Month: January 2010

Does anyone take responsibility for their actions any more?

Last week I bought an item on eBay. When I received it, I discovered that the seller had mis-measured two of the dimensions. It was the wrong size.

I explained this to the seller and asked her to take it back. Her response was that she’d measured it carefully, that if she’d made a mistake it was a completely innocent one, and what did an inch matter? After all, I’d gotten a great deal. So what was I complaining about? Oh, and by the way, she sold the item for a friend and she can’t refund my money because she doesn’t have it.

There was no admission that she had made a mistake. That she was sorry. Or that she was willing to take responsibility for her action. I guess she never read the part on the eBay auction site which says that the seller is responsible for the listing.

It’s a trend that I find disturbing.

Here’s another more serious example.

I’m locked in a dispute with a web programmer who built a database driven web site for me. Although we had a fixed fee agreement at the end of the project he handed me a bill for more than twice the price I’d signed off on. This was not a small overage. It amounted to more than 100 hours of work at his billing rate. What was he thinking? I can’t even imagine turning in a final invoice to a client with that kind of overage especially when our agreement was for a set fee, not an hourly rate.

I took a look at the invoice. The major item was “trouble shoot search function.” Translation: he couldn’t figure out the programming and he wants me to pay for his learning curve. He took no responsibility for his own ineptitude. He never submitted a revised estimate or consulted me on how I wanted to handle the problem. In fact, most recently he’s threatened to sue me! His rationale appears to be that I paid him less than other bids I’d gotten for the project, therefore I got a bargain! Maybe if I’d hired one of the other firms I would have gotten a website that worked.

What happened to making an agreement and sticking to it? Am I aging myself to admit that’s how I do business?

Sharing media lists with clients.

One topic that I’ve seen discussed on PR forums repeatedly is whether or not you should share the media lists you develop for an account with your client.

For me, that’s been a moot point. In the past 25 years I’ve had clients ask me for their media lists a grand total of . . . never. If they wanted it, though, I would gladly hand it over. Why not? They paid for it. After all, it’s just a list. Anyone with a subscription to Bacon’s, Vocus, or MediaPro can create a list; there’s not a lot of magic there.

Many of the practitioners who say they would not hand over a list (and there are plenty) seem to feel justified because their contacts are “private”. I don’t buy that. What the client cannot do is immediately recreate your relationship with the journalists and editors that you have nurtured over time. A list, or a contact at a publication, does not guarantee a result. I hope that my clients hire me because of my ability to successfully place articles on the topics that are most important to them in the publications that reach the right audience.

I think that folks who don’t want to share their lists are worried that the client will take that information and try to “wing it” on their own. If that’s the case, they have a larger problem because their client does not perceive that they are adding value. In that situation, often the best choice is to hand over the list and move on!

Who needs traditional advertising when YouTube is available?

First Frito-Lay eschewed the Superbowl and started running commercial contest on YouTube, Crash the Super Bowl.

Now, Ray Ban is taking viral video marketing to to the next level. If you haven’t seen the most recent video in Ray Ban’s campaign, Guy has Glasses Tattooed on his Face, then you are rapidly becoming one of the minority.

The video was posted just a week ago; already there are 1,099,435 views! Not to mention the media coverage this has generated. Did he? or didn’t he?

Actually this is just the latest in Ray-Ban’s campaign. The videos are posted on Ray-Ban’s YouTube Channel under the moniker Never Hide Films.

Each of their videos is clever, entertaining and gets people talking.

So, what do you think? Is the tattoo for real? or is it a well done fake?

Are writing mills ruining the freelance market?

Think you could make a living as a freelance writer? Think again.

According to a recent article in the LA Times, Freelance Writings Unfortunate New Model, the proliferation of free (and almost free) content available is driving down the market value of good quality writing.

