A couple of years ago I remember coming across the Traffic street teams site and thinking that if I had more time, it’d be a cool thing to do. In short, Traffic puts together teams of people who are fans of bands willing to help promote that band in return for ‘swag’ – gig tickets, merchandise and other desirable stuff. It’s a cheap, easy and appears to be effective.

As it happened, I didn’t have time and the swag on offer was not sufficiently valuable to me that I wanted to spend hours doing the tasks required to earn it. That’s no great surprise – street teams are set up appeal to students and rabid fans, not businesswomen with a new internet start-up to look after.

A few days ago, I was feeding my rabid obsession with Shaun of the Dead when I came across Shaun Squad, a street team site for fans to promote the film in America, where is has just got a limited theatrical release.

Having a look round Shaun Squad, I was somewhat surprised that a site as new as this hasn’t taken any notice of the lessons learnt by social networking sites, which is a shame because it means that the site is nowhere near as effective as it could be.

Compare and contrast
Before I start pointing out what Shaun Squad could have been, I think it’s worth looking at how it works, and how it differs from Traffic.

On Shaun Squad, you have to register before you get full access to the site. You can then do certain tasks which earn you ‘pints’ that you can swap for goodies. The various tasks include inviting a friend to the site, IMing your friends, posting a link on a relevant messageboard or website, creating banners and icons, and various offline tasks such as taking photos of yourself in front of a theatre showing Shaun of the Dead. The site also collects feedback on ads, trailers and other official promotional activity.

If you earn enough pints, you can swap them for goodies such as a signed copy of the script, signed posters, t-shirts and the soundtrack CD. Pretty good incentives, but when a signed script costs you 18,000 pints and the tasks start at 50 pints for the online stuff, going up to 700 pints for an opening weekend photo, that’s a lot of effort to go to.

(Actually, if these prizes were available for UK residents I might be tempted into it by the thought of getting hold of a script, signed or not, but it’s only for Americans, sadly.)

On Traffic, teams are expected to do work offline – they are supplied with “materials (which could include stickers, leaflets, posters, CDs, promotional items, vouchers, tickets, competition prizes, etc.)”, and then have to complete simple tasks and submit an online report form prior to a deadline.

Traffic describe their perks thusly:

In addition to the satisfaction that you will get from promoting your favourite bands, you will receive all kinds of perks depending on what the bands, record companies/other clients provide us with on your behalf. You will receive things like pre-release copies of new records, free merchandise, gig tickets and promo items for completing your assigned tasks. There will, on occasion, be competitions and opportunities to meet the bands. There are also potential rewards and job possibilities for the most committed team members.

The key difference is that Traffic deals with ongoing promotions – a band will have single releases, album releases, tours, festival appearances, in-shop appearances and all sort of other stuff going on almost year round. Traffic creates teams of individuals to work a given band or project, and once a team is full it accepts no further members. They have time to build a team, and for that team to create a presence for the band.

Shaun Squad deals with one event – the release of a film in the States. And it’s a limited release at that, showing in only 607 theatres. They don’t have time to waste, they need a quick hit now. Shaun Squad doesn’t create teams, instead encouraging individuals to compete for prizes.

With Traffic, the social side of their activities is limited online to forums. Considering the slow burn nature of their activities, I guess this is just about adequate. More social interaction would create stronger teams, but without actually being able to take part in a team it’s hard to see precisely how well it works as is.

Shaun Squad uses forums and chat to promote social interactivity amongst members, but you must be registered before you can do that, or access most of the rest of the site. Whilst I can see why forum/chat moderators prefer users to register, it is beyond me why you would hide the majority of a promotional site behind registration.

Getting more bang for your buck
The whole point of Shaun Squad is to promote Shaun of the Dead. It has no other purpose. Once Shaun of the Dead is no longer showing in cinemas in the States, it has no function. Shaun Squad has a limited lifespan so they really want to be getting as much bang for their buck as possible, and they’re not: Currently the site has only 5300 members, a number I find to be surprisingly small.

Let’s do some maths. According to IMDb, Shaun of the Dead took $3,330,781 in its first weekend. At an average cost of $9.50 per ticket, that works out to be around 350,000 people. Even if every single member of Shaun Squad went to the movies once, that would only be an extra $50,000 (and this is not taking into account the fact that many of the members of Shaun Squad are in fact in the UK).

So, if its remit is to promote Shaun of the Dead and get more bums on seats, then Shaun Squad isn’t really doing so well. The question has to be why?

Social Shaun
I know that the company behind Shaun Squad, FanPimp, has heard of at least one social tool, because they have a news blog which includes posts by Edgar Wright, the director. Sadly, they are totally underusing this tool – it lacks standard blog furniture, is hard to navigate and is hidden behind registration. What does this mean? I means you can’t start a meme with it.

