketing Profs blog, where she reposted a post she had made on WhatsNext.

But by joining the community, Eric is in a position to point out to BL that he's quite active on other blogs, as well as mention when other bloggers write about HP's blogging efforts.

If Eric was hiding, he would have no idea what BL or any other blogger was saying about him. Instead, he can not only address their concerns, but point them to examples of his involvement in the blogging community.

Is there a point to be made that HP needs to make it easier to find their blogs on HP's landing page? Yep and it's my guess that Eric will mention this to the right people at HP. But it's hard to claim that Eric is 'hiding' when he is going out to other blogs and actively attempting to engage with bloggers on their turf.

A graph tells a thousand words

This is an Alexa graph representing radio station WFMU's traffic since late 2001.(Click on the '5Y' tab)

Question: By looking at the graph, can anyone guess when WFMU added a blog to their website?

Answer: December 28, 2004. As you can see from the graph, the radio station's traffic starts a nice upward arch right at the end of 2004.

I was going through my browser bookmarks, and decided to visit the website for a radio station I had marked years ago. I checked it out, saw a mish-mash of flashing banner ads, pics of artists, and ads for upcoming concerts, and immediately wondered why this station had no blog? How hard would it be to get a couple of interns to post some music/celeb related gossip/news/gossip, and live-blog the station's concerts? I figured that adding a blog to this, or any radio station's website would likely be a boon for traffic, and the graph above proves this point.

If Alexa's graph is accurate, WFMU effectively quadrupled their website traffic by adding a blog. Is there anyone that works in radio that can give me an idea of what type of affect a 4X increase in traffic would have on a station's ad rates? (JD?)

The end is the beginning is the end

I'll be out of town tomorrow, so I wanted to leave everyone with some stories/posts that caught my eye...


Toby has a great recap of HP's blogging initiative, and also talks to Eric Kintz, who has already been kind enough to comment here. Susan was kind enough to tell us about HP's live-blogging of the Sundance Film Festival back in January. Good to see companies like HP taking the lead in embracing the blogosphere.


After taking a few weeks to settle into his new Regional Marketing Manager position with Canada's Boston Pizza, Ryan is back in the saddle at Ashton Media. Add AM to your bloglines feeds and you'll thank me for it later.


Love this story of what happened when the city of Austin embraced its musical community. The city works with local venues and musicians to make the live music scene as vibrant as possible. The results of the city working with their community of musicians has resulted in the music scene pumping over $600 million a year into Austin's economy, and feeding the city another $11 million in taxes. Here's another more detailed account of what the city does to cater to the musical community. Amazing things happen when you market WITH your community, not TO them. Makes you wonder why other companies/people/cities can't figure this out.


The always interesting Andrea writes about the 'Online Disinhibition Effect'. I think she's onto something here.


Chris, as usual, has way too much cool stuff to comment on. But I did want to point out his post on how the director of the movie Stick It turned to MySpace to build buzz for the movie, mainly because Disney was giving her little traditional marketing support. This was a perfect way to appeal to the movie's core target community of teenage girls.

UPDATE: I posted too soon, just came across Clyde's recap of several examples of marketing successes with MySpace on his blog ProHipHop - Hip Hop Marketing. Clyde also mentions MC Lars, who I blogged about as part of the Nettwerk/RIAA file-sharing flap on BMA last month.

Do you know who your community is?

Some quotes concerning Ford's new 'Bold Moves' marketing campaign:

"The strategy targets values, attitudes and emotion rather than age and other demographics, and it features conventional media as well as the Internet." - Modbee

"It happens every day. Someone, somewhere makes a bold move. There's a car company for people like that. Ford" - Ford's new 'Bold Moves' spot

"The focus here, across the board, is on this customer that we feel is really the target customer for Ford," Dan Bedore, a Ford spokesperson, told ClickZ. "It's not just a demographic. It's more of a mindset and lifestyle." - ClickZ

"Key elements of the Bold Moves launch include:

* The Bold Moves Anthem - Bold Moves debuts in a 60-second commercial on "American Idol" featuring people in real life situations that require a bold move. The scenes range from a teenager getting his driver's license to a woman with breast cancer entering the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation's Race for the Cure® - a cause Ford has long supported. The song "Go," newly-recorded by two-time Grammy®-winning RCA Records recording artist Kelly Clarkson, provides the musical backdrop.

