Cogent Insights

BLORGE.com is a pet project I’ve been working on for the past few months. What I’m doing is setting up a family of blogs that provide entertaining and informative content under a common overarching global brand - Blorge.

Stephan Spencer (one time scientist, now marketing guru) is writing a series of articles about marketing on MySpace, and his latest post makes some interesting points, which I’d like to expand on.

Spencer interviews Michael Bolding at Pugster, online retailer of charms and jewelry. The business has a MySpace profile, which it is using to help generate traffic and sales. Bolding provided some advice on how to use MySpace as a marketing vehicle. His key points were:

I was interviewed yesterday by Dearl Miller of Trafficology.com about marketing on MySpace. While I was preparing for the interview I tried to distill the key issues for someone trying promote themselves (as a musician or artist) or a product or service using MySpace.

Here are the three principles I came up with:

Do you ever start loosing your enthusiasm for your blog? Read this story “Blogging for dollars” from Business 2.0 to keep up your enthusiasm.

By the way, Business 2.0 is the only newstand magazine that go out of my way to buy (and it’s quite expensive out here in Australia). There’s always something interesting in each issue, and if you’re looking for business opportunities, online  or not, you’ll always see something ot get the creative juices going.

It’s well-researched, and well-written, and if you’re interested in the blogosphere and new media, it should be on your reading list.

You’re about to start a new blog (or you want to expand an existing blog), and you come across blogging networks such as b5media or On Topic Media (Orble). How these networks seem to work is you sacrifice a percentage of ad revenue in exchange for being part of the blogging network. Depending on the model adopted by the blogging network, you may or may not own the blog, and you may or may not receive some kind of subsidy to help establish your blog.

So what competitive advantage do you gain by joining a blogging network?

Steve Rubel is the quintessential PR practitioner - articulate, diplomatic and very accomplished in the art of promoting both himself and matters dear to his heart. After all, his blog Micro Persuasion helped him get his job at the PR agency Edelman.

Rubel’s blog reflects all of these qualities, and helps make it one of the most interesting, and well-read blogs in the blogosphere.

The focus of his writing is “how social media is transforming marketing, media and public relations”.

Hacking MySpace has been available in book stores in the US for the last couple of weeks, but I only received my author’s copies yesterday.

While I’ve written a number of books over the years, I still get a buzz when I first see the finished product. I think the publisher, Wiley, has done a great job on the cover design and layout.

And yes, the book is red, and not blue (as it was shown in the previews).

If you do decide to get a copy, or already have one, I’d really like to get your feedback. I’d also be interested in hearing about any ideas you have for this site.

One of the biggest books in marketing at the moment is Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”, which looks at how the Internet is creating demand for niche products, and allowing companies to supply these niche markets, which not too long ago were uneconomic to service.

We’re living in a fascinating time where older products and services might have a much-extended life cycle.

At the risk of sounding like a Steve Rubel devotee (given my recent references to his posts), he recently wrote an article for the Advertising Age, where he provided three ways that marketers can “thrive in the long tail world”.

Steve Rubel posted an interesting note about how economist Nouriel Roubinni’s blog about the US economy was picked up by the media.

It’s very interesting to see that more and more the blogosphere is a furtile hunting ground for journalists looking for news.