The Shaun Squad site of itself is not a meme, and never could be a meme, because it is inherently unlinkable. An open, public official Shaun of the Dead blog could, however, produce a meme which could spread through the film blogosphere rapidly – precisely the behaviour that’s required for the promotion of a cult film.

Posts by Wright, Pegg or Frost would create enough interest in the fans that they would post about it, and these posts would reach pre-fans (people who aren’t yet fans, but might turn into one given the chance). And it’s the pre-fans you want to get because these are the people who are going to go to the cinema and cough up their 9 bucks and thence (hopefully) turn into fans who will continue the word-of-mouth promotion of the film.

Ultimately, you can’t force a meme – they just happen. But you can create conditions suitable for meme growth: by posting strong material you can increase the chances that meme-spawning will occur. Hide your blog and you ensure memelessness.

Human traffic
Far worse than stifling memes, hiding the blog very effectively prevents healthy traffic. Look at Zach Braff’s Garden State blog and you start to get a feel for how popular film blogs can be. Zach has left comments open on his blog and he gets anywhere from 1500 to 3000 on each post. Compare this to the 40 to 50 comments per entry on the Shaun Squad blog.

Now, some more maths, although maths that is admittedly based on a terrible assumption. Think of it more as a thought experiment than actual maths.

I get around 40,000 unique visitors a month on Chocolate and Vodka. I get around 80 comments a month, so for every comment I get 500 visitors. By that reckoning, Zach Braf must be getting around 1.5 million visitors to each post. OK, my logic may well be faulty here, but either which way you cut it, this blog’s popular and it’s doing its job – it’s promoting Garden State.

Hiding the Shaun Squad blog is possibly the stupidest thing that FanPimp could have done. It achieves absolutely nothing. If anything it is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted – you need to be a committed fan in order to be bothered enough to register for the access to the site which will then allow you to read the blog.

The site should, however, be trying to convert pre-fans into fans and to do that you need to do two things: 1) reach your pre-fans and 2) persuade your pre-fans to go see the film. A blog can potentially do both of these things, something that FanPimp seem not to have realised.

In an ideal world
Any site that relies on word of mouth and networking to raise its profile needs to be thinking much harder about which social tools they can use, and how best to use them. Unfortunately, most aren’t. Whilst the fans are doing a pretty good job of promoting Shaun of the Dead themselves, it would be so much more effective if there had been a central hub which pulled all of that effort together.

If you couldn’t code a dedicated Shaun of the Dead Aggregator to pull in blog posts and spew them out again as a single RSS feed, then an official PubSub feed and/or TopicExchange channel would allow fans to find content more easily. A wiki would allow fans to collate trivia, a task currently performed by my very unofficial OpenZombie. And an open, official blog would be the perfect way for fans to find these resources.

But instead, and as usual, Shaun Squad tries to own the conversation, as well as the means of conversation. In pinning it all down, they kill it and the whole thing fails to achieve its potential.

I’ve no doubt that Shaun of the Dead will become a cult classic – it’s got the depth, the style, the laughs to succeed with or without Shaun Squad. But it would have been so nice to see it utilising social software to facilitate proper online support too.

Matthew Oliphant from BusinessLogs talks about companies who specify blogging as a core skill when hiring, in particularly The Robot Co-Op who have posted job vacancies on their blog.

I don’t think this is really that surprising a development. Blogs are a great window onto someone’s life and thought processes and it’s inevitable that they’ll increasingly be used as a tool for both people looking for jobs and companies seeking new employees. Blogs are, after all, just logical extensions of the traditional website jobs page and the online portfolio/CV.

Oliphant also points to Heather Leigh who asks, What is it going to take for (corporate) blogging to become a job skill? Heather outlines a number of key skills which she thinks contribute towards success as a blogger:

– An ability to gauge relevance
– Strong written communications skills
– An ability to filter for appropriateness
– Original opinions or an ability to contribute original thoughts to existing discussions
– Diplomacy skills

I agree with all of these points, but I think there are other barriers that need to be overcome before corporates accept blogging as a desirable skill, and they have little to do with what it takes to be a good blogger.

Getting buy-in
Good blogging, the sort of blogging that gives your company a good reputation, takes time. Anyone who is experienced in writing original posts understands this, but new bloggers may not and managers who haven’t ever blogged almost certainly will not. The blogger and manager need to be committed to the blog – the blogger in order to actually blog, the manager in order to provide the support required to blog.

The Invisible Work Problem
Much of our modern work ethic is based around the visibility of our tasks. We have open plan offices, public calendars, meetings, milestones, expectations. There is a need to be seen to be Doing Stuff. That’s why slacking off at work is easy if you’re pretending to actually work, but work that makes you look like you’re not working can create difficulties if managers and colleagues immediately assume the worst.