* Bold Product Commercials - Throughout the year, Ford will use high profile television properties, including "American Idol" (FOX), NASCAR Nextel Cup racing (FOX and NBC), "Monday Night Football" (ESPN) and the "Bowl Championship Series" (ABC), to air 30- and 60-second commercials for individual products ranging from the Ford Escape to the Ford Fusion that all will feature customers making bold moves in their lives. These will be integrated with print and digital executions.

* Kelly Clarkson Summer Tour - Ford will be the exclusive automotive sponsor of Clarkson's 24-city summer concert tour, which begins in West Palm Beach, Fla., on June 30. At each stop on the tour, a fan will win a new Ford.

* Warriors in Pink - Ford has long supported the Susan G. Komen Foundation's Race for the Cure, which benefits breast cancer research, and plans to step up support to increase visibility of the cause. For example, a portion of tickets sold for Kelly Clarkson's summer concert tour will be donated to Ford's Warriors in Pink effort supporting the Susan G. Komen Foundation Race for the Cure." - Ford's Press Release

"In conjunction with the debut of the TV spot, Ford is re-launching its FordVehicles.com Web presence to reflect the "Bold Moves" messaging. To drive traffic to the site, the company will place roadblocks, beginning May 4, on AOL, Yahoo! and MSN." - ClickZ



Hmmmmm........2 questions:

1 - Who is Ford's target community here? From what I can tell, it is 'anyone that is bold, living a bold lifestyle'.
2 - How is sponsoring Kelly Clarkson's concert series, and buying a buncha TV ads and roadblocking on such mainstream sites as AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!, a 'bold move'?

My guess is that Ford is going after Gen Yers and Gen Xers, but doesn't want to 'label' them via demographics because they are 'dehumanizing'. So instead of 18-34, they say they are targetting a 'lifestyle'.

Ok fine, then tell the people living that lifestyle how owning a Ford will benefit them. Don't throw wads of cash at AI spots, give them the ability to get more enjoyment out of their lifestyle. Why buy ads on AOL, Yahoo! and MSN, when you should be going after partnerships with iTunes, YouTube, and MySpace?

The problem is, Ford seems to be targetting a specific community, while giving them no real reason to buy their product. This is why you have to join the community you are targetting. If Ford had, they would know what features the 'bold lifestyle' looks for in a vehicle, and they would be offering them. They would understand how to COMPLIMENT the person's lifestyle, instead of attempting to dominate it.

As it is, I have no idea who the 'bold lifestyle' includes (anyone that can be bold?), and I doubt Ford does either.

Still scared about joining the community?

Then check out this quote from the movie marketing master, Chris Thilk:

"...ceding control can be a good thing, when it's part of an organized plan. It's scary, but trust me, it will be okay. Letting people talk about your content will actually help."

Read the entire column here. Here's another gem: "The use of content that's created for expressly promotional purposes on a viral video site is something marketers should embrace and encourage."

You ARE reading Chris everyday on MMM, right?

But what if your passion WAS the community?

I was shuffling through my MP3s earlier and Sarah McLachlan's song World on Fire started playing. Hopefully when I mention 'World on Fire', your first response is 'Ah yes, great video!'. If you've never seen the video, please stop reading this post and click on the image to right.

As I talked about back in February, this is simply brilliant marketing. If you've never seen the video, Sarah took the $150,000 that was set aside for the shooting of the video(which is an absurdly low figure) for World on Fire, and spent only $15 of that amount on the video, for a video tape. Almost all of the remaining $149,985 was donated to 11 different charities, and the combined charitiable efforts bettered the lives of over a million people.

The video itself is amazing. Sarah shows what the normal expenses are for a video, and instead what she spent the money on. $200 that would normally go to a production assistant for a day, instead paid for a term's worth of schooling for 100 Ethiopian children. $480 is usually set aside for phones, but in this case the money went to equip 10 schoolhouses in Afghanistan. Nepal was given 5 bicycle ambulances, after Sarah donated the $1,150 that would normally go to filming equipment. Normally $3,000 would be spent on one day's worth of catering during the video shoot. This time, it fed 10,950 children in Calcutta. Here is a breakdown of exactly which charities received donations, and exactly what the money was spent on.

But why did she do this?