Trails.com will pay $15 for articles about the outdoors. Livestrong.com wants 500-word pieces on health for $30, or less. In this mix, the 16 cents a word offered by Green Business Quarterly ends up sounding almost bounteous, amounting to more than $100 per submission.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at elance.com and guru.com to see whether this was a universal trend. It is. Look at some of these examples:

  • I am looking for 25 inspiring health articles for web content on my smoothie site. Each article should be between 500-600 words in length and keywords will be supplied for use in each article. Budget: Less than $500. Time to deliver after bid is accepted: 1 week. There are 19 bids for that project.
  • Looking for someone to write 10-20 articles per month on a variety of topics. Looking to build a long term relationship.  Articles must have a minimum of 5 paragraphs with 5 paragraphs being ideal. Budget: Less than $500
  • We are looking for native English speakers and professional writers to write for us 400 to 500 words business articles for up to $5 per one article (including posting the articles to: [obscured] Or [obscured] ). We need around 25 articles per month about business plans, business investors, business entrepreneurs and start up companies news topics.

Wow, $5 for 500 words. I suspect that Dickens was paid better than that. For $5/article, I’d rather write content for my own blog and hope to attract advertising dollars.

Another article, this time in Wired Magazine, also discusses the phenomenon of mass production. The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable and Profitable as Hell Media Model talks about the approach of Demand Media to content — which is to publish 4,000 articles and videos PER day!

The company’s ambitions are so enormous as to be almost surreal: to predict any question anyone might ask and generate an answer that will show up at the top of Google’s search results. To get there, Demand is using an army of Muñoz- Donosos to feverishly crank out articles and videos. They shoot slapdash instructional videos with titles like “How To Draw a Greek Helmet” and “Dog Whistle Training Techniques.” They write guides about lunch meat safety and nonprofit administration. They pump out an endless stream of bulleted lists and tutorials about the most esoteric of subjects.

Demand Media uses an algorithm to fine tune it’s content strategy. The result may not be memorable, but it is geared toward SEO.

The algorithm is fed inputs from three sources: Search terms (popular terms from more than 100 sources comprising 2 billion searches a day), The ad market (a snapshot of which keywords are sought after and how much they are fetching), and The competition (what’s online already and where a term ranks in search results).

Approved headlines get fed into a password-protected section of Demand’s Web site called Demand Studios, where any Demand freelancer can see what jobs are available. It’s the online equivalent of day laborers waiting in front of Home Depot. Writers can typically select 10 articles at a time; videographers can hoard 40. Nearly every freelancer scrambles to load their assignment queue with titles they can produce quickly and with the least amount of effort — because pay for individual stories is so lousy, only a high-speed, high-volume approach will work. The average writer earns $15 per article for pieces that top out at a few hundred words, and the average filmmaker about $20 per clip, paid weekly via PayPal. Demand also offers revenue sharing on some articles, though it can take months to reach even $15 in such payments. Other freelancers sign up for the chance to copyedit ($2.50 an article), fact-check ($1 an article), approve the quality of a film (25 to 50 cents a video), transcribe ($1 to $2 per video), or offer up their expertise to be quoted or filmed (free). Title proofers get 8 cents a headline.

I had breakfast with an editor of a trade publication earlier this week and he confirmed the trend. His budget for hiring freelancers has been cut to the bone. He depends on articles that are written (or submitted) by his readers. Most of them still employ PR professionals to write the articles for them, but even then he tells me that standards are slipping as they seek to pay less for their content, too.

I see two problems in the current model of paying less for content: First, the pricing scheme devalues writing as a professional skill. The low fees are attracting aspiring writers who are trying to build their portfolios or pick up some extra cash. Professional writers and editors, many of whom have been in this business for decades, are appalled by this development.

The second problem is that the quality of the writing and the quality of the content is spiraling downward as fast as the fees. Just look at http://www.ehow.com. Here is a site where the writers are paid according to how well their articles are rated and how much the site pulls in through Google Adsense. The problem is, most of the articles I’ve read give bad or inaccurate advice!

So, what are writers to do? I believe there are still niche areas where the quality of content is valued. Mostly these are technical topics where the people paying for the content are committed to accuracy and recognize and value the benefits that good writing can deliver. I also believe that the best companies still understand that good writing is something that is worth paying for. Let’s only hope that they spread the word!

Fun with Fonts

My type is Cooper Black Italic -- what about you?

As writers we look at fonts all day long . . . we probably each have our favorites. Or perhaps our font choice is dictated by our clients or employers.