Blogging takes a lot of reading and thinking. These are non-visible activities, but they are essential to a good blog. If you can’t spent two hours just reading without raising suspicions, then your blog is going to suffer. Much of this is down to trust – you need your manager and your colleagues to trust that you’re getting on with stuff even if you look like you’re not. Surfing the net and reading RSS feeds are seen by many as skiving activities, but they are meat and drink to the blogger.

Clarifying the lines
What can and can’t you blog? This question needs to be answered very, very clearly in the blogger’s head. Mostly, one would hope that employees understand what they can and can’t talk about publicly, but that doesn’t stop people being fired for blogging. (Ostensibly, at least – we usually only get half the story when bloggers are fired, and that half is possibly the least rational of the two.) Clarity on this issue is essential – it’s not about trying to neuter the blog with a list of dos and don’ts, but of attempting to ensure that PR snafus never arise.

Prioritisation
How important is the blog to the company? Where does it sit within the blogger’s other responsibilities? Should they be blogging regularly or only when they have a light work load? How much of their time should they spend blogging?

Again, this comes back to issues of management buy-in, trust and time. Tacking a blog on to someone’s existing responsibilities without considering the impact of the additional work is only going to make life difficult for the blogger and will result in a poor blog. Expectations need to be set and managed. Again, clarity is important.

There are other issues to the acceptance of blogging as a core skill in business, but management and blogger alike must take into account these sorts of practical considerations in order for the bloggers to have the opportunity to blog well. It goes without saying that there is still a lot of suspicion about blogging in the business world, so attending to the practical and proving that you’ve thought these things through can go a long way towards helping overcome those barriers of unfamiliarity.

Phew!

At Corante, to the degree that we can be said to direct our various contributors at all, we certainly aren’t going to exhort them to produce more entries in the name of more entries alone — even if that technique naturally dupes the gullible. We are searching for a different path to influence the communities and markets we are involved in: true expertise and deep insight. And we may get talky at times too, but it won’t be for its own sake, or to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Horst Prillinger explains trackbacks, and discusses when you should and should not trackback. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately too.

Horst’s first point is that you should not ping if your post does not have anything to do with the post you’re pinging, which is good common sense. He also advocates that you don’t trackback if you do nothing more than link to a post without adding to the conversation somehow.

My response to that second point is that some software automatically pings – i.e. if I link to you in a linklog style post, the software will ping you anyway. The software doesn’t differentiate between post styles, it just sees a link, derives a trackback uri and pings. I may be able to tell it not to, but I’ll probably forget.

I can see why Horst feels that a trackback from that sort of post is not worthwhile, as linklogs aren’t really adding to the conversation per se. But you do get some useful information from that sort of ping – it brings to your attention bloggers who are reading you and with whom you may have something in common.

That may seem like a very author-centric reason for accepting this sort of ping, but readers may also derive value from being able to follow the link trail to other blogs which, even though they don’t pass comment may also point to related posts that do.

There’s another circumstance where the value of trackbacks are debatable, and that’s when someone pings even though they are not quoting a post directly, but just talking about the same subject.

I had a trackback like that a while ago and initially I was rather miffed. I’d followed the link back to the referring blog, but there was no link to my blog there at all. In retrospect, I think my annoyance was down to my ego – here was someone implying they had mentioned me and they hadn’t.

On balance, this sort of trackback is no less useful than any other sort. It is, after all, extending the conversation and that is what trackbacks and comments are all about.

Mark over at Weblog Tools Collection asks How many posts are too many posts? and compares a selection of blogs with different posting frequencies. He doesn’t really come to a conclusion, other than that it depends quite a bit on post length and type.

For me, it also depends on how much time I have to catch up with updated blogs and how much I enjoy reading that particular writer. When time is short, I prefer blogs that don’t update too often and avoid those that do, simply because seeing too many unread posts in my aggregator can be a bit overwhelming. Instead of thinking “Cool! Lots to read!” I think “I’m never going to get through that lot in time” and so I never start on the backlog.

But let’s turn the question on its head and ask not “How many are posts are too many”, but “How many are not enough?” Given enough time, I would be posting on Strange Attractor at least once a day, preferably more, but as you may have noticed if you are a regular visitor either here or to Chocolate and Vodka, lately I haven’t had enough time.

I have a tendency towards writing longer, more considered posts with the occasional short linklog style post, and wherever possible I like to add to the conversation rather than just repeat what others are saying. Sometimes, of course, someone else has said it all so succinctly that all I can do is point to their post and say “Look at this!”.