The inspiration for this video came from Sarah visiting the website for Engineers Without Borders, a Canadian company that tries to bring technology to poorer countries in an effort to help relieve their poverty. One of their workers, Mike Quinn, would post updates 'from the field', detailing the conditions and people he came in contact with. Here is a portion of one of his updates:

I visit a woman with a stunning smile every night to buy oranges. Her name is Christy Yaa and she never lets me pay for my oranges because she wants me to take them as a gift. She works everyday from 6am until 2pm as a cleaner, and then from 4pm until midnight selling oranges. She does this seven days a week. She is a single mother and every penny she earns goes towards putting her 20-year-old son through secondary school near her home village, far from Accra. When she saves enough money for a bus ticket, she'll travel to see him.

As an engineer in Canada I would have made more in a day than she does in a year.

And still, she does not let me pay for my oranges.

When you watched the video for World on Fire, you no doubt remember seeing a woman selling oranges. That was the same Christy Yaa.

A music video is simply a marketing tool. In almost every case, it is used to help promote the single, and ultimately the artist. And this is how Sarah used the video for World on Fire, as a promotional tool.

But she wasn't promoting herself, she was promoting others. She was not only promoting the plight of poor, the tired, and the sick, she was explaining how easily these people can be helped.

Sarah took the $150,000 that Arista had given her to create a great video for World on Fire, and instead she helped over a million people. And quite fittingly, Sarah got one of the most remarkable music videos ever created in the process.

The moral? When you make the community your passion, you get what you deserve.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing Blogs - Week 2

Here's the first update to our weekly look at the Top 25 Marketing Blogs. Unfortunately, Alexa has decided to not update their rankings since the 20th of April, but since there was at least one marketing blog that I missed last week, we can still update the rankings.

The 'LW' in paratheses refers to the blog's ranking in Last Week's Top 25.

So here's the standings for Week 2, and these will be updated again next Monday.

1 - Seth's Blog - 11018 (LW - 1)
2 - Guy Kawasaki - 14793 (LW - 2)
3 - Gaping Void - 18059 (LW - 3)
4 - Duct Tape Marketing - 18562 (LW - 4)
5 - Creating Passionate Users - 22087 (LW - 5)
6 - Marketing Shift - 53816 (LW - 6)
7 - HorsePigCow - 53986 (LW - 7)
8 - Brand Autopsy - 85385 (LW - 8)
9 - Church of the Customer - 87685 (LW - 9)
10 - What's Next - 90302 (LW - 10)
11 - Coolzor - 108026 (LW - 11)
12 - Emergence Marketing - 118773 (LW - 12)
13 - Jaffe Juice - 126679 (LW - 13)
14 - Marketing Roadmaps - 137510 (LW - 14)
15 - Beyond Madison Avenue - 147519 (LW - 15)
16 - Diva Marketing - 153025 (LW - 16)
17 - Jack Yan - 163243 (LW - 17)
18 - Johnnie Moore's Weblog - 165287 (LW - 18)
19 - What's Your Brand Mantra - 183879 (LW - 19)
20 - Marketing Begins At Home - 259014 (LW - 20)
21 - Decker Marketing - 260171 (LW - 21)
22 - Being Reasonable - 268503 (LW - 22)
23 - Marketing Headhunter - 274606 (LW - UR)
24 - The Origin of Brands - 282050 (LW - 23)
25 - Crossroads Dispatches - 294041 (LW - 24)



If your blog fell out of the Top 25, don't worry, I will keep tracking it, and if its Alexa ranking rises enough, I will put it back in the rankings. And keep emailing me the links to your blogs, I'll keep tracking them as well.

Next update is next Monday!

Do you want to lead the parade, or get run over by the crowd?

If you've read BMA for any amount of time, you know that Jewel's music, and marketing, are frequent topics of mine. What I find so fascinating about both is that in the mid to late 90s, when Jewel's career was beginning to take off, both her music and her promotional efforts were exceptional. This story remains one of the best examples I have ever seen of a grassroots internet-based marketing campaign. And the fact that it happened in 1996 makes the event even more amazing.

But in recent years, it seems that Jewel's interaction and involvement with her EDAs(the mailing list members that Jewel worked with in 1996 to create and execute the Jewelstock concerts) has waned. Remembering that the release of her new CD, Goodbye To Alice in Wonderland was this Tuesday, I wanted to read the recent posts from the EDAs to see what their feelings were on the eve of the album's release. Here are some comments I found interesting:

Hey, I uploaded the Yahoo! performances onto Youtube so you all can put them o your blogs, Myspaces, and Friendsters. Let's promote this album; I think, all in all, it will be one of her best.

