I use Radio Userland to do my blogging. It's good at a lot of things, ok at some, and absolutely horrible at giving me any kind of useful stats for tracking what goes on at my website when people visit. I actually signed up as an Amazon Associate a while back not because I ever expect to make a cent off of product referrals on my site (I never have), but because the Amazon Associates backend gives me a wealth of useful information (anonymously, and in aggregate) about what people who read my blog are actually interested in.
So here's the weird thing: the topic I get the most response on is marketing. Any mention of it at all sends the page hit count through the roof. I wrote this piece a while back which was really just something I typed off quickly to say "Hey Scoble, think about this for a minute because it's harder than it looks" and it's turned into some kind of seminal work on marketing -- I'm STILL getting hits on it.
Last week I gave a link and a quick review of Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin, and the click-through rate was stunning. I've given a lot more glowing reviews to other books on a variety of subjects, and none of them ever got that kind of click-through.
So one of two things is happening: either I'm developing a following among marketing people, or a disproportionate number of marketing people read blogs. I doubt it's the former, so now I'm wondering if the latter is true. If so, are we on the verge of a repeat of the late 1990's when people thought that the Web was the alpha and the omega of marketing and advertising? Are we going to wake up tomorrow in the midst of a marketing gold-rush to the blogosphere?
I was hoping the Dean campaign cured us of that fantasy. Maybe I'm wrong.
It's clear that blogging is not a way to reach the mass market today. Maybe in a few years there will be a significant population, but the numbers are still too low today. So then the $64,000 question becomes: is it reaching key influencers, or early adopters? Both Guy Kawasaki and Geoffrey Moore (not to mention Malcolm Gladwell) eloquently explain why they aren't the same thing, and why getting confused about that is a recipe for disaster. Or even worse, have we created a subset of the blogosphere which is marketing people marketing to other marketing people?vNot just talking, or sharing best practices, but actively marketing? That would be an awfully loud echo chamber.
Is anyone doing a credible census of the blogosphere? Who's out there? (and why don't they read anything I write other than the marketing stuff?)
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