Use Seth Godin's Tribes to Become a Market Leader

A lot of people interpret the newest internet marketing meme to hit the net: "Market Leadership" as having the largest mailing list, the highest price product, or the biggest profit margin. This would be a logical step but this is really the result of market leadership. If you serve a need in your market then your list will grow because of higher demand. So really if you become the "go to guy" or "go to community" in your niche, you establish trust and rapport with your target niche.

Let me break down Tribes into practical concepts. First off, a Tribe is really a internet swarm or affinity group. You can see examples of this on twitter during a conference or the recent political debates. A swarm, a lot of times, brings in the best people to come up with support, ideas, news in a particular niche or interest group that is extremely valuable for serving that group. What a great time to establish rapport and trust. This obvious vested interest difference will be noticeable to potential clients and customers that your success are based on the long-term strategy of providing value and quality.

If will dive a little deeper into the nature of Tribes, you will find that the future of marketing is observing people's behaviors. The big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo know this. The are creating ways like the Thumbs Up tool bar in StumbleUpon to harvest this attention data. When you lead a market, you are doing just that in finding out what people's attentions are. A vivid example is twitter. Each tweet is a "gesture" that conveys (when collected together) the interests or attention of a group. For more info on the theory of gestures listen to a few of Steve Gillmor's NewsGangLive podcasts. Gestures seem to be light weight or nearly effortless online actions that represent attention. This is the beauty of the 140 character messages in twitter.

So appearing to be going the extra mile to find solutions and finding innovative ways to deliver those solutions in your is much easier if you are leading a tribe. An example of this is people who have a large and loyal following on twitter can just tweet a question and get back relevant answers in just minutes. Amazing. This is the absolutely best possible exposure you can possibly get. You can not buy better marketing right out.

So really the world has changed. There is a difference between trying to “dominate your niche” purely for gain, and making an effort to truly serve your market. Instead of looking at a niche and asking yourself how much money you could possibly earn there, look at a niche and determine ways you could create a tribe over time using podcasts, blogs, YouTube videos, Ustream, FriendFeed or twitter. These are the new internet version of the xeroxed newsletters that Seth Godin passed around in his Tribes book.

Why I like Facebook Beacon.

Facebook Beacon is an advertising service that allows a user of Facebook to opt-in to a posting of a message on the user's newsfeed when performing some activity on a Facebook page or exterior website. The significance of this is it allows relevant advertisement of a product or service that is highly related to one's interests or needs due to a trusted relationship in one's social graph. This is effortless word of mouth advertisement.

I really feel that the newsfeed of Facebook is the most interesting part of the social network. I have discovered some interesting things just by looking at the activities of who I know. I actually want to know if a friend purchased, downloaded software, or visited a particular vendor. This has meaning to me.

When I first heard of Beacon, I was concerned that all of my activities would appear on the newsfeed. But if it is opt-in, I don't see a problem. One thing for sure, if this idea works out, social networks will grow like wildfire because this is effective marketing like that world has never seen before. There will be a real incentive to promote social media to the public.

Use of Flip Video at Blog World Expo

Jim Kukral with Flip Video at BWE


I went to Blog World and New Media Expo at the Las Vegas Convention Center last Dec 7th, 8th, and 9th, and I have to say that I had a great time. I am fascinated by some of the newer media being used as social objects such as podcasts and video. The term podcast I have since found out is being de-emphasised because of its connotation with a single commercial product the ipod and replaced with the term new media. The only thing about audio and video is that it is not directly text searchable. It seems to me that it is important to go through the effort if you can to create text transcipts so the search engines can find the content.

I carried my Flip video around with me at the conference and I noticed a lot of other people with the Flip. I had the intention of doing video interviews on the show floor but I just ended up taking pictures. The hour capacity of my flip was used to get small samples of the sessions just to try things out. I found myself taking notes, pictures, and flip video at the sessions to develop some ideas to blog about. I do regret taking 15 minute segments on a few sessions forcing me to delete one session that I really liked: Building Your Online Reputation.

Getting back home I had placed back some of the videos and used mencoder to create 320 by 240 size mpeg4 videos for YouTube. The Flip uses the MS ADPCM audio format so I convert to mp3 using the lame part of mencoder. I uploaded six videos onto YouTube tagged BlogWorldExpo. The great thing about the Flip Video is its convenience and size and I love experimenting with it. I am just going to take shorter video segments.


Anil Dash on Open Social, one my BWE videos

Book: Ubuntu Hacks.

First of all, I know that everything in this book can be found on the web. But, if you are casually using ubuntu like me, this is a great guide. There is a wealth of ubuntu information on the net, finding the right things takes some effort and using this paperback cuts through the confusion. This book is about 1 inch thick and is 450 pages with the symbolic picture of a tuning fork that suggests tweaks for your ubuntu distribution. It is oriented for the Dapper Drake version of ubuntu 6.06LTS which was just coming out when the book was released. This is fine if your are just interested in stability and not the latest and greatest. Also many of the tips probably can be applied to other Linux distros.

At first glance, this is a rather large Hacks book compared to others in the series. There are 100 hacks listed and from the length of the book you can tell that some of the entries go into great detail. Most of the entries describe getting the necessary program, the commands used and syntax, and the results shown on the screen so you know what to expect. This care of detail helps you understand the processes involved and gives you a certain degree of confidence. There is a certain level to the hacks described. If you want the most exciting, in-depth, technical details, you are going to have to search elsewhere. Having said that, the material is quite good and thought out and tips are not that overly simple or obvious. I think it is a great second ubuntu book to read for beginners. The book also has a sense of humor to it. Instead of using the typical warning triangle symbol in the margin to show caution, a picture of a screw is used.

Looking through the book here are a few of its outstanding tips. Acidrip is a Gtk::Perl script that uses mencoder and is a good alternative to dvdrip. Tovid is a useful set of DVD authoring tools. You can use those extra keys on your keyboard with the xev X events utility. You can customize your right click menu by editing ~/Templates. Udev can be used to label removable devices and have them mounted in the same place each time. There is a package called sshfs that allows mounting of remote directories using ssh. There is a lot to the QSynaptics program in controlling your laptop mousepad. You can hide or show Nautilus desktop icons by editing using the nautilus configuration editor. The Drivel application allows you do offline blogging. Great chapter about Virtualization and Emulation, Vmware and Xen. Nice tip about making Live CD data persistant with a USB thumb drive with the casper-cow label.

Title -- Ubuntu Hacks
Authors -- Bill Childers, Jonathan Oxer, Kyle Rankin
Publisher -- O'Reilly
Publication date -- June 2006
ISBN -- 0-596-52720-9

Getting Google Video Uploader to work in Ubuntu.

I initially had problems in using the Java application that Google has to upload videos greater than 100MB. It seems that Java 6 under Ubuntu does not have AWT installed. To get it to work I just downloaded Java 5 and unpacked it to my local directory. I then ran the command (substitute yourUserName for your own):

~yourUserName/jdk1.5.0_13/bin/java -jar GoogleVideoUploader.jar

And it worked just fine.

Video: Changing USB soundcard Ubuntu.

Nice Lockergnome linux fanatic video of changing your default sound card using scripts.


YouTube Video Link

Flip Video Ultra works in Ubuntu.

The Flip Video Ultra works great in linux. The device is mounted as a USB mass storage device. The videos are avi files encoded in mpeg4. Just drag and drop. Use Totem or mplayer to play. Very nice.