I know I mentioned this before, but I am so disappointed in the level
of promotion being one for this new album.

Since I haven't seen ANY and Jewelink hasn't had any missions, I made a banner. You can put it on websites or you're myspace or whatever. You can also use it as an image on certain message boards.

Actually JewelLink did send out a banner with some interactive code in mid-March to webmasters (Jewel online team), but I didn't bother adding it since it seemed like too much work at the time to get it running. Plus it had a corner of it dedicated to advertising other musical artists (looks like it would change periodically) and I didn't much care for that aspect of it. Must be others felt the same way since you said you haven't seen one anywhere.

I think there's a banner on myspace for people to use too. Though, I think they should have advertised that fact more. Also, where are the AOL Instant Messenger buddy icons?!

I just saw on iTunes that if you pre-order Jewel's CD before next Tuesday you will also receive the exclusive track "Satellite (Acoustic Live)".

The members also linked to several articles featuring Jewel, tour updates, television appearances, etc. It should be noted that these are truly 'hardcore' fans, some of which have been members of this mailing list for over a decade, no small feat, considering that Jewel's first album was released 11 years ago.

Notice that these fans are already doing Jewel's marketing for her. They are linking to every article/television appearance that they come across. They are uploading music videos to YouTube. They are lamenting the lack of good Jewel banners to add to their websites/blogs, and then CREATING ones to share with each other!

This is the perfect example of how a marketer's main function is to help a community get from point A to point B as effectively as possible.

The EDAs are huge fans of Jewel, so they are going to promote her new album. Jewel can either leave them alone and let them do the best they can, or she can give them the tools to reach their destination more effectively. As I said last month on BMA, I think it's about being smart enough to understand where the community is headed, and then clearing a path for them.

Also, many of the members of the mailing list had remarked that they had already heard most if not all of her album. Why not contact the mailing list owner and get the email addys for all the members, and email them asking for their address so Jewel can mail them a copy of the CD? And when it arrives, have them open the package to find the CD as promised, but SIGNED and INSCRIBED to the person? Why not give the list their own Jewel banner with an EDA logo? My guess is that these very simple acts of interaction with the community of Jewel's fans would result in an explosion of positive promotion for the artist. Promotion that would spread far beyond the boundaries of a simple mailing list.

If the community is doing your job for you, shouldn't you at least be smart enough to give them the tools to do so more effectively?

When A-Listers clash: How to write a successful blog

Guy gives his tips for writing a successful blog. Tara doesn't get it.

I'm going to side with Tara on this one. What I got from both of them was that Guy was saying you should present your blog as your product, Tara says present it as your passion.

Gotta go with passion everytime. In fact I left a similar post on BMA back in December, and here was my top tip for having a successful blog:

1 – Write about something that you are passionate about. This is key. Passion can’t be faked, and visitors to your blog won’t come back if you try. But if you are passionate, and effective at communicating that passion to your readers, they’ll love you for it.

I don't want to hear about your product, I want to hear about your passion.

Honda goes back to school to market Fit

This is just too cool. Honda has created the Honda Fit Marketing Challenge a contest where Honda provides 18 universities with a $2,500 operating budget, and let's them design a marketing campaign for the Honda Fit. In the brochures that the students are given, they are encouraged to 'push the envelope' in creating the materials.

This is gold. What Honda has done is taken the Fit's target market, and give them the chance to create the campaign for the product. The campaign judged to be the best will receive $5,000, with 2nd and 3rd place teams receiving $2,000 and $1,000, respectively. As a huge bonus, the top 3 teams will be flown, all-expenses paid, to Honda headquarters in Torrance, Calif., on June 1 to present their campaigns to top executives from Honda and RPA, Honda's advertising agency.

The only question I have about this campaign is, why didn't Honda supply the 18 schools with a Fit to test-drive while preparing their campaigns? Often times the target market is attracted to qualities of a car that might be overlooked in the factory. Still, this genius, you put control of the marketing in the hands of the target market, and give them the motivation to create the best work they can produce.

This is what happens when marketers join the community.

Some notes on the Top 25 list

Really glad that everyone seems to be enjoying the list. I'll be updating the list every Monday, and when I do, I will also list how many spots in the poll each blog moves up or down, and how their Alexa traffic ranking changed, again, up or down. I'll also make special mention of the blog that moved up the most in both categories. This will be a great way to track how a blog is performing long-term. Alexa tends to be sporadic in their updating, but they usually update the rankings every 4 or 5 days, so that's why I decided to have a weekly update.

