Earning Your MediaA VC » 车东's shared items in Google Reader

I spent the second week of our kids' spring break (a week ago) mixing work and family time in Los Angeles. The Gotham Gal's brother and sister-in-law live in LA with two wonderful girls and I always enjoy our time with them. On this trip, in addition to some high quality family time, I got an education from the Gotham Gal's brother Jerry on the subject of earned media.

Earned media is media you don't buy but earn the hard way. PR is an example of earned media. Word of mouth is another. Earned media has been around forever. But it has now gotten a lot easier, thanks to the Internet and social media, to earn media for your brand, product, or self.

I have earned a fair bit of media over the past five years. Google Analytics tells me that 120,000 people have visited this blog in the past 30 days, 45,000 of them by typing in this blog's address directly, and another 60,000 of which came from a referring link. 25,000 people find this blog interesting enough to subscribe to it in RSS. And 17,500 people have chosen to follow my posts on Twitter.

That's a fair bit of media and I earn it every day by posting something thoughtful or thought provoking on this blog or twitter or tumblr or somewhere else on the web. If I stopped doing that, the media would slowly flow away from me to all of the rest of you who are earning media every day.

I am giving a keynote talk at the Ad Age Digital Conference on Tuesday morning. The agenda says I am going to talk about "Bridging the Gap: How Venture Capitalists and Marketers can Create Meaningful Relationships and Innovation." I'm not entirely sure how that came to be the title of my talk but that's not what I am going to talk about after spending a week with Jerry. I am going to talk about earning media, how you do it, and why it's such a great strategy for marketers.

When we landed in LA, Jerry (who just recently got hooked on twitter and blogging) told me "you have to follow kogibbq on twitter". So I whipped out my blackberry and typed "follow kogibbq" and sent it to twitter. Shortly thereafter, I got a tweet on my phone that said:

ROJA: 12-3PM@Media Park-12312 W Olympic Blvd 6:30-8:30PM@Eagle Rock-4372 Eagle Rock Blvd;10PM-2AM@The Brig-Abbot Kinney and Palm in Venice


And I thought "genius".


late night street life-48
Originally uploaded by kogibbq.

See, KogiBBQ are two tacos trucks serving korean barbeque tacos throughout Los Angeles. They drive around and twitter their locations. They've got 13,500 people who are following them on Twitter. The picture on the right is the "Verde" truck at night outside one of the nightclubs they frequent on the late shift.

Not only does KobiBBQ twitter, they also have an amazing flickr stream, and a blog that will make your mouth water if you click on this link.

KogiBBQ is all about social media. After I twittered about kogibbq a few times while I was in LA, I got a tweet back suggesting I talk to Mike Prasad. So I did.

Mike told me that KogiBBQ was the creation of Mark Manguera and a team of food professionals who come out of some top restaurants. They were totally taken by the energy and quality of urban street food and had this idea for a taco truck selling korean barbque tacos.
Kogibbq taco

What they did not have was a way to get the word out quickly and build a brand. They found Mike and he explained social media to them and they loved it. The blog, the photos, the tweets, and mostly the tacos did the trick. KogiBBQ is such a big hit that they increase the revenues at the clubs they park outside of at night by more than 2x. And the lines are Shake Shack lengths. People often wait an hour or more for one of these tacos.

The point of telling you this story is that earned media is both powerful and free. But you must earn it. KoqiBBQ posts photos to flickr every day and tweets all day long. They reply to tweets as well. They are active in their "earned media".

This is one of several stories I plan to tell in my talk on earned media on tuesday morning. I plan to start building the talk tomorrow and I will, as usual, post it as soon as I've got it in draft form. I am sure you all will help me make it even better.

09:46 Digg Architecture » High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Update 4:: Introducing Digg’s IDDB Infrastructure by Joe Stump. IDDB is a way to partition both indexes (e.g. integer sequences and unique character indexes) and actual tables across multiple storage servers (MySQL and MemcacheDB are currently supported with more to follow).
Update 3:: Scaling Digg and Other Web Applications.
Update 2:: How Digg Works and How Digg Really Works (wear ear plugs). Brought to you straight from Digg's blog. A very succinct explanation of the major elements of the Digg architecture while tracing a request through the system. I've updated this profile with the new information.
Update: Digg now receives 230 million plus page views per month and 26 million unique visitors - traffic that necessitated major internal upgrades.

Traffic generated by Digg's over 22 million famously info-hungry users and 230 million page views can crash an unsuspecting website head-on into its CPU, memory, and bandwidth limits. How does Digg handle billions of requests a month?

read more

09:05 Scaling Twitter: Making Twitter 10000 Percent Faster » High Scalability - Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Update 5: Twitter on Scala. A Conversation with Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer by Bill Venners. A fascinating discussion of why Twitter moved to the Java JVM for their server infrastructure (long lived processes) and why they moved to Scala to program against it (high level language, static typing, functional). Ruby is used on the front-end but wasn't performant or reliable enough for the back-end.
Update 4: Improving Running Components at Twitter by Evan Weaver. Tells how Twitter changed their infrastructure to go from handling 3 requests to 139 requests a second. They moved to a messaging model, asynchronous process, 3 levels of cache, and moved their middleware to a mixture C and Scala/JVM.
Update 3: Upgrading Twitter without service disruptions by Gojko Adzic. Lots of good updates on the new Twitter architecture.
Update 2: a commenter in Twitter Fails Macworld Keynote Test said this entry needs to be updated. LOL. My uneducated guess is it's not a language or architecture problem, but more a problem of not being able to add hardware fast enough into their data center. The predictability of this problem is debatable, but once you have it, it's hard to fix.
Update: Twitter releases Starling - light-weight persistent queue server that speaks the MemCache protocol. It was built to drive Twitter's backend, and is in production across Twitter's cluster.

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01:55 encarta的往事 » laolu's blog: Blog

微软宣布将关闭encarta

微软在公告中表示,"Encarta在世界范围内曾经一度是非常受欢迎的产品,然而,传统百科知识库以及相关参考资料已经发生变化,人们今日查询百科获取资料的方式也已经与几年前大不相同。"

胜利的维基百科在为此表示惋惜的同时,也希望用免费授权方式把Encarta资料纳入Wikipedia维基百科中

模糊记得,大概是95年,盗版光盘还没有到处露宿街头。在上海的乌鲁木齐南路上(建国西路与肇嘉浜路之间,就在49路公交车的站牌边上),有家小黑店。整日拉住窗帘,门一直掩着。熟人只管推门进入,里面很小,挤满了人,老外也不少。柜台上有很多盒子,全是五颜六色的盗版软件光盘,十块钱一张。那时初涉盗版,就买过encarta,在windows 3.1里看,已经觉得很神奇。记得还买过微软的bookshelf。没过两年,互联网就来了。

放一张encarta将来的“遗照”,先睹为快。

MSN Encarta : Online Encyclopedia, Dictionary, Atlas, and Homework

 


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