TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

social media

Reading Gladwell’s Outliers and Cushman’s Networks

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I’ve been working my way through a backlog of books, and finally moved onto Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success, which is a look at those people who stand out for their achievements, whether online or in the sporting world, for example.

He explores the possible reasons that contribute to such success – for example, the age cut-off for selection into sporting programmes – and shows that being born in a certain month gives you an advantage which is then amplified by being selected into more intensive training. Or the fact that in addition to the talents of Bill Gates, the fact that he was probably the only 13-year-old with access to an advanced computer (at the time), meant that his success was one of timing and opportunity in addition to his own skill.

I can understand why Gladwell comes in for criticism – his anecdotal style can hide the fact that Outliers certainly uses a reasonable amount of data to back up his observations. And as a parent, the insight into what can contribute to scholarly success certainly caught my attention.

Funnily enough, I actually observed something similar (I suspect it’s still languishing on my Blogger account amongst some posts which didn’t automatically transfer here) about the sudden appearance of Web 2.0 business successes under 30.

The reason they were all around a similar age (aside from possible fraudulence), was the situation they were in – old enough to be ambitious and educated at a time when Web 2.0 technology came available, in places where they were able to find equally interested developers, not tied down to mortgages and commitments etc, and generally in a University setting where they either had the free time to experiment, or could find it by missing classes!

The one thing that’s possibly missing is a message to absorb and use what you can learn from Outliers whilst still remembering that exceptions occur and not using it as an excuse.

The other book I’ve finally found time to sit down and digest is David Cushman’s The Power of the Network.

I’m probably not in a position to critically review his work (Dave is a former boss, colleague and friend of mine), but I can certainly see why Chris Thorpe wrote about the power of print after reading it.

It’s a collection of material and white papers Dave has already published on his blog, FasterFuture, and as such it’s material I’m fairly familiar with – but the fact that he frames it with discussion of Moore, Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws means that it benefits from a little bit of time and attention – which is too easy to avoid doing when skimming through RSS feeds during a busy day. Plus, as Chris points out, having the extracts collected means that certain themes become more apparent through the material Dave has picked out.

Plus at 98 pages it’s the right length to communicate the ideas without dragging on, and being self-published via Lulu, it’s also ‘cost-effective’ at £4.98 for print and £0.49 for a digital download.

Just to finish off, one of the books I’m currently keen to get hold of is What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis – which is available in print, but also as a video book if you’re in the U.S. You can watch a non-region specific excerpt below:

TheWayoftheWeb is a top 30 UK Marketing blog!

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TheWayoftheWeb has somehow made it’s way up to 27th in the January 2009 rankings of UK Marketing Blog compiled by Spinning Around.

The list is compiled by filtering the UK-based blogs from the AdAge Power 150 (Which is now up to 941 blogs in total!). And it means I’ve moved up from #39 back at the start of January, which is nice.

For the record, it’s nice to get a bit of validation and evidence than people get some value out of what I do here – which I didn’t really imagine would happen when I started blogging.

But the main reason I’m pleased to move up rankings, whether it’s Google, Technorati or AdAge is that it may lead to more people stopping by – thus increasing the proportion of people I have the opportunity to connect and converse with.  Because it’s the comments, emails, Tweets and other connections which are the most valuable reward I can ever get from blogging (Adsense isn’t going to make me rich!).

So if you’ve ever linked, commented, emailed, tweeted, bookmarked, shared, phoned, chatted, conversed or promoted TheWayoftheWeb (or me!) in any way, then this is a public Thank You.

Next stop, the top 20!

Tomorrow should be very interesting

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Whilst today has been approaching epic fail status, (including my other blog, 140char.com having some kind of outage for 50% of visitors – including me), tomorrow has suddenly shaped up to be very interesting.

I’ve suddenly ended up with a breakfast date over soup with someone I’ve been trying to catch up with for ages.

Then there’s a good chance I might actually make MeasurementCamp for once…it’s always really interesting, and it has more of a focus on actually coming up with metrics (hence the name) that work for social media and marketing!

Then catching up on some of the plans for the day job at Bauer Media.

And then off to the very interesting EverySingleOneofUs event.

Considering some of the complications and illness-inspired delays that have already hit me (and my family) in 2009, it feels like tomorrow is the day it all kicks off.

Pizza Hut’s viral campaign could go either way…

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Pizza Hut has released a new viral campaign via Youtube.

But it’s getting mixed reviews. AdAge has the background, including that it was placed through Zadby for a comparable fee to the $25,000 paid for Wendy’s first viral video.

The video itself on Youtube by MediocreFilms has been seen almost 200,000 times as I write, and 2852 comments and 3807 ratings. Most are positive and it’s got 4.5 stars.

But the style of the video, and almost all the comments, focus on the video as an example of Jackass style comedy. There’s no mention of Pizza Hut in the comments, or in the video itself. (I had to check the Adage link to make sure it actually was related to Pizza Hut).

And it’s also receiving negative comments. I found out about the video via Ian Schafer who writes: ‘Pizza Hut, what the heck were you thinking?

As Ian points out, the Pizza Hut brand is essentially mocking small ‘mom and pop’ pizza joints. Not the best method for promoting a brand which essentially produces a homogenised version of the product and has economies of scale on it’s side already.

It will be interesting to see whether the comments on Youtube would change it someone posted where the video came from – and whether the video does any more for Pizza hut than giving them lots of views of something with no link to them or their product at all.’

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