Also, I have started doing a similar list for advertising blogs over on BMA, and will be updating it each Monday as well.

Finally, there seems to be some question about why this blog was in, why this one wasn't. The biggest rules for the marketing blogs is that marketing has to be one of the primarily topics for your blog, and your blog can't be primarily a link aggregator, and your content can't be primarily news-related. IMO, both Marketing Vox and Micro Persuasion are heavy on links and news. Most marketing blogs lean more toward commentary and theory discussion, whereas with the advertising blogs, it's the exact opposite. Now if I were going to do a list for PR blogs, MP would likely be #1, but I'm not.

BTW keep those links to your blogs coming, as I will definitely check all of them out. However keep in mind that I rank them based on Alexa's traffic rankings, so if I think you have a GREAT blog, but your Alexa traffic ranking is 1,200,000, that's not high enough to make the list, at least not yet. I am obviously partial to THIS blog, but the Garden's Alexa ranking simply isn't high enough to be added, at least not yet. Just so everyone realizes that the judgment call is on whether or not to include your blog on the marketing list, not on where to rank it.

Thanks again to all the commenters and for the emails!

New Line's brilliant move? Realizing the community is smarter than they are.

"I've never seen anything like this -- where people actually have a vested interest in going to see this film. People are talking about dressing up in pilots' uniforms and flight attendant uniforms. There are the crazy people who will probably show up in plane outfits. It's moved beyond being a movie into 'How can we make a party out of this?' Who doesn't like a good party?"," - Stephanie Wasek, founder of the Snakes on a Plane community on LiveJournal.com


Perhaps we can't fully appreciate it right now, but 2006 could end up being a watershed moment for marketing. In the last year, community-generated content, and the blogosphere have exploded in unison. Want to make fun of a product? Make a spoof commercial and upload to YouTube. Then blog about the creation process. Think you can do better than the talking heads on the radio? Make your own podcast. Are you a musician? Make a MySpace page and share your songs with the world.

So as we are just discovering the beauty that is CGC, it seems as if it were fate that a movie like Snakes on a Plane would come along. A B-movie with a title so absurdly honest that you have to make fun of it. For a community that is just learning the joys of CGC, SoaP gave us the perfect chance to spread our wings. Go crazy.....make posters for the film, songs, trailers, t-shirts, hell let's even make blogs about it.

But there's still the matter of the studio, New Line. If history shows that SoaP was the right movie at the right time, then history will also show that New Line made the perfect move in EMBRACING the community. They didn't squash community-created blogs, or YouTube videos, or any other CGC. Basically New Line told the community 'You know what, this IS a stupid movie...here's your chance to go crazy, have at it!'.

Kids. In. A. Candystore. And New Line unlocked the doors and held them open for us. Hell they even went back and re-shot scenes to incorporate dialog from the trailer for the movie created by Chris Rohan and Nathaniel Perry.

And that's the key. When Snakes on a Plane opens, the viewers aren't going to see a movie, they are going to watch a product that they helped create.

The Viral Garden's Top 25 Marketing blogs

I added this nifty Firefox extension that gives a blog's Alexa ranking and Google PageRank when you visit, and I thought it would be fun to do a Top 20 ranking of the marketing blogs, a la the AP Top 25. The rankings are according to Alexa, and basically if I think your blog either focuses mainly on marketing, or marketing is at least half the content, then I added you(and the content couldn't be all news-related, like Marketing Vox). Certain judgment calls had to be made, like including Creating Passionate Users and What's Next, and not including Micro Persuasion and AdRants.