I have one client who requires that everything be in Tahoma. One client who writes all his emails in Comic Sans MS in bold purple (channeling a little Harold and the Purple Crayon, perhaps?)

Recently I came across a clever quiz that assesses what “Type” you are based on your answer to four questions.

Check it out — it’s very funny!

And if that doesn’t tickle your funny bone, test your knowledge of two seemingly completely different things: cheese or font. You’d be surprised how difficult it is to tell which is which just from the names. Take Myzithra, for example, is it edible?

The 2009 Blogosphere – Who’s out there?

I’m a blogger. I’ve been blogging now for about 18 months on an almost daily basis. Not this blog, but rather my “hobby” blog, EquineInk.

I started blogging for fun. I wanted to write about topics that I find personally interesting. After decades of writing on assignment, that’s been enjoyable. But what I didn’t expect was how much I would learn about social networking, the power of Search Engine Optimization, and the power of such tools such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

When I launched my blog in March of 2008 I told no one about it. I wanted to see if the “If you write it, they will read” philosophy worked. The first few weeks I was lucky to get 3-4 views per day. That March I had a total of 114 views. The end of April, that had grown to 997 views. Today I get nearly 1,00o views per day. To what do I attribute my readership? Frequent content updates, topics that address the interests of my niche audience, and tapping into the SEO power of WordPress.com.

How does my experience compare with others out there blogging? I looked at the 2009 Technorati report for comparison. Here’s where I fit in:

I am one of the 72% of respondents were Hobbyists who blog for fun. That’s me. We don’t make money by blogging, although it would nbe nice. We blog to express our “personal musings” (53%). We are pretty prolific as a group: 71% update at least weekly, while 22% update daily. I aim for 5 posts per week. Because 76% blog to speak their minds, their main success metric is personal satisfaction (76%). How true — the “stat” button on my dashboard would be worn down if it was real.

I am also one of the 15% of respondents who are Part-Timers. We are blog to supplement our income, but don’t consider it a full time job. 75% of us blog to share their expertise, while 72% blog to attract new clients for our businesses. Check, that’s me. Their business and personal motives for blogging are deeply entwined – while 61% say that they measure the success of their blog by the unique pageviews they attract, 60% say they also value personal satisfaction.

9% are Self-Employeds who”blog full time for their own company or organization.”  10%  report blogging 40 hours per week or more. 22% say that their blog is their company, while 70% say they own a company and blog about their business. Self-employeds also rank page views (63%) over personal satisfaction (53%) as a success metric, and 53% are blogging more than when they started. Finally, in a demographic (bloggers) awash with Twitter users, self-employeds are the Tweetiest of them all — 88% say they use the service.

4% are Pros. Who  “blog full-time for a company or organization” — though actually very few of them actually report spending a full 40 hours per week blogging. 46% are blogging more than they did when they started. 70% blog to share expertise; 53% blog to attract new clients for the business they work for. Accordingly, page views are the most important success metric for pros, valued by 69%, compared to 53% for personal satisfaction.

Technorati gives a profile of the typical blogger.

  • Two-thirds are male – Not true here. And, I’ve found that at least among equestrian bloggers, the majority are female. That’s certainly an accurate reflection of the riding demographic.
  • 60% are 18-44 – Nope, older than that. Many of the bloggers I read are also older than 44. It may just be that I’m not that interested in what the younger generation is writing about!
  • The majority are more affluent and educated than the general population – Probably true.
  • 75% have college degrees – Yup.
  • 40% have graduate degrees – No.
  • One in three has an annual household income of $75K+
  • One in four has an annual household income of $100K+
  • Professional and self-employed bloggers are more affluent: nearly half have an annual household income of $75,000 and one third topped the $100,000 level
  • More than half are married – Yes
  • More than half are parents – Yes
  • Half are employed full time, however ¾ of professional bloggers are employed full time.

What the report doesn’t talk about is how many communicators use their personal blogs as a way to experiment with the medium and learn how to more effectively use blogging to reach a targeted audience. Certainly what I’ve learned as a hobbyist blogger has made a huge impact into my use of blogging (and other social media) as a public relations professional. It’s changed the way I write and helped me better understand SEO techniques. In short, it’s made me a better practitioner.