However, although it seems like a bit of a cop out to convert to linklog style, to be a really good linklog you have to do a lot of reading and, as we have already established, time is short. So it seems that I’m stuck either way. Essayist or linklog, blogging takes time and lack of time means that I am posting a lot less here than I had originally hoped.

Mark also asks another question: “Is there such a thing as too much bloggage in a day?”

A couple of months ago, I would have said “No, there can never be too much bloggage” but now I have four blogs on the go and another in the pipeline I am understanding the nature of the overblogged. Don’t get me wrong, I love my blogs, but they’re like little kittens – fun to play with but very demanding. Where other people struggle with their work/life balance, I’m struggling with my work/blog balance, (having given up on the whole having a life thing a long time ago).

I was thinking this morning that I need to rearrange my life a bit to enable more quality blogging time, but then I realised that I’ve already cut out TV, I am barely on IRC anymore and I have pretty much stopped reading magazines (I have a huge stack of unread issues of New Scientist and Scientific American staring balefully at me from a shelf at this very moment). Other than cutting out sleeping and eating, I really can’t see that I have any ‘spare time’ to turn over to more blogging.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. Firstly, I need to hope that you, my readers, prefer infrequent posts to hourly updates. Secondly, this issue of balance is a far bigger problem for business bloggers who are blogging at and for work – starting a business blog is a potentially time-consuming commitment, and that needs to be worked into the plan right from the start.

About a week ago, Complete Tosh drew my attention to Real‘s ill-conceived Freedom of Music Choice blog. Intended to make Real’s RealNetwork online music shop look good by slagging off Apple’s iPod, iTunes and their proprietary music format, it includes such gems as:

Consumers are getting a raw deal with the status quo in digital music, which limits healthy, open competition that drives down prices and encourages innovation. Stand up for your right to Freedom of Music Choice!

And:

RealNetworks has launched the “Freedom of Music Choice” campaign to help consumers break the chains that tie their music devices to proprietary music downloads. We’re here to inform AND motivate.

Unsurprisingly, Freedom of Music Choice rapidly fell foul of Real’s own customers’ long memories. As Neil McIntosh says:

Someone should have told Real – hell, they should have known: pick a fight with Apple, and hoards of Mac lovers will pile in to support the company. All the harder if your own company has an utterly shitty record when it comes to looking after its own customers.

Well, now it seems that Warner Brothers Records have succumbed of the same brand of idiotic thinking that holds sway at Real.

According to the New York Times, earlier this month “Warners became the first major record label to ask MP3 blogs to play its music” when it emailed an MP3 by new band The Secret Machines out to a select group of around eight bloggers.

Initially, one might think that was a savvy move on Warners’ part. Get the bloggers on side, easily reach online audiences and give out the message that Warners understand the value of downloading.

Of course, it didn’t work out like that. The bloggers were understandably suspicious and wary of being seen as a publicity conduit for a major label, so in the end only one blog, Music For Robots, posted the MP3. That’s when it went from an idea that could go either way to a Rather Bad Idea (TM).

Comments. Some say that blogs should not have comments, but without comments we wouldn’t get to enjoy the fawning stupidity of Warners staff pretending to be punters (punctuation/spelling as per original):

This track is amazing!! Thanks for letting us listen to it!! I never heard these guys before, but theyre awesome. I went to their website and you can listen to a lot of ther other stuff, very cool andvery good!

Of course, no one would have known that the comments weren’t from real punters if a) they hadn’t been so out of step with the rest of the comments and b) they hadn’t posted from the Warners IP address, identifiable as the same one from which the original email was sent.

Ah, IP addresses will always let the unwary spoofer down.

This is the sort of thing that makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall until the nasty voices stop. Really, guys, it’s so very, very simple. But here are a few pointers for the terminally hard of thinking:

1. Bloggers are independent people (usually). That means they think for themselves and don’t like being put on a lead. You can send a press release to a blogger, but you can’t make him blog.
2. Blogs are authentic (usually). That means that bloggers won’t post something because you asked them to, it has to be something they believe in. In order to get a blogger to blog, you have to give them something worth blogging about.
3. Bloggers are individuals (usually). On the whole, bloggers don’t do things en masse. Send a press release to a N bloggers, particularly bloggers with similar genre blogs, and you can expect to find that N-1 (or maybe N) won’t post it.
4. Bloggers are awkward buggers (usually). If you want to get on the right side of the blogosphere, treat bloggers with respect. Build relationships up over time. Earn your trust.
5. Don’t try to manipulate us. I don’t care how many meetings you sit in each week or how many besuited minions you control, you don’t control us. Not only will we fact check your ass, we will check your IP address too, and any other scraps of information that might give you away.

To paraphrase Mark Willett of Music for Robots, this is the blogosphere, not an AOL chat room.