So according to Alexa, here's the top marketing blogs, at least all the top ones I could find ;) Each blog's Alexa ranking follows their position:

1 - Seth's Blog - 11018
2 - Guy Kawasaki - 14793
3 - Gaping Void - 18059
4 - Duct Tape Marketing - 18562
5 - Creating Passionate Users - 22087
6 - Marketing Shift - 53816
7 - HorsePigCow - 53986
8 - Brand Autopsy - 85385
9 - Church of the Customer - 87685
10 - What's Next - 90302
11 - Coolzor - 108026
12 - Emergence Marketing - 118773
13 - Jaffe Juice - 126679
14 - Marketing Roadmaps - 137510
15 - Beyond Madison Avenue - 147519
16 - Diva Marketing - 153025
17 - Jack Yan - 163243
18 - Johnnie Moore's Weblog - 165287
19 - What's Your Brand Mantra - 183879
20 - Marketing Begins At Home - 259014
21 - Decker Marketing - 260171
22 - Being Reasonable - 268503
23 - The Origin of Brands - 282050
24 - Crossroads Dispatches - 294041
25 - The Brand Builder Blog - 430378

So there's the first Viral Garden Top 25 Marketing Blogs. From now on I'll be posting the new rankings every Monday. A good way to make sure I start off the week with a post ;)

Individuality is fine, as long as we are all doing it together

Found this article in The Economist on blogs, and particularly loved this passage:

But in January this year "“the conversation"” arrived in Germany with a vengeance. Jung von Matt, a German advertising firm, had come up with a campaign in the (old) media called "“Du bist Deutschland"” ("“you are Germany"”). The advertisements were intended "“to fight grumpiness"” about the country's sluggish economy, said Jean-Remy von Matt, the firm's Belgian boss.

But German bloggers found the idea kitschy, and subsequently dug up an obscure photograph from a Nazi convention in 1935 that showed Hitler's face next to the awkwardly similar slogan "“Denn Du bist Deutschland"” ("“because you are Germany"”). In the ensuing online conversation, Mr von Matt's campaign was ignominiously deflated. Outraged, he sent an internal e-mail to his colleagues in which he called blogs "“the toilet walls of the internet"” and wanted to know: "“What on earth gives every computer-owner the right to express his opinion, unasked for?" ” When bloggers got hold of this e-mail, they answered his question with such clarity that Mr von Matt quickly and publicly apologised and retreated.

Inadvertently, Mr von Matt had put his finger on something big: that, at least in democratic societies, everybody does have the right to hold opinions, and that the urge to connect and converse with others is so basic that it might as well be added to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Yep. Web 1.0 was about getting everyone to the party. Web 2.0 is about us deciding what games we want to play now that we are all here ;)

So is Chevy Apprentice contest already working for the Tahoe?

I heard something in passing the other day that surprised me. It was a show previewing Mission Impossible 3, and it was mentioned that despite Tom Cruise's bizarre behavior last year (remember his Oprah appearance, not doing much publicity for War of the Worlds), that War of the Worlds was actually the biggest box-office hit of his career.

This suprised me because the movie itself wasn't very good, IMO. But when you think about the media exposure that Tom Cruise was getting last year, it makes sense. Many people probably thought 'Everyone is talking about Tom Cruise this, Tom Cruise that, TomKat this, TomKat that, wonder what all the fuss is about?', and decided to see WOTW as a result.

Any publicity is good publicity, I guess.

Remembering this story, I went over to WhatsNext, where BL is still going on about how Chevy, SUVs, Chevy Apprentice, and Dick Cheney all suck. Since the contest began last month, I decided to take BL's advice and Google Chevy Tahoe, but instead I wanted to see what happened to the Tahoe's sales last month.

It seems they did quite well, thank you very much, increasing 20 percent:

Retail sales fell 17 percent compared to strong year-ago deliveries, and fleet sales tumbled 5 percent.

But the Cadillac Escalade and Chevrolet Tahoe, two of the models the automaker is counting on to help revamp its ailing North American operations, posted double-digit sales gains.

So what does this prove? Honestly, not much. But it does suggest that the negative Chevy Apprentice ads that users submitted aren't going to kill the brand, and if anything, the extra attention that the buzz surrounding the contest generated has likely INCREASED sales.

Let's look at this logically. If you want to buy an SUV, the odds are that negative ads from the anti-SUV aren't going to change your mind, because you have likely already heard their arguments.

But what you WILL remember is that you heard a fuss surrounding the Chevy Tahoe. So when you go to shop for SUVs, if you don't have a particular model in mind, you are probably going to give your first look to the model you are most familiar with. At this point, you go back to 'well I remember hearing about that contest that the Chevy Tahoe was running, let's see what the deal is with them'.

In another couple of weeks we should find out what the sales for April were for the Tahoe. If they are up again(Especially considering the rising cost of gas.), I think we can safely say that the Chevy Apprentice contest, negative ads and all, has likely increased sales, at least short term.

Any publicity is good publicity